People gather in June in downtown Bend to protest the the city’s planned sweep of homeless camps on Hunnell Road.  

The city of Bend, Deschutes County, and ODOT are gearing up to “remove” multitudes of people from established parking and campsites in what The Bulletin is calling “The Summer of Sweeps.”

Hunnell Road, Clausen Road, Juniper Ridge, Redmond Airport, etc., may soon be depopulated and their residents scattered across the landscape. It is the making of a humanitarian crisis.

They will be scattered with no assurance of a safe, secure facility to move to or park. They will lose the medical care and services they now have access to.

They will lose connections with trusted friends and possibly be cut off from companion animals. On Hunnell they, at least, have city water and the respite from lethal heat that a mist tent can provide.

Even the Bend City Manager Eric King acknowledged on June 28 “there is a sense of community in that area [Hunnell Road] and there are many stories of hardship, hope and resilience.” Yet in the same breath he goes on to say that the city of Bend will use force to exhaust the resilience of this community, destroy its hope, and intensify its hardship.

But there is a shift in public attitude. Service providers, who in the past might have been reluctant to speak out, are now willing to sign a petition to stop the July 17 sweep. Gen Z and late Millennials seem especially keen on signing.

There is still time to email City Hall to express your concern: eking@bendoregon.gov and council@bendoregon.gov.

— Foster Fell, Bend

Supreme Court does set policy

I must take issue with Christi Pavia’s July 12 Bulletin column about the U.S. Supreme Court. She asserts that, “The role of the Supreme Court is not to set policy, but to determine questions of Constitutionality.” Would that it were so simple.

One has to ask: If the Supreme Court’s sole task is to determine the constitutionality of laws, then how can it be that different Supreme Courts at different times reach opposite conclusions?

How can it be that one SCOTUS can rule in 1973 that the Constitution guarantees women the right to abortion and another SCOTUS in 2023 can rule that the Constitution makes no such guarantee? How can it be that one SCOTUS can affirm in 2003 that colleges may use institutional diversity as a goal in selecting students and another can decide in 2023 that they may not?

These are but two examples where presumably well educated constitutional scholars reached diametrically opposed conclusions. The existence of such situations proves that deciding what is constitutional depends on who is doing the deciding. Supreme Court decisions have never been and never could be simply be a matter of reading the text as if it were a mathematical proof with only one possible outcome.

As a law school graduate, I would have expected Ms. Pavia to know that judges make judgments and that different judges make different judgments. It is simply wrong to assert that the Supreme Court does not set policy when, in fact, every judgement sets policy.

— John Cushing, Bend

Parking lot confrontation over bumpersticker

Went to Home Depot in Bend on a recent morning and had quite the surprise!

I was just getting out of my car when a man came over and started yelling at me for the bumper sticker on my auto. You could hear him over the entire parking lot.

My bumper sticker reads “Let’s go Brandon,” and he certainly did not like it. During the time he was verbally assaulting me, I could hardly get a word in the one-way conversation. I was told how great Biden is about 10 times and the rant became ugly, too.

Finally, I lowered my voice and talked to him, then another man came up and started yelling at him. The unruly man finally left, and I did my shopping. Some observations: I find it interesting the vast majority of the time, it is the woke liberals who attack other people for merely having an opinion about something they are not in agreement with.

If he had a gigantic nasty bumper sticker about a politician who I disliked, it would not cause a parking lot explosion with me!

So, what happened to Bend?

— Wally Long, Bend

Do you have a point you’d like to make or an issue you feel strongly about? Submit a letter to the editor.