Jon Wiener: From The Nation magazine, this is Start Making Sense. I’m Jon Wiener.  Later in the show: homess vets in LA have been trying for years to get the VA to build housing for them on land dedicated to that purpose. Now, a federal judge has finally ruled: the vets win, and the VA loses. Mark Rosenbaum, lead attorney in the vets’ class action suit, will explain.  But first – the debate showed what Kamala can do – and what Trump can’t. John Nichols has our report – in a minute.
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For our analysis of Tuesday night’s debate, we turn, of course, to John Nichols. He’s National Affairs correspondent for The Nation and author most recently of the book It’s Okay to Be Angry About Capitalism, co-authored by Bernie Sanders. John, welcome back.

John Nichols: Great to be with you, Jon, especially great to be with you today.

JW: Well, going into the debate, Kamala knew she faced two big challenges. 31% of voters in The New York Times poll said they “still needed to learn more” about her, so she needed to come across as in command of the facts, has a plan, strong, confident. She needed to look the way she did in her convention acceptance speech, where afterwards, people said, ‘Okay, she could be president.’ Second, she knew Trump’s strategy was going to be to attack her. His whole life is negativity, aggression, and hostility.
How do you think she did with the people who said they needed to learn more, and how did she do with Trump’s attacks?

JN: Well, you set up two very different questions, but they do come back to the same place, and I would even add a codicil here, if you will, or a little bit of an element, and that is those people who say they need to know more about Kamala Harris are, in some cases, literally saying they need to know something about her. They are far less informed than you might imagine, and that is not on them. That’s on the media. The American media did a lousy job of covering Kamala Harris during her tenure as vice president. She was off radar in a lot of media.
And so I think that for Harris, this is a challenging moment. It’s one where she literally has to tell virtually a third of the electorate who she is, where she’s coming from, and at the same time, she has to contrast herself with a guy they know very, very well, Donald Trump. And that’s a bit of a delicate balance, and you saw Harris do it, I think, quite ably.
She mixed in elements of biography at many places during the speech, talked about her middle-class upbringing, talked about her mom buying a house, talked about her experience along the way, but she didn’t just go straight bio. She didn’t just say, ‘Oh, well, here are all these things you need to know.’ She brought them in at correct places during the debate. That was a very skilled, very, frankly, nuanced way to do it.
The other thing she did was that she prosecuted Donald Trump. She showed people that she is more than capable of not just standing on the same stage with Trump and putting out there a point of view on one side or the other of an issue, but of actually doing something that no major Republican has been able to do since 2015 when Trump got in that race, that if we are honest with ourselves, Hillary Clinton struggled to do in 2016, and frankly, that even Joe Biden struggled to some extent to do in 2020. Biden won the race, but the debates were complex and weird.
In this case, for the first time since Donald Trump got into presidential politics, someone went on a debate stage with him and dominated that stage. It wasn’t Donald Trump who was writing the narrative. It was Kamala Harris. Frankly, if you’re going to introduce yourself, that’s the way to introduce yourself.

JW: And I especially liked the way she baited him over and over, and every single time, he walked into her trap. So she said things, for example, she said, “I have talked with military leaders, some of whom worked with you, and they say you’re a disgrace.” In response, you’ll remember he offered his relationship with Viktor Orbán, the authoritarian Hungarian leader, who he quoted, telling Americans, “You need Trump back as president.”  How many undecided voters do you think were convinced by the Orbán endorsement?

JN: Yeah, I hate to tell you it’s probably about the same number as the Cheney endorsement. The truth of the matter is there are some people whose endorsements don’t necessarily move a lot of votes outside of their precinct. And I say that honestly because I think that, to my view, there’s a chance that the Democrats are overplaying their new relationship with the Cheneys.
But you do get to something much deeper there, and I think much more significant, and that is that at every turn in this debate, you saw Kamala Harris ahead of where Trump was, anticipating him, outmaneuvering him, and it actually began very early.
One of the things that historians will write about this debate, and by the way, this is going to be a debate that gets written up a few times, not least for it being, I believe, the first point in presidential debates where there was a discussion about eating dogs.

JW: That’s a first.

JN: But this is one of the things that will be noted. Donald Trump came into this debate at a point of something of a turn in his fortunes. The New York Times poll from over the weekend suggested that despite Harris’s surge in August, that this was still a very close race. And you saw Donald Trump come to that stage with a desire to present himself as presidential. And those first few minutes of the debate, Trump was being very well-behaved, very structured in his answers. He was listening to the moderators. He was trying to avoid going off the rails.
And the interesting thing is Harris clearly recognized it, she waited for the right moment, and she mentioned crowd sizes, and knowing, having been reminded by Barack Obama at the convention, that the thing that Donald Trump is obsessed with is crowd size.

JW: Yeah, who would’ve thought. Who would’ve thought Donald Trump would respond to a remark about the size of his crowds?

JN: And a pretty rough remark, right? I mean, she hit him pretty hard on it. And that’s all-

JW: Yeah, what she said was she invited people to go to his rallies where they would see that people were leaving early out of exhaustion and boredom.

JN: Devastating, right? I mean, that was just – but it was also just an invitation to Donald Trump.
Now, any political advisor in the world, including Viktor Orbán’s advisors, would suggest that when you’re in a situation like that, you don’t respond. You just move right beyond it because in a sense, it’s a little bit of a throwaway line, right? You’re saying, ‘I invite you to go to the rally, blah, blah, blah.’ But no, Trump went all the way into it, and he went on and on about it, and he went on what’s now referred to as the weave, where he’s bringing in 100 different topics.
And clearly, Harris, who is thinking in real time, she’s great on her feet, she has that courtroom skill, she saw that this was very much derailing Trump, and she kind of kept back at it. She kept feeding it in throughout the debate, issue after issue, moment after moment, bringing up his advisors, bringing up the Republicans who are backing her, bringing up all of these things that she knew we’re going to get at Trump. And the fact of the matter is that he ended up the debate that he had started trying to be presidential ranting and raving as badly as he does at his rallies.
It was actually – it was a remarkable kind of baiting of Trump, something that goes far beyond just poking at him on an issue. This was something that got him so far off the rails that he finished the debate illustrating why he shouldn’t be president.

JW: Yeah, in fact, that remark about the people leaving his rallies early out of exhaustion and boredom, his reply to that ended up with him saying that illegal immigrants are killing and eating their neighbor’s pets. That was the context in which he said, “They’re eating the dogs. The people that come in, they’re eating the cats.” And the ABC moderator said, “You know, there’s no”—

JN: It’s not actually happening.

JW: “—no evidence, no evidence of that.” And Trump’s reply was, “I’ve seen it on television.” 

JN: Yeah, and you know how he’s seeing it on television? It’s his running mate saying it. You know? And so at some fundamental level, the whole thing generated into such absurdity.
And by the way, why are we surprised? Why are we surprised? Because yes, Kamala Harris did an incredibly able presentation on that debate stage. There’s no doubt of it. But remember, even without prompting, Donald Trump tends to do this. And so certainly in this debate, I don’t think he wanted to, but in some cases, he’s unable to avoid it.
Remember, in his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention, all he had to do was deliver a 20-minute speech that said, ‘Hey, I’ve been through some pretty hellacious things over the last week,’ recount some of the story of an attempt on his life, get the sympathy from that, but also present himself as strong and ready, throw a few issues in, and he nails it. Right? That wasn’t that hard, but of course—

JW: And he did it, he did it for 20 minutes.

JN: Right, and then he added in another hour and some minutes of just kind of riffing, which took him to Hannibal Lecter. And, and amazingly enough, he actually said, “My aides, my allies, my advisors, they tell me not to talk about this stuff,” and then he goes and does it.
So the fact is that Harris, who is a student of politics and a student of communicating, she’s on top of all this stuff. She was very aware of Trump’s vulnerabilities, and we do talk about where you took him off the rails and where he actually did himself political harm, but I think we should also talk about the fact that while the moderators were steering the debate about issues, Kamala Harris had a substructure of her debate, which was that again and again and again, she brought this debate back to democracy issues. And you saw that in not one answer, but multiple answers, multiple ways in.
And so, yes, the moderator brought up January 6th. Yes, the moderator spoke about some specifics of Donald Trump denying the election results, but Harris was bringing that in all over the place, and often causing Trump to respond to that. The end result is that we actually had what we needed to have, which was a serious debate about the future of American democracy, and Kamala Harris won it.

JW: And let me just remind our listeners what his answer was about was there anything he regretted about his actions on January 6th? His answer was, “I wasn’t responsible for security.” That is like the—

JN: Yeah, “But Nancy Pelosi was.”

JW: “But Nancy Pelosi was.” I think that looks pretty lame, especially to his supporters who expect him to be strong, forceful, on the attack, and decisive.

JN: Yeah. I will say one last thing on this though, that what was significant was that there was the referencing to the particular day, but more significantly, it was when you saw what Harris had to say, more often than not, she kept it in the context of the broader question of trying to overturn the results of an election, right?

JW: Yeah.

JN: And that’s really important because instead of relitigating the impeachment or something like that, what she did was create a discussion about a current concern, and that is whether Donald Trump will accept the results of this election. And she actually, at one point, said to him or she went at him a little bit and then she turned back to the audience and she said, “You know, the guy at my right is saying some things,” or, “the guy here on stage with me is saying some things that you really ought to think about, and you ought to think about whether he has the temperament, whether he is prepared, A, to accept election results, but B, to serve as president of the United States.”
It was a very masterful deconstruction of Trump.

JW: I think we need to talk about the, what should we call it, frosting on the cake. 20 minutes after the end of the debate, Taylor Swift endorsed Kamala in a very cool way, I thought. She wrote to her 283 million followers on Instagram, “I watched the debate and I’m voting for Kamala Harris because she fights for the rights and causes I believe need a warrior to champion them.”
And then she didn’t say, “You should vote for Kamala Harris too.” She said, “You should make your own decision. Study the issues, register to vote, and then vote.” And she signed it, “Childless cat lady.”

JN: Well, the thing is, this was clearly, this is a pivot point for Taylor Swift, and Taylor Swift is one of the two, I would argue, along with Beyonce, uber-celebrities of our moment, the people who have followers who don’t probably think a lot about politics always, and this is an invitation to go into that serious discussion, that serious consideration of politics.
If you know anything about Taylor Swift’s influence, and I happen to know quite a bit because I live in a household with a daughter who has, for many years, been very, very enthusiastic about this woman, and also a pretty serious person about politics as well, what I can tell you is though that Taylor Swift has been with now a generation of American women. She’s not a newcomer to celebrity. She’s been with people for a long time. She has been with them through a lot of their journey, their life, and as such, she’s somebody they know, and she’s somebody who is saying, ‘Hey, take a pause here. Go take a look at this election. You figure out what you think about it,’ but clearly offering an indication of where to go.
Don’t fall into the trap of not seeing this as something that, I happen to think the debate is more important, but seeing this as a major development in the campaign. And the history of politics shows that this happens at critical junctures in campaigns. When people step up and make endorsements from outside the world of traditional politics, when they say, ‘This is so important, I’m going to step in here and say something,’ that is a part of how we should cover politics. We should recognize that that’s how electorates get expanded. And one of the things we know is that in America, when the electorate expands, when you get more people coming to the polls, like a dramatic increase in it, historically, that has been good for the Democrats.
And so this is a development. Again, I’m still in the old-school camp that says the debate matters more, but I will tell you that having this in combination on Tuesday night, my instinct is that Kamala Harris probably headed home feeling in a rather exuberant mood.

JW: John Nichols, read him at thenation.com. John, always great to have you on the show.

JN: I would say we’ve had many great days, but this may be one of those that will stand out as a particularly significant one.
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Jon Wiener: Los Angeles is known for the tens of thousands of homeless people sleeping on the streets. And according to the city’s official count, about 4,000 of them are veterans, many of whom have disabilities, including traumatic brain injury and PTSD. Los Angeles is also the home of a huge body of land officially dedicated to housing disabled veterans, a beautiful 400-acre gated campus in Brentwood. And yet the VA for years refused to settle a class action suit by disabled homeless vets seeking housing there. And the VA insisted on going to trial.
A month-long trial ended recently, and the verdict is in, the homeless vets won, the VA lost. The lead attorney for the vets is Mark Rosenbaum. He’s senior special counsel at the organization Public Counsel. He’s argued landmark cases before the Supreme Court four times and more than two dozen before the Federal Courts of Appeal in the California State Supreme Court. We talked with him about this case when the trial began back in July. He joins us again now that it’s ended.  Mark Rosenbaum, welcome back.

Mark Rosenbaum: It’s great to see you, Jon. Thank you for having me. And thank you for continuing to cover this vital issue. One out of every 10 unhoused veterans is in Los Angeles, so it’s important for veterans here, who are, as you said, on the streets, living and dying on the streets, but it’s also important for veterans across the country who have not been served well in their time of need in response to the way they served the country in its time of need.

JW: The official policy of the VA for a long time, many presidents, has been, “End veterans’ homelessness.” First, remind us about the issues in this case. What was the VA saying about housing vets in LA, and what were you seeking in this case?

MR: This is actually the second of two cases. You’re exactly right. The first one started in 2011 on the issues that you talked about, the fact that LA was the homeless veterans’ capital of the United States, and there was this 388-acre campus that was donated in 1888 to the predecessor of the Veterans Administration, specifically to be a soldier’s home. And for decades, soldiers who had served in the Spanish-American War, World War I, World War II, the Korean War, came to Los Angeles and they found a home and a community here on those grounds. That shut down with Vietnam, and the land became a commercial enterprise, often crookedly, being leased to Enterprise Rent-A-Car and Marriott Laundries and theater groups, and most notoriously the UCLA baseball complex, the UCLA baseball team, and a private school out here, the Brentwood Private School, which is one of the most exclusive private schools in the United States.
There was a settlement in that case in 2015, but the VA did not follow through on that settlement, and the numbers of homeless veterans actually grew. So we filed the new case in November of 2022. As you said, we’ve been litigating it since then. We had a month-long trial, and the issues are exactly what you said. The government has talked the talk about ending veteran homelessness, but that hasn’t happened. As you know, there are encampments all across this city where there are veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan and even Vietnam, who are there.
In addition, there is this spacious land that is a natural for housing veterans and restoring that community. Instead, veterans during the pandemic had to line up on the streets that were adjacent of it in what was called Veterans’ Row. And the VA response to that was to say, “We have no authority to address those individuals,” wouldn’t give them housing, wouldn’t give them tents, wouldn’t give them food, wouldn’t give them bathrooms, wouldn’t give them garbage vehicles. And so a number of them died on the street and—

JW: —Died on the street outside the gates of the VA.

MR: Literally, while the VA was saying to them, “We cannot help you.” And literally while they were working with UCLA to amend the lease there to give UCLA an infield on the parking lot. It would’ve been the parking lot. And to give them an infield practice, a state-of-the-art infield practice area. And the vets went to the VA and went to UCLA and said, “Look, we could put housing on that parking lot, and that would take us off the streets during the pandemic.” Incidentally, the VA wouldn’t give individuals even hand sanitizer or masks or anything to address the pandemic. And the VA and UCLA said in the midst of the pandemic, ‘Yeah, we agree that you could have housing here, but the UCLA baseball team has games, and we don’t want to interrupt the UCLA baseball schedule to put housing for veterans there.’
So we filed the lawsuit, had the month-long trial that you presented, and said, “Look, we’re not asking for charity, we’re not asking for favors, we’re not even asking for moral good. We’re saying the law requires, where individuals are disabled, where that disability was secured by serving this country, those individuals need housing if they are to access the medical services that exist on that campus,” which are quite good, those medical services, quite good.
We fought with them, saying, “First of all, they need that housing on those grounds in order to get off the streets. Housing is healthcare and healthcare is housing.” And we said that 388 acres, that the government had a fiduciary duty, which the VA denied. And so we went to court on the issues of the Rehabilitation Act, to give individuals permanent supportive housing, and on the issue of what did that duty constitute in terms of what the obligation of the VA was to those men and women who served their government.

JW: The ruling by US District Judge David O. Carter had many parts. The heart of the case, as you said, was housing. What did he order the VA to do about housing homeless, disabled vets on that VA land in West LA?

MR: Judge Carter’s answer in his 125-page ruling was to say, “The time for housing is now. The time is up.” He concluded his opinion by saying, “It’s time for all disabled veterans to come home.” And he said, “With respect to that, there needs to be on those grounds temporary housing, not tents, not shacks, but real housing, modular housing,” real housing that you and I would recognize as housing. And that had to be instituted, 750 units of temporary housing on those grounds, within 12 to 18 months. And it had to be rolling, had to get started in terms of getting there.
In terms of permanent supportive housing, Judge Carter said the government has to come up within six months with a plan for 1,800 permanent supportive housing units that would be built over a long period of time and that those two combined with a number of other programs outside the campus for housing, that would end veteran homelessness once for all, not as a matter of rhetoric, but as a matter of reality.

JW: The problem the last time you won this case, the 2011 case, was enforcement. There wasn’t any way to enforce the construction of the new housing that was ordered at that time. What does this new ruling say about enforcing a timeline?

MR: That’s such an important point. When we settled the case in 2015, and I’ve said to you before, I was part of the team that made a grievous error and accepted the word of the VA that it would carry out what the settlement required on a matter of trust. It had no enforceability to it. That was malpractice. This time we started the case by saying, “What we’re seeking here is an enforceable order.” And that’s what Judge Carter gave us. He gave us an order with a strict timeline, with clear directions as to what the government had to do. He is going to, on the 25th of this month, appoint a special master to oversee that implementation of the program. And if the government falters in any way, he’s made clear, we’ve made clear they’ll be back in court. But I think the existence of an enforceable order is going to get the job done this time.

JW: You also argued that the VA was discriminating against disabled vets by counting their disability benefits as income, which disqualified the most disabled vets from getting housing assistance. What did Judge Carter say about that?

MR: Yeah, that’s pretty remarkable, isn’t it? What the government chose to do in order to build whatever housing it had was to outsource that building process. We argued and the judge agreed with us, that the VA does have authority to build the housing itself. It builds medical centers, it builds housing for staff, it builds all sorts of healthcare programs, have residential treatment to them. So it’s not like the government can’t do that. And the judge agreed with us that the government, if it doesn’t want to build it, it could finance it directly, the way it finances all sorts of things in terms of issuing contracts and then paying for those contracts.
What the government had done instead was to outsource it and go to private developers and say to those developers, ‘You build the affordable housing, you get the financing, you do the construction.’ And that built in years and years and years of delays while that process took place. To make matters worse, getting to your point, the government would go to state and local entities to get financing for affordable housing, and the state and local entities would say, ‘Yeah, we’ll give it to you, but we have some strings attached to it. And those strings are certain limitations as to who would go in there. And as part of that,’ what the entity said is, ‘We are going to say that your disability compensation, all the individuals whom we represent, the people whom you said, PTSD, severe mental illness, brain trauma, they’re a hundred percent disabled.’ They’re actually more than a hundred percent disabled.
But what the government did was to sanction finance schemes that said, ‘We will count your disability compensation as income,’ even though it’s far from it. IRS doesn’t count it as income. It’s what you receive as an entitlement because, my God, you gave up of your mental and physical health in the service of this nation. But those sorts of limitations disqualified from affordable housing those individuals who were most in need of it, those who had the greatest disabilities. And what Judge Carter said is, “That is discrimination. That is using your disability to penalize you in terms of your access to the housing itself.” He struck that down and he said, “The government cannot authorize, sanction, or any way permit finance schemes even by private developers that penalize an individual for the disabilities they suffered in the service to our country.”

JW: What’s this in the judge’s order about the VA being required to build a town center for this new housing?

MR: The town center concept, the whole idea of a community concept, that goes back to the 1888 deed. It was to be a soldier’s home, not an isolated home, but part of a community. And that’s part of a healthcare process, isn’t it? And it’s part of the way you and I live, that we live in communities. We don’t live in isolated houses. And what the government had done over the years was to destroy the community structures that existed on that campus. The master plan, which the government had in fact drafted but never implemented, had not one bit implemented, provided for a town center, a center with retail stores, a center with community meeting places, a center where individuals could get together.
And the judge said, “Your job, VA, is not just to provide the housing, but to give the individuals an opportunity to be in a community, a community of their peers, a community of others. And I want to see progress built. I want you to get started on actually constructing that town center so that individuals don’t live on grass. They live in a community.” And that is a huge victory. And that’s, after all, what the veterans seek.
During the pandemic, there were veterans, when the government said, ‘We’re not going to give you housing. We’re not going to give you even tents.’ They said, ‘Well, we’d rather live on the street, where at least we’re within a community of individuals,’ and that shouldn’t be the choice. So the judge said, ‘Part of this order, part of this enforceable order, is that the government has to get to work to provide a community.’

JW: Housing wasn’t the only thing at issue here. As you explained there, these neighboring institutions that have been using the VA land, and you objected to that, what did the order say about the UCLA baseball field and the Brentwood School athletic fields?

MR: There’s a statute that Congress passed in 2016. It’s called the West LA Leasing Act of 2016. And it permitted the government, the VA, if it chose, to enter into leases. But it was very specific as to what the nature of those leases had to be. Those leases had to, quote, “primarily benefit veterans and their families,” not others. Well, UCLA baseball complex occupies more than 10 acres of the property. It’s a state-of-the-art baseball complex. The stadium itself has the same dimensions as Dodger Stadium. The UCLA baseball team plays between 27 and 35 games a year there. And it is a nationally recruited sports operation there. And what I said to the judge is, “This is supposed to be the home of the brave, not the home of the UCLA Bruins.” And the judge agreed and said, “No, if you’re going to have a lease with UCLA, its primary benefit has to be not baseball, but veterans.”
Interestingly enough, when we examined the UCLA representative at trial, I said to him, “Look, sir, in terms of what UCLA is doing on that campus–” Incidentally, what UCLA said was, “We will give the veterans free tickets.” And they were free baseball tickets to games that were when the stadium there was half filled. So they were getting free tickets to empty stadiums – and they gave them free hot dogs and cokes and then put the value of the hot dogs and the cokes and these tickets as part of what they call their in-kind consideration. So they weren’t free at all. And what the judge said was, “No, if you are going to operate on this land, you’ve got to comply with the statute.” And having a baseball program, as I said, the UCLA witness said, “No, our main purpose here is baseball. It’s not veterans.” And that was candid, honest, and it was the truth.
So the judge said, “I’m going to strike down this lease as violative of the statute. We know that part of that land could be used for housing.” And so the judge struck down that. And Brentwood School, which is as exclusive a private school as any school in this country, occupies 22 acres of the land. And they put state-of-the-art athletic facilities for their students. And they said, ‘Oh, by the way, veterans can use it, assuming they want to come here at 5:30 in the morning to use it, but they can’t interfere with the student hours.’ And they ran a shuttle that began at 9 AM. So even with those limited hours and crazy hours, and the judge said the same thing to Brentwood. Brentwood put in a state-of-the-art aquatic center, got a $10 million donation to pay for it. None of that money went to vets or to veteran organizations. And the judge said, “No, that doesn’t primarily benefit veterans” and struck down that lease as well.
So what we’re doing is carrying out the dream and the intent of the donation in the first place, that 1888 deed. And what we’re saying is that veterans who serve this nation, it’s time for this nation to serve those veterans.

JW: Now that the ruling is in, now that you’ve won this case, is your work on housing for homeless disabled vets finished now?

MR: No. We can’t make the same mistake we made last time. As I said, this order has teeth. It’s enforceable with the judge has set a hearing on the 25th of September to begin the implementation process itself. But in some way our work is just beginning in terms of making sure that these provisions are carried out.
And I want to correct you on one thing: We didn’t win this case. The veterans won this case. I’m a good lawyer, but it wasn’t any legal cross-examination or filing or a brief that won the case. These veterans who served in Iraq, who went through hell that you and I cannot even imagine, they told their stories in the courtroom.  They moved the judge. And so they were the narratives that carried the case. My job was easy compared to what their lives are about, and this victory belongs entirely to them.

JW: Congratulations to them and to you on this groundbreaking ruling, mandating sweeping changes in how the Department of Veterans Affairs provides housing and care for disabled veterans. Mark, thank you for your years of work on this case – and thanks for talking with us today.

MR: Thanks for your interest, Jon. It’s always great to talk to you.