The justices toss their bingo buddies into the street.

In case you missed Alex Kotlowitz's There Are No Children Here, the best account of life in government housing projects, the facts of HUD v. Rucker provide a pretty good summary of what a senior citizen must endure there. Poverty, fear, drug deals and drive-bys, kids and grandkids who come and go, nurses who use your apartment in lieu of a crack den.

And that's before the federal government evicts you because some grandkid fired up a doobie in the parking lot. So out go Pearlie Rucker (the 63-year-old great-grandmother whose mentally retarded daughter was caught with a crack pipe three blocks from the project); Willie Lees (a 71-year-old grandma whose grandson smoked pot in the parking lot); Barbara Hill (a 63-year-old grandma whose grandson smoked pot in the parking lot); and Herman Walker (a 75-year-old semi-paralyzed former preacher whose caretaker was stashing crack paraphernalia at his apartment). Maybe the court thinks Rucker can move into the Plaza Hotel. A useful reality check for all of us renters, for whom the most onerous requirement in our lease agreement is that we refrain from driving nails into the walls …

At issue today is 42 U.S.C. Section 1437d(1)(6), a 1988 law allowing public housing agencies to evict any tenant for any drug-related activity (with or without a criminal conviction) "engaged in by a public housing tenant, any member of the tenant's household, or any guest or other person under the tenant's control."

It's unclear what a tenant—particularly an elderly tenant with a shifting roster of house guests—can purport to "control." But according to the Department of Housing and Urban Development and the various public housing authorities in question, the rules mean that whether or not the tenants in question knew about the drug use, once it happens, they're out. Raising the question: Does Florida Gov. Jeb Bush live in government-subsidized housing?

The four tenants evicted from their homes by the Oakland Housing Authority all claim to have known nothing about the drug use of their various children/grandchildren/caregivers. They each claim to have warned their families about the consequences of drug use on the premises. And in three of the four cases, the drug use happened out of the apartment—either blocks away from the project or in the parking lot. And you may want to stop and consider whether your own grandma ever knew more than about 3 percent of what you were doing in your spare time.

Still, the government theory seems to be one of strict liability for old poor people. Strict liability means the courts don't care what the accused knew or didn't know. You are guilty regardless of fault or intention. A good example of a strict liability crime is statutory rape. The courts don't care if she looked 16, said she was 16, or was too drunk to remember. The burden is on the squire to sort it out. So making the drug use of your grandchildren subject to strict liability evictions assumes that public housing tenants are the best source of "control" over their families and guests. Of course, HUD could go further and demand that residents of public housing projects actually make citizens' arrests for any drug use on the premises, on penalty of eviction. Or maybe the police should just do their jobs.

In any event, the district court in Oakland prevented the Oakland Housing Authority from evicting the seniors, a three-judge panel of the 9^th Circuit Court of Appeals reversed this, and then the whole 9^th Circuit, sitting en banc, reversed the reversal, stating that the law didn't authorize evictions of innocent tenants. Meanwhile, a panel of the 11^th Circuit Court of Appeals went the other way, and the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case.

With facts this sympathetic, you might think that it would be hard to lose the votes of the entire Supreme Court at oral argument, but you'd be wrong. Paul Renne, arguing on behalf of the evicted tenants, manages to do just that. Which leads to the list of "The 10 Best Ways To Lose the Most Sympathetic Case in History":

1) Argue That Acts of Congress Don't Mean What They Say: Renne and the 9^th Circuit must prove that Congress didn't mean to impose strict liability on public housing tenants in Section 1437d(1)(6). The 9^th Circuit did that by suggesting that Congress was confused, and the results would be absurd (i.e., your nephew in Boston's drug use could get you kicked out of an Oakland public housing project). Renne tries to argue the same point and promptly loses the right-tilting five justices, who always hold that laws mean what they say, unless a Bush presidency is on the line.

2) Argue That Regulatory Agencies Don't Mean What They Say: The law of the land is that courts give federal agencies deference to interpret their own regulations. Once HUD agrees that it wants a zero-tolerance policy for drug abuse, no court in the world (except the 9^th Circuit) would try to mess with that.