How bad is the tyranny of leftist judges appointed by Democrats to the federal bench in Western states? So bad that the Democratic mayor of San Francisco held a rally outside the city’s federal courthouse to protest one of the 9th Circuit’s recent decisions on homelessness.
We have called on the Supreme Court to reverse the 9th Circuit’s homelessness insanity before, and after a three-judge appeals court panel of that circuit upheld a lower court decision last Thursday, the Supreme Court finally acted on Friday, announcing it would hear the case of City of Grants Pass v. Johnson.
Homelessness has been rising in Western states for decades, but the problem became much harder to handle after 2018, when the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals created a constitutional right to vagrancy. In Martin v. Boise, six residents of Boise, Idaho, claimed the city’s camping and disorderly conduct ordinances, which made it a misdemeanor to camp or sleep on public property without permission, violated their Eighth Amendment right not to be subject to cruel or unusual punishment.
“As long as there is no option of sleeping indoors, the government cannot criminalize indigent, homeless people for sleeping outdoors, on public property, on the false premise they had a choice in the matter,” the 9th Circuit wrote.
Since that Martin decision, cities throughout the 9th Circuit’s jurisdiction have found it next to impossible to clear homeless encampments because any action taken by law enforcement authorities must be carefully micromanaged by a federal judge — and usually a far-left federal judge appointed by Democrats. As a direct result, the homeless population in Western states has exploded to the point that almost half of all the nation’s homeless people are under the 9th Circuit’s jurisdiction.
The reasoning behind the 9th Circuit’s decision is absurd. Anti-vagrancy laws were common in England and the colonies before the revolution, and they stayed on the books after the Constitution was written. When Patrick Henry pushed for the inclusion of the Eighth Amendment in the Bill of Rights, he was not trying to overturn state anti-vagrancy laws. He was far more concerned with excessive penalties being used in European countries to extract false confessions from accused criminals.
The Eighth Amendment has since been used to overturn sentences for criminal convictions that were disproportionate, including life sentences for juvenile offenders. But it has never been used to invalidate a criminal statute entirely as the 9th Circuit did first in Martin and now again in Grants Pass.
The decision has become such a nuisance that even San Francisco Mayor London Breed has attacked it as she looks to combat her city’s homelessness problem. “The fact that the courts have crippled our ability to do our job to help get people into shelter is criminal. If we have a place for someone to go. They need to go. There has to be accountability,” Breed said at a rally outside San Francisco’s federal court last summer.
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You know the homelessness problem in San Francisco must be bad if the city’s democratically elected leaders are finally willing to get tough on homeless encampments. It is too bad that Democrats in California need the conservative members of the Supreme Court to come to their rescue and free them from the crazy rulings of the leftist judges who control the 9th Circuit.
This should be a lesson for the entire nation, though. Every federal judicial appointment matters. When you vote to put Democrats in the White House and Senate, you leave yourself open to being ruled by extreme, activist judges who will invent new rights to destroy law and order in your community.