Did you know that it’s a violation of the Eighth Amendment for a city not to provide public places for the homeless? That’s how the infamous Ninth Circuit ruled last year, expanding upon an earlier decision.
Attorney Mark Pulliam writes about this atrocious case on Law & Liberty:
By banning the enforcement of anti-camping ordinances throughout the jurisdiction of the Ninth Circuit — which includes (among others) the states of Washington, Oregon, California, and Arizona — that court has overseen the proliferation of homeless encampments in Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Diego, Phoenix, and countless other cities. “Homeless encampments” — a euphemism for the squalid detritus of vagrants, drunks, drug addicts, and mentally ill formerly derided as “hobo jungles,” “shanty towns,” or, during the Great Depression, “Hoovervilles” — are a blight on the urban locations where they unfortunately often appear. Especially in the western United States, sprawling homeless encampments have become ubiquitous, to the disgust and dismay of local residents. Martin v. Boise is largely to blame.
Pulliam also gives us a look into the way the Left’s well-funded, powerful legal apparatus pushes for rules that undermine our civilization:
Martin v. Boise was not a home-grown litigation brought by well-intentioned, locally-based do-gooders in Boise. Rather, it was the product of a well-funded, national organization (the National Homelessness Law Center, formerly known as the National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty) based in Washington, DC that believes “housing is a human right” and seeks to establish, via litigation, “a right to housing in the United States”—a phony “right” that nowhere appears in the Constitution. The radical activists at the National Homelessness Law Center partner with large law firms to utilize the vast resources of their so-called “pro bono” programs to overwhelm outmatched municipalities in a tsunami of litigation to invalidate local laws restricting public vagrancy—with the goal of forcing cities to provide public housing for all.
Thanks to such people and groups, America is dying the death of a thousand cuts.
Read the whole thing.