Progressive elected officials beg conservative Supreme Court for relief on homelessness

The Boise decision is a 2018 decision reached by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. A lawyer in Boise, Idaho had filed a lawsuit on behalf of six homeless people claiming that it violated their 8th amendment rights against cruel and unusual punishment to be arrested or otherwise punished for sleeping on the streets when they had nowhere else to go. The 9th Circuit decision effectively made it illegal for any state that was part of the 9th Circuit’s jurisdiction to do anything about homeless camps which proliferated on the sidewalks.

Cities have been trying to overturn the Boise decision by appealing to the Supreme Court since at least 2019. That’s when Los Angeles’ City Supervisors voted to hire an attorney to appeal the case.

In San Francisco, Mayor London Breed was elected on a platform of cleaning up the streets. She began removing tent camps around the city (which homeless activists all sweeps). The ACLU sued the city and the day before Christmas Eve a judge ruled the city could not do any more sweeps. Mayor Breed was clearly frustrated, saying at the time “Mayors cannot run cities this way.”

So the outcome of the Boise decision is that cities on the west coast cannot remove tents from sidewalks unless they have a bed to offer every person being removed. In fact, thanks to the ACLU lawsuit, the status quo now is that San Francisco can’t do anything unless it has enough beds for every homeless person in the city. Mayor Breed decided to appeal that case to the 9th Circuit, knowing she would probably lose but then expecting to be able to appeal that loss to the Supreme Court.

And Mayor Breed isn’t alone. As the NY Times reports, both progressives and conservatives impacted by the Boise decision are begging the Supreme Court to overturn another ruling out of Grants Pass, Oregon which extended the Boise decision to not just cover criminal cases stemming from homelessness but civil penalties as well.

In a surge of legal briefs this week, frustrated leaders from across the political spectrum, including the liberal governor of California and right-wing state legislators in Arizona, charged that homeless encampments were turning their public spaces into pits of squalor, and asked the Supreme Court to revisit lower court decisions that they say have hobbled their ability to bring these camps under control…

“The friction in many communities affected by homelessness is at a breaking point,” the attorneys for Las Vegas, Seattle and more than a dozen other cities, as well as national municipal organizations, wrote in one brief. “Despite massive infusions of public resources, businesses and residents are suffering the increasingly negative effects of long-term urban camping.”…

“It’s just gone too far,” Mr. Newsom said in a Sacramento forum held by Politico this month, in which he vowed to seek clarity from the Supreme Court and recognized that he was asking for help from the same conservative jurists whom he had sharply rebuked for decisions on abortion and gun regulations.

“People’s lives are at risk,” he said. “It’s unacceptable, what’s happening on streets and sidewalks.”

In addition to Gov. Newsom, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Honolulu have all joined the effort to bring this to the Supreme Court. So it really is a bunch of progressive elected officials begging the conservative Supreme Court they have castigated repeatedly to bail them out of this mess. The Vice President of the conservative Goldwater Institute in Arizona found the whole thing pretty amusing. “When somebody comes to see the light, you don’t berate them for spending all this time in the darkness — you praise them for seeing the truth,” he told the Times.

Naturally, the leader of the National Homelessness Law Center thinks Newsom and other progressives should be ashamed of themselves. She accuses them of siding with Donald Trump and conservatives. And yet, in this case, progressive leaders don’t seem to care because they know the problem is impacting their cities, not just in terms of the squalor on the streets but also the immense amounts of money they are spending on shelter as well as the impact the homeless are having on local businesses.

On the other side of this, homeless activists agree ideologically with the massive increase in spending essentially mandated by the Boise decision and also seem likely to benefit from it financially. Cities like San Francisco usually contract out homeless services, so all of this money flows through organizations that have a vested interest in keeping it going. Overturning the Boise decision might put a stop to at least some of it.

The Supreme Court is expected to decide whether to take up the case by January. The belief is they are likely to take it up simply because so many municipalities on both sides of the aisle are begging them to do so. Obviously the cities believe overturning Boise would be better for them. But part of me thinks that’s a bit of a cop out. It allows all of these progressive officials and the voters who elected them to blame conservatives on the court for being mean to the homeless (even though that’s what they’re hoping for). Maybe the progressives who voted for this should be allowed to stew in their own failure for a few more years until the voters themselves are really fed up and decide to vote for someone more sensible.

It’s not unlike the immigration situation in New York City and elsewhere. If a conservative court were to bail them out somehow, that would prevent voters from getting what they asked for when they voted for sanctuary cities. Maybe the learning experience is better for the country than the quick fix.