If anything serves as a reminder that elections matter, check out what a Trump-appointed majority on the Ninth Circuit has ruled after a leftist panel of judges said otherwise.

As the Los Angeles Times reported it:

Some of the most powerful conservative judges in the United States took collective aim Wednesday at the idea that homeless people with nowhere else to go have a right to sleep in public, excoriating their liberal colleagues for ruling as much.

Their scathing comments came in a set of responses to a decision Wednesday by the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals not to rehear a case in which a smaller three-judge panel affirmed such rights in September.

In their responses, the court's conservative wing painted a dystopian portrait of an American West deprived of its public spaces and under siege by an overwhelming epidemic of homelessness.

Yeah, and why shouldn't they have ruled that way?  There's a such thing as private property, a such thing as public property, and if you're a drug addict making yourself a plague on society, you don't own any of it.  Polls repeatedly show that this is the public understanding of the matter, and bums shouldn't be free to take over every public park.

But to the Los Angeles Times, that seems to be a bad thing, a conservative thing, a case of stolen identity, given that the Ninth had been historically ruled by the nation's foremost far leftists until President Trump came along and appointed non–judicial activists.

The case started when the small, conservative, and (based on news reports) wants-to-join-Idaho city of Grants Pass in southern Oregon passed a measure prohibiting homeless encampments in the public areas of the city.  That wasn't because they wanted to be mean — it was because their city had been taken over by drug-addled and mentally ill homeless people, many of whom had refused public shelter to maintain their "lifestyle," and there were no safe public spaces left, whether for the public to walk down or families to take their children to.

A leftist appellate panel of three judges told them "no," they couldn't clear the city of the homeless campout in certain public spaces, and the homeless were effectively free to camp wherever they liked since no one was taking care of them, or rather, since they "cannot obtain shelter."

That may well be because of their behavior, but leave that detail aside.

An old Reagan conservative judge on the panel laid out the commonsense ruling:

Judge Diarmuid O'Scannlain, an older conservative judge appointed by President Reagan, wrote in a separate statement that the position of the court's liberal wing was "egregiously flawed and deeply damaging," and blaming it for "paralyzing local communities from addressing the pressing issue of homelessness."

O'Scannlain wrote that the decision "now effectively guarantees a personal federal constitutional 'right' for individuals to camp or to sleep on sidewalks and in parks, playgrounds, and other public places in defiance of traditional health, safety, and welfare laws," which he called "a dubious holding premised on a fanciful interpretation of the 8th Amendment."

O'Scannlain was joined in part by Smith and in full by 13 other conservatives on the court.

...and this...

"One need only walk through our neighborhoods — through the Tenderloin (San Francisco) or Skid Row (Los Angeles) — to know that our communities are fast coming undone," he wrote. "Tents crowding out sidewalks, needles flooding parks, and rubbish (and worse) marring public squares reflect a threat to the public welfare that should not be taken lightly."

He called the panel's initial ruling "an inventive, jude-made novelty" which he added "effectively requires local communities to surrender their sidewalks and other public places to homeless encampments."

Well, yeah.  The leftists who disagreed — two of whom were on that three-person panel — insisted there was no such wording in their ruling:

The ruling, they wrote, "holds only that governments cannot criminalize the act of sleeping with the use of rudimentary protections, such as bedding, from the elements in some public places when a person has nowhere else to sleep."

The ruling "does not establish an unrestrained right for involuntarily homeless persons to sleep anywhere they choose," Silver and Gould wrote. "Nor does it require jurisdictions to cede all public spaces to involuntarily homeless persons."

 Actually, it does.  What they were engaging in was gaslighting because the results speak for themselves.  If a city can't chase the bums out of public areas, the bums get to stay and "camp" where they like.

It reveals an amazingly naïve view of why homelessness and homeless clusters happen — which is because of the rise of social service agencies, which attracts chiselers, and the rise of unchecked drug-dealing, which brings whole groups of junkies to surround their drug-dealer.  Get rid of the social service rackets, and the homelessness disappears.  It was like this before the rise of the homeless issue, and it will be like this after the gargantuan social service agencies and the drug-dealers are gone.

In the meantime, anti-camping ordinances serve to disincentivize homelessness as a lifestyle and encourage those who are homeless to answer one of those "Help Wanted" signs and rejoin society.

As Thomas Sowell once said, you can have all the poverty you'd like to pay for.  Ending the "right" of the homeless to squat on public and private property is an excellent first step, and every last blue city, including the Times' Los Angeles, should be thanking those judges.

Image: Screen shot from Nick Johnson video via YouTube.