SCOTUS Girls Gone Wile: The Right to Crap in the Streets

On MSNBC, they’re convinced that the Supreme Court ruling on presidential immunity will finally usher in the long-feared Trump Dictatorship, though I’m almost certain the Supreme Court explicitly limited the immunity to presidential acts authorized, or even required, by the Constitution.

Staging a coup would not be covered. Neither would murdering political opponents.

(One of the most alarmed guests was former CIA chief John Brennan. Wasn’t he involved in a bit of unauthorized surveillance of American citizens, as well as lying to Congress about it?)

MSNBC: What if Mohamed Atta were president? According to SCOTUS, EVERYTHING HE DID WOULD HAVE BEEN PERFECTLY LEGAL!

     What if TED BUNDY had been elected president? But for a few votes in a few precincts, he could have been … OH MY GOD!!!

Where on Earth did Clarence Thomas get the idea that raping and bludgeoning coeds is part of a president’s core functions? That’s CRAZY!

As liberals carry on about the conservative majority on the court, I direct your attention to the three liberals on the court, Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson — aka “Girls in Robes Gone Wild”  and what a majority of them would mean for our country.

In City of Grants Pass v. Johnson, the court was asked to decide whether the “homeless” (in the sense that “I am Hope Diamondless”) have a constitutional right to camp anywhere they please. Thankfully, a majority of justices found no such right in the Constitution.

But the dissenters concluded, Yes! Mentally ill drug addicts have total immunity from any local health and safety ordinances.

To illustrate how bonkers this is, consider that both the crazily woke governor of California, Gavin Newsom, and the certifiably woke mayor of San Francisco, London Breed, pleaded with the Supreme Court to allow them to shut down homeless encampments. That has been impossible since 2019, when the 9th Circuit — and the 9th Circuit alone  ruled in Martin v. Boise that “the Eighth Amendment prohibits the imposition of criminal penalties for sitting, sleeping or lying outside on public property for homeless individuals.”

No other circuit in the nation agreed. Almost immediately, homelessness exploded in cities and towns throughout the 9th Circuit.

We don’t have to speculate about the unintended consequences the liberal justices’ policy preferences would unleash on the country. Less than 20% of the U.S. population lives within the 9th circuit, but 42% of the “homeless” do. In Boise alone, homelessness doubled within two years of the ruling in Martin. Boise!

Contrary to the three justices comfortably ensconced in their chambers 2,000 miles away, governors and mayors, such as Newsom and Breed, say the homeless encampments are hotbeds of sexual assault and sex trafficking, that they proliferate in the “poorest and most vulnerable neighborhoods,” and that they pose a particular danger to children and the disabled who have to navigate sidewalks jam-packed with drugged-out freaks. (I would add that the homeless are notoriously bad at separating their recyclables.)

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     How nuts are the three liberal justices? They’re well to the left of a California Democrat.

But these robed dingbats think they know better than governors, mayors, district attorneys and sheriffs — you know, the people who actually have to deal with the homeless on a daily basis. (It seems relevant at this juncture to recall that Harvard Law professor Larry Tribe warned President Barack Obama that Sotomayor is “not nearly as smart as she seems to think she is.”)

Sotomayor claimed that “homelessness,” as we now call rank degeneracy, is “due to complex and interconnected issues, including crippling debt and stagnant wages; … and rising housing costs coupled with declining affordable housing options.” Elsewhere, she blamed homelessness on “[n]atural disasters … climate events … floods … and snowstorms.”

Um, hello? Did we forget “systemic anti-homelessism”?

Back on planet Earth, “homelessness” is pretty much due to indolence, mental illness and drug use — mostly drug use, which causes both mental illness and a lack of industriousness. Talk about “intersectionality”! Look at the intersectionality of not having a job, not paying your bills, and getting stoned out of your mind all day long, every single day of your life.

After clearing a homeless encampment along the Santa Ana River in 2018, the Orange County clean-up crew had to haul away thousands of pounds of human waste, almost 14,000 hypodermic needles and more than 400 tons of garbage.

Was it a lack of “affordable housing options” that drove these otherwise responsible adults to defecate in public, toss their garbage on the ground and inject themselves with illegal narcotics? Show me the decision tree that leads from “a snowstorm” to living on the street and shooting fentanyl.

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     Sotomayor reached her legal conclusion through the sort of sophistry that just makes a normal person angry.

It goes like this: The Eighth Amendment prohibits the infliction of “cruel and unusual punishments”; being a homeless drug addict is a “status” completely out of the control of the homeless drug addict; and because sleep is a biological necessity, to punish the “homeless” for sleeping outside is punishing them for their status, which is “cruel and unusual” under the Eighth Amendment.

See? You want to strangle her. (But don’t do it. Only a sitting president has the legal right to strangle a Supreme Court justice.)

This is wrong on every possible level. First, the punishment — the allegedly “cruel and unusual” punishment — happens to be a series of fines, leading, eventually, to 30 days in jail. You heard me right: The punishment for lying in a pool of your own excrement on a public sidewalk is 30 days in a clean, comfortable cell with a toilet, a cot, a blanket, showers and three squares a day. What’s the punishment for repeat offenders? Summering at George Clooney’s villa on Lake Como?

Second, homelessness is not just bad luck, like being struck by lightning. It’s the result of a dissolute lifestyle, taking drugs and stubbornly refusing to get a job.

Third, the Eighth Amendment forbids certain punishments; it doesn’t say anything about what can be made a crime.  The “cruel and unusual” language comes from a clause in Britain’s 1689 Bill of Rights that was a response to the Spanish Inquisition. Criminalize whatever you want, but the punishment absolutely cannot be the rack, the wheel, knee splitters, thumb screws and so on.

That’s it.

But with just two more votes on the court, these deranged justices would turn every city in America into a dystopian nightmare where zombie drug addicts crap outdoors and get high all day.

Of course, that’s nothing compared to Trump dropping MOAB bombs on his political opponents — so get back to those fascinating hypotheticals, American journalists.

     COPYRIGHT 2024 ANN COULTER