September 22, 2023 • 11 mins
The homeless population is taking over many of the blue cities in our country and the government is allowing that to happen. Why?! They're homeless and drug open air markets.
Timothy Sandefur is the Vice President for Legal Affairs at the Goldwater Institute’s Scharf-Norton Center for Constitutional Litigation and holds the Duncan Chair in Constitutional Government.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
So so much to talk about with Tim sander for
Vice President for Litigation the Goldwater Institute. Tim's latest book,
Freedom's Furies. How Isabel Patterson Rosewilder Lane ein Rand found
liberty in the age of darkness? In an age of darkness?
Speaker 2 (00:13):
There are many owes.
Speaker 1 (00:14):
You a facetive American history nobody ever talks about in
the twentieth century, how enamored the progressives were with totalitarians,
And on that note, perhaps introduced our crusader for liberty,
Tim sanderfer hate Tim.
Speaker 3 (00:29):
Hey guys, thanks for having me on.
Speaker 2 (00:30):
And as I always like to point out, referred to
as a national treasure by George will of The Washington Post,
Tim Sanderford.
Speaker 3 (00:37):
But fortunately I'm not in a senator's closet like other treasures.
Speaker 2 (00:42):
Right, that's gold bars. Wow, that is old school. Anyways.
Speaker 3 (00:45):
I guess you go in there with a pocket knife
and like skim off a few shavings and use those
to go buy gas or something.
Speaker 1 (00:52):
I guess I wonder if he actually had those sacks
of money with dollar signs on.
Speaker 3 (00:58):
I was signing them like scooge McDuck.
Speaker 1 (01:01):
You know, all right, Well, let's get down to business
there has been a seemingly large victory recently in Maricopa
County that's a Phoenix essentially Arizona, where a judge has
said enough with the junkie camps. Can you explain to
folks what happened.
Speaker 3 (01:18):
Yeah, So, this is a lawsuit that's been going on
for quite a while now because of the city purposely
creating an open air homeless shelter so to speak, in
the streets of downtown Phoenix, where over a thousand people
at a time have resided in tents right on the streets,
and that the city has been transporting the homeless people
(01:39):
to this area and then just saying do what you want,
We're not going to enforce the law, which of course
has been destroying the local businesses, ruining people's homes in
the area. It's been leading to there's been arson, there
have been dead bodies found in this area, all these
sorts of you know, sewage in the streets. So there's
(01:59):
a group of them filed a lawsuit, and what happened
earlier this week was a trial judge in America County
has declared that the city is maintaining a public nuisance
and must clear up the area before November fourth. That
means remove all the tents and get rid of the
sewage and stop allowing the law breaking in this area.
Speaker 2 (02:21):
Get rid of the sewage is a sanitized way to
explain what was going on there.
Speaker 3 (02:28):
Yeah, and you know, Arizona law, like what most states,
prohibits the people from polluting in a way that will
run off into the local rivers and things. And here
in Phoenix, you know we had when we get a
rain storm. Man, it's a huge flash flood rainstorm.
Speaker 2 (02:43):
It's squashed looting, polluting, yet another loyally high follutin way
of saying people are crapping on the streets.
Speaker 3 (02:50):
Exactly, that's right, and on the sides of people's buildings,
on their home. Our client in the case actually had
to replace the windows in his building because the urine
was so bad that it had rotted away the seals
on all of their windows.
Speaker 2 (03:07):
That's gross.
Speaker 3 (03:08):
Now, the reason this has been going on is not
just because the city has been refusing to enforce the law.
But when you ask the city, they say, well, our
hands are tied because the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals
has issued a couple decisions that say that it's unconstitutional
for us to arrest people for sleeping on the streets
if there are not enough shelter beds in homeless shelters
(03:30):
to give them a place to stay for the night. Now,
it is true. The Ninth Circuit issued a couple rulings,
one called Martin versus Boise, another ones called Johnson versus
Grants Pass that both do say that it's unconstitutional for
the government to arrest people for sleeping on the streets
if they can't help it, and they define can't help
it as there aren't enough shelter beds available. And worse
(03:51):
than that, the ruling actually excludes from the count any
shelter beds at churches, any shelter beds that churches operate.
Those are religious, those not secular, those don't count when
you count how many shelter bus.
Speaker 2 (04:04):
So, so outlawing any Christian charity or church charity, that's fandast.
Speaker 3 (04:08):
That's basically ruling out the number one source of homeless
shelters right anyway. So the big story here really is
that that one of those cases, the Grants Past case,
the people have now asked the U. S. Supreme Court
to take up that case, and in the ruling that
this judge in Phoenix issued he urges the U. S.
Supreme Court to take up that case. He says, to
the extent that a state trial judge could have any
(04:31):
influence on the US Supreme Court's decision to review a
lower court ruling. This judge respectfully urges the Supreme Court
to review that ruling and overrule it because it has
caused so much chaos in the Western States, because cities
see it as an excuse to not enforce laws against
loitering and camping and so forth.
Speaker 1 (04:49):
Well, I was just going to ask, Tim, you know
so much more about this than we do, given the
unbelievable negative effects of that. You know, I usually cite
the ruling but grants pass as well. How has the
Supreme Court not looked into this, particularly given its current makeup.
Speaker 3 (05:08):
The Court has this long standing tradition of allowing things
to develop in the lower courts before it takes up
an issue, and sometimes an important issue gets postponed for
years before the US Supreme Court finally decides to take
it up. But I don't see how they could possibly
refuse to take up the issue at this point. It
has caused so much chaos or I mean that's a
(05:31):
little bit unfair because, to be fair to the Ninth Circuit, there,
the Martin case and the grands Pass case both say
that cities can still enforce laws against camping in the streets,
at least under certain circumstances. And so what's actually happening
here in Phoenix is that the city officials are using
these cases as an excuse to not do their job.
And it's a colorable excuse. It's you know, it's it's
(05:52):
not a totally crazy interpretation of those cases. But it's
really the fault of local officials who are refusing to
take action because it's politically unpopular. They want us, you know, oh,
we have to build housing first. All these sorts of excuses,
and these these Ninth Circuit rulings are convenient excuses to
refuse to take actions.
Speaker 2 (06:10):
Well, since you follow the Supreme Court so closely in
the thinking of all the justices, what do you think
they would do with this issue?
Speaker 3 (06:16):
Oh? I think they would definitely overturn it because the
logic is crazy. What the Ninth Circuit says is a
person is involuntarily homeless if there aren't shelter beds available
for them, that the government provides, and therefore it's cruel
and unusual punishment to arrest them for sleeping on the streets.
This is crazy logic. By this logic, if I were
(06:36):
to go to a bar and get drunk and then
drive home drunk from the bar, it's not my fault
because the government didn't hire me an uber. You know,
the whole theory here is that people are incapable of
controlling themselves unless the government steps in and controls them
for them, and then otherwise they're just they're helpless little
waves who couldn't possibly take acts. It's a crazy way
(06:56):
of looking at the world, although you know there are
a lot of people who idlow logically just think that
you can't run your own life without the government stepping
in to hold your hand all the.
Speaker 1 (07:04):
Time, right, you know, I'd have thought that because of
the enormous human cost of so many of these junkie camps,
as I generally refer to them, because addiction is the
number one reason for most of these people being on
the street, and certainly not exclusively, but it is. There
are just dens of drug addictions, but the number of
(07:24):
overdose deaths has shocked the conscience of every American over
the last several years.
Speaker 2 (07:29):
I can't believe.
Speaker 1 (07:31):
Maybe do the Supreme Court justices not get the nexus
between drug addiction and homelessness.
Speaker 3 (07:36):
I think that the Ninth Circuit, you know, it's the
Ninth Circuit, And their view is that, you know, these
people need to be treated in some other fashion. We
shouldn't arrest them, we shouldn't in voluntarily take them and
move them somewhere else, and these sorts of things, and
this is a sort of false compassion. They think that, well,
(07:57):
we don't want to be cruel to these people, Okay,
so you're all alternative is to let them sleep on
the streets, and not just sleep on the streets, but
for well over a year now in Phoenix, Arizona, where
in the summer it gets one hundred and twenty degrees
and during the pandemic. This is what you think is
a more compassionate alternative than getting these people treatment, even
(08:18):
if it might be quote involuntary treatment. And that logic
escapes me.
Speaker 2 (08:22):
Well, then in n angle always bring up us how
about compassion for taxpayers and business owners? So is there
any way to have the law be leaning toward how
about my right to live in this neighborhood and go
to my local park and not be afraid or not
have junkies in the doorway of my business, so I
can operate.
Speaker 3 (08:40):
Totally right, absolutely, the real victims here of what Phoenix
has done, I mean, the homeless have suffered badly enough,
But on top of that, the real victims are the innocent,
tax paying property owners and business owners in this area.
The New York Times a while back profiled one of
the business owners, a guy who runs a really well
known sandwich shop. Who's I mean, not only have has
(09:01):
it there been the pollution. Not only do people just
not come there anymore because they don't want to be
around them.
Speaker 2 (09:05):
I like what you call human crap pollution.
Speaker 3 (09:07):
But go on, but a lot of homeless people are
coming into the business, harassing and endangering the employees. He
has to then he's basically being drafted into being a
psychological counselor for people with mental problems and drug addiction,
right because the government refuses to come in and do
its job. Now, what are the alternative? There is actually
(09:27):
a proposal that we've been working on that says, if
the government fails to do its job under these kinds
of circumstances and it destroys the value of your property.
The government should compensate you for the loss of property value,
because they're the ones that fault for ruining your property.
And we will have more to say on that once
we've developed more among those lines really interesting.
Speaker 1 (09:48):
Tim Sander for Vice President for Litigation at the Goldwater Institute.
Speaker 2 (09:52):
Tim I came across an.
Speaker 1 (09:54):
Article in the USA today surprisingly about a woman who
is being denied the right to open to business because
she wasn't able to get one of those certificates of necessity.
Speaker 2 (10:04):
Is that what they're called? Yeah, that's right.
Speaker 3 (10:06):
These are basically permit laws that say they don't have
anything to do with whether you are capable or whether
you have the education or card. It doesn't have anything
to do with that. These are laws that say you
have to first get permission from all of the competitors
who are already in that industry before you're allowed to
start a business. And guess what, they usually say no
because they don't want economic competition. And these kinds of
(10:29):
laws are called con laws. Appropriately enough, these kinds of
laws apply to everything from moving companies to medical clinics
in this country, and it's totally insane and in my view,
totally unconstitutional.
Speaker 1 (10:40):
Yeah, well, we'll have more on that to come. We
appreciate the time very much. Keep fighting the good fight. Yeah,
you know, sometimes I think sanity might have a chance.
Not often, but occasionally.
Speaker 3 (10:53):
I'll tell you, guys, the law part is my job,
the sanity part, that's your job.
Speaker 1 (10:59):
Well, God to help them, Erica. Effluvium is my favorite
word for human waste. By the way, it's so musical.
Tim Sandifer, good to talk to you, Tim, Thanks Budd
Speaker 3 (11:09):
Thanks guys, Armstrong and Getty
So so much to talk about with Tim sander for
Vice President for Litigation the Goldwater Institute. Tim's latest book,
Freedom's Furies. How Isabel Patterson Rosewilder Lane ein Rand found
liberty in the age of darkness? In an age of darkness?
Speaker 2 (00:13):
There are many owes.
Speaker 1 (00:14):
You a facetive American history nobody ever talks about in
the twentieth century, how enamored the progressives were with totalitarians,
And on that note, perhaps introduced our crusader for liberty,
Tim sanderfer hate Tim.
Speaker 3 (00:29):
Hey guys, thanks for having me on.
Speaker 2 (00:30):
And as I always like to point out, referred to
as a national treasure by George will of The Washington Post,
Tim Sanderford.
Speaker 3 (00:37):
But fortunately I'm not in a senator's closet like other treasures.
Speaker 2 (00:42):
Right, that's gold bars. Wow, that is old school. Anyways.
Speaker 3 (00:45):
I guess you go in there with a pocket knife
and like skim off a few shavings and use those
to go buy gas or something.
Speaker 1 (00:52):
I guess I wonder if he actually had those sacks
of money with dollar signs on.
Speaker 3 (00:58):
I was signing them like scooge McDuck.
Speaker 1 (01:01):
You know, all right, Well, let's get down to business
there has been a seemingly large victory recently in Maricopa
County that's a Phoenix essentially Arizona, where a judge has
said enough with the junkie camps. Can you explain to
folks what happened.
Speaker 3 (01:18):
Yeah, So, this is a lawsuit that's been going on
for quite a while now because of the city purposely
creating an open air homeless shelter so to speak, in
the streets of downtown Phoenix, where over a thousand people
at a time have resided in tents right on the streets,
and that the city has been transporting the homeless people
(01:39):
to this area and then just saying do what you want,
We're not going to enforce the law, which of course
has been destroying the local businesses, ruining people's homes in
the area. It's been leading to there's been arson, there
have been dead bodies found in this area, all these
sorts of you know, sewage in the streets. So there's
(01:59):
a group of them filed a lawsuit, and what happened
earlier this week was a trial judge in America County
has declared that the city is maintaining a public nuisance
and must clear up the area before November fourth. That
means remove all the tents and get rid of the
sewage and stop allowing the law breaking in this area.
Speaker 2 (02:21):
Get rid of the sewage is a sanitized way to
explain what was going on there.
Speaker 3 (02:28):
Yeah, and you know, Arizona law, like what most states,
prohibits the people from polluting in a way that will
run off into the local rivers and things. And here
in Phoenix, you know we had when we get a
rain storm. Man, it's a huge flash flood rainstorm.
Speaker 2 (02:43):
It's squashed looting, polluting, yet another loyally high follutin way
of saying people are crapping on the streets.
Speaker 3 (02:50):
Exactly, that's right, and on the sides of people's buildings,
on their home. Our client in the case actually had
to replace the windows in his building because the urine
was so bad that it had rotted away the seals
on all of their windows.
Speaker 2 (03:07):
That's gross.
Speaker 3 (03:08):
Now, the reason this has been going on is not
just because the city has been refusing to enforce the law.
But when you ask the city, they say, well, our
hands are tied because the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals
has issued a couple decisions that say that it's unconstitutional
for us to arrest people for sleeping on the streets
if there are not enough shelter beds in homeless shelters
(03:30):
to give them a place to stay for the night. Now,
it is true. The Ninth Circuit issued a couple rulings,
one called Martin versus Boise, another ones called Johnson versus
Grants Pass that both do say that it's unconstitutional for
the government to arrest people for sleeping on the streets
if they can't help it, and they define can't help
it as there aren't enough shelter beds available. And worse
(03:51):
than that, the ruling actually excludes from the count any
shelter beds at churches, any shelter beds that churches operate.
Those are religious, those not secular, those don't count when
you count how many shelter bus.
Speaker 2 (04:04):
So, so outlawing any Christian charity or church charity, that's fandast.
Speaker 3 (04:08):
That's basically ruling out the number one source of homeless
shelters right anyway. So the big story here really is
that that one of those cases, the Grants Past case,
the people have now asked the U. S. Supreme Court
to take up that case, and in the ruling that
this judge in Phoenix issued he urges the U. S.
Supreme Court to take up that case. He says, to
the extent that a state trial judge could have any
(04:31):
influence on the US Supreme Court's decision to review a
lower court ruling. This judge respectfully urges the Supreme Court
to review that ruling and overrule it because it has
caused so much chaos in the Western States, because cities
see it as an excuse to not enforce laws against
loitering and camping and so forth.
Speaker 1 (04:49):
Well, I was just going to ask, Tim, you know
so much more about this than we do, given the
unbelievable negative effects of that. You know, I usually cite
the ruling but grants pass as well. How has the
Supreme Court not looked into this, particularly given its current makeup.
Speaker 3 (05:08):
The Court has this long standing tradition of allowing things
to develop in the lower courts before it takes up
an issue, and sometimes an important issue gets postponed for
years before the US Supreme Court finally decides to take
it up. But I don't see how they could possibly
refuse to take up the issue at this point. It
has caused so much chaos or I mean that's a
(05:31):
little bit unfair because, to be fair to the Ninth Circuit, there,
the Martin case and the grands Pass case both say
that cities can still enforce laws against camping in the streets,
at least under certain circumstances. And so what's actually happening
here in Phoenix is that the city officials are using
these cases as an excuse to not do their job.
And it's a colorable excuse. It's you know, it's it's
(05:52):
not a totally crazy interpretation of those cases. But it's
really the fault of local officials who are refusing to
take action because it's politically unpopular. They want us, you know, oh,
we have to build housing first. All these sorts of excuses,
and these these Ninth Circuit rulings are convenient excuses to
refuse to take actions.
Speaker 2 (06:10):
Well, since you follow the Supreme Court so closely in
the thinking of all the justices, what do you think
they would do with this issue?
Speaker 3 (06:16):
Oh? I think they would definitely overturn it because the
logic is crazy. What the Ninth Circuit says is a
person is involuntarily homeless if there aren't shelter beds available
for them, that the government provides, and therefore it's cruel
and unusual punishment to arrest them for sleeping on the streets.
This is crazy logic. By this logic, if I were
(06:36):
to go to a bar and get drunk and then
drive home drunk from the bar, it's not my fault
because the government didn't hire me an uber. You know,
the whole theory here is that people are incapable of
controlling themselves unless the government steps in and controls them
for them, and then otherwise they're just they're helpless little
waves who couldn't possibly take acts. It's a crazy way
(06:56):
of looking at the world, although you know there are
a lot of people who idlow logically just think that
you can't run your own life without the government stepping
in to hold your hand all the.
Speaker 1 (07:04):
Time, right, you know, I'd have thought that because of
the enormous human cost of so many of these junkie camps,
as I generally refer to them, because addiction is the
number one reason for most of these people being on
the street, and certainly not exclusively, but it is. There
are just dens of drug addictions, but the number of
(07:24):
overdose deaths has shocked the conscience of every American over
the last several years.
Speaker 2 (07:29):
I can't believe.
Speaker 1 (07:31):
Maybe do the Supreme Court justices not get the nexus
between drug addiction and homelessness.
Speaker 3 (07:36):
I think that the Ninth Circuit, you know, it's the
Ninth Circuit, And their view is that, you know, these
people need to be treated in some other fashion. We
shouldn't arrest them, we shouldn't in voluntarily take them and
move them somewhere else, and these sorts of things, and
this is a sort of false compassion. They think that, well,
(07:57):
we don't want to be cruel to these people, Okay,
so you're all alternative is to let them sleep on
the streets, and not just sleep on the streets, but
for well over a year now in Phoenix, Arizona, where
in the summer it gets one hundred and twenty degrees
and during the pandemic. This is what you think is
a more compassionate alternative than getting these people treatment, even
(08:18):
if it might be quote involuntary treatment. And that logic
escapes me.
Speaker 2 (08:22):
Well, then in n angle always bring up us how
about compassion for taxpayers and business owners? So is there
any way to have the law be leaning toward how
about my right to live in this neighborhood and go
to my local park and not be afraid or not
have junkies in the doorway of my business, so I
can operate.
Speaker 3 (08:40):
Totally right, absolutely, the real victims here of what Phoenix
has done, I mean, the homeless have suffered badly enough,
But on top of that, the real victims are the innocent,
tax paying property owners and business owners in this area.
The New York Times a while back profiled one of
the business owners, a guy who runs a really well
known sandwich shop. Who's I mean, not only have has
(09:01):
it there been the pollution. Not only do people just
not come there anymore because they don't want to be
around them.
Speaker 2 (09:05):
I like what you call human crap pollution.
Speaker 3 (09:07):
But go on, but a lot of homeless people are
coming into the business, harassing and endangering the employees. He
has to then he's basically being drafted into being a
psychological counselor for people with mental problems and drug addiction,
right because the government refuses to come in and do
its job. Now, what are the alternative? There is actually
(09:27):
a proposal that we've been working on that says, if
the government fails to do its job under these kinds
of circumstances and it destroys the value of your property.
The government should compensate you for the loss of property value,
because they're the ones that fault for ruining your property.
And we will have more to say on that once
we've developed more among those lines really interesting.
Speaker 1 (09:48):
Tim Sander for Vice President for Litigation at the Goldwater Institute.
Speaker 2 (09:52):
Tim I came across an.
Speaker 1 (09:54):
Article in the USA today surprisingly about a woman who
is being denied the right to open to business because
she wasn't able to get one of those certificates of necessity.
Speaker 2 (10:04):
Is that what they're called? Yeah, that's right.
Speaker 3 (10:06):
These are basically permit laws that say they don't have
anything to do with whether you are capable or whether
you have the education or card. It doesn't have anything
to do with that. These are laws that say you
have to first get permission from all of the competitors
who are already in that industry before you're allowed to
start a business. And guess what, they usually say no
because they don't want economic competition. And these kinds of
(10:29):
laws are called con laws. Appropriately enough, these kinds of
laws apply to everything from moving companies to medical clinics
in this country, and it's totally insane and in my view,
totally unconstitutional.
Speaker 1 (10:40):
Yeah, well, we'll have more on that to come. We
appreciate the time very much. Keep fighting the good fight. Yeah,
you know, sometimes I think sanity might have a chance.
Not often, but occasionally.
Speaker 3 (10:53):
I'll tell you, guys, the law part is my job,
the sanity part, that's your job.
Speaker 1 (10:59):
Well, God to help them, Erica. Effluvium is my favorite
word for human waste. By the way, it's so musical.
Tim Sandifer, good to talk to you, Tim, Thanks Budd
Speaker 3 (11:09):
Thanks guys, Armstrong and Getty
Hosts And Creators
Joe Getty
Jack Armstrong
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