End court’s homeless meddling, the ‘Bidenomics’ delusion

From the Right: End Court’s Homeless Meddling

The US Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit isn’t “the only reason why cities across the West Coast have been overrun with plague-infected homeless camps,” but it’s “a big part of the problem,” grumbles the Washington Examiner editorial board. In Martin v. Boise, the 9th Circuit used the Eighth Amendment to prohibit cities “from enforcing their anti-camping statutes unless they could prove that the city had enough shelter beds available to house every homeless person” there. “Denying cities the ability to clear out public spaces and disincentivize public camping” makes homelessness harder to deal with. A year ago, the “Supreme Court wisely took abortion regulation out of federal courts and returned it to democratically elected leaders”; it’s time it “did the same thing for homelessness policy.”

Ed desk: The ‘Moms for Liberty’ Explosion

“Until Moms for Liberty” — “the most consequential education advocacy organization since Teach For America” — “efforts to organize parents into an effective political counterweight to teachers unions and to impose their will on K–12 education haven’t amounted to very much,” notes Robert Pondiscio at The Free Press. The group’s rise stems from its “refusal to follow the playbook common to parent advocacy organizations” and the fact that 67% of Americans think “K–12 public education in the U.S. is ‘on the wrong track,’ including half of Democrats.” Teach For America claims “270 of its alumni serve in elected positions.” Moms for Liberty “might have that many or more school board members already.” Teach For America “has been around for 30 years. Moms for Liberty? Thirty months.”

Iconoclast: The ‘Bidenomics’ Delusion

While President Biden touts “his achievements for the US middle class” based on new job numbers, “American wealth inequality is at one of its highest levels since the Fed began calculating it in 1989,” observes Karen Petrou at The Hill. The bottom 50% of US households “would need to earn $5,000 more just to buy the same things it could the year before the pandemic.” Indeed, “two out of three voters disapprove of his economic performance and no wonder — roughly two-thirds of American households are living paycheck to paycheck and/or skipping purchases they can no longer afford.” The prez hopes to “persuade voters that happy times are here again,” yet that’s not the reality for most Americans.

Conservative: The Case for Chris Christie

Former NJ Republican Gov. Chris Christie is “running, by far, the most noteworthy [presidential] campaign” and “deserves his spot on the stage,” cheers the National Review’s Michael Brendan Dougherty. While other candidates wait for “scandal, time, exhaustion, and the debates to wear down Donald Trump’s lead,” Christie is “frontally criticizing Trump, getting under his skin, and then surviving the blowback.” Dougherty would prefer a “Ron DeSantis type who is willing to defy business interests that are treading on the future,” yet Christie has “presence.” And “there’s no doubt that he’s sharp, energetic, and ambitious.” At bottom, “Christie’s persona — funny, grieved, prickly — is better for the party in the age of Biden.”

Crime beat: Soros’ DA Miscalculations

Billionaire George Soros was right that he could fund successful candidates for DA across the country, writes Thomas Hogan at City Journal, but wrong that if they declined to prosecute criminals they wouldn’t “degrade” but “improve” public safety. In poor cities with Soros prosecutors, homicides “spiked” — with minorities the main victims; in wealthy ones, “property crimes rose dramatically.” Soros also miscalculated that “his prosecutors would bring about permanent change”: More than a dozen were defeated or resigned or were “otherwise removed from office in the past few years.” Alas, some other cities have just elected their first Soros-backed progressive prosecutors. “It may be that having a Soros prosecutor” is like “getting chickenpox in the old days: everybody gets it once, but then you develop immunity.”

— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board