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.