Category: Public Order

Walgreens Shrugged

by · Oct 9, 2025 11:10 am

Illinois Review has a story headlined “Walgreens Abandons Chicago, Flees a Crime-Infested Downtown Under Pritzker and Johnson.”

Walgreens, one of Illinois’ most iconic companies, is the latest major corporation to abandon downtown Chicago – delivering another blow to Governor J.B. Pritzker and Mayor Brandon Johnson’s claim that the city is safe and open for business.

The Deerfield-based pharmacy chain announced this week it will vacate its massive 200,000-square-foot office space inside Chicago’s Old Post Office, a redevelopment once hailed as proof of the city’s comeback. Instead, Walgreens plans to move back to the suburbs in January 2026, nearly seven years before its lease expires in 2032.

At its peak, the office housed 1,800 employees, serving as a corporate hub for operations and tech teams. But in a city now defined by retail theft, carjackings, and homelessness, downtown has become unrecognizable. Continue reading . . .

San Francisco’s Summer of Tough Love

by · Aug 16, 2025 10:36 am

Maggie Grether reports in the WSJ:

Last year, the U.S. Supreme Court granted cities more power to penalize people for sleeping outside, handing city leaders a new tool with which to clear homeless people from the streets.

Since then, San Francisco has been among the most aggressive in wielding it.

Wow. For over 30 years, it has been an article of faith on the political left that taking any action against people who live on the streets and refuse to take any of the steps needed to be functional and self-supporting members of society was mean, cruel, heartless, and possibly Nazi. I wish I had a dollar for every time I’ve been called one of those names in this regard.

And now the epicenter of the American left is “among the most aggressive” in cracking down. There is nothing like the convert zeal. When decades of so-called “progressive” mismanagement has given a city a problem that is among America’s worst, it becomes the strongest in the opposite direction. Continue reading . . .

Ninth Circuit Stays Injunction Against Cal. Guard Federalization

by · Jun 20, 2025 7:31 am

In previous posts, I discussed California Governor Gavin Newsom’s suit against President Trump’s federalization of the National Guard to deal with the Los Angeles riots, the district court’s temporary restraining order, and the court of appeals’s immediate short-term administrative stay.

Yesterday, despite being a federal holiday, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit stayed the district court’s TRO for the duration of the appeal. In circumstances such as this, the stay pending appeal may be the whole ball game. If order is restored and the federalization rescinded before the actual decision of the appeal, the appeal may very well be dismissed as moot.

The panel was not too worried about the point that I considered the weakest element of the President’s case, the requirement of 10 U.S.C. § 12406 that the orders be issued through the state governor.

Continue reading . . .

Guard Federalization TRO Issued, Stayed

by · Jun 13, 2025 9:07 am

Following up on yesterday’s post, District Judge Charles Breyer granted California a temporary restraining order against the federalization of the National Guard. The federal government filed an emergency motion with the Ninth Circuit. That court stayed the TRO temporary and set briefing on a very fast track. The state’s opposition is due Sunday at 9:00 a.m., the fed’s reply is due Monday at the same time, and argument is Tuesday at noon. (All times PDT.) Continue reading . . .

Federalizing the National Guard in California Over the Governor’s Objection

by · Jun 12, 2025 11:36 am

On June 9, California Governor Gavin Newsom sued President Trump over the President’s directive to federalize units of the California National Guard and deploy units of the Marine Corps to Los Angeles to protect immigration officers and facilities and enable them to enforce federal immigration law. The suit claims that these actions are not authorized by the federal statute cited for them and that they violate the post-Reconstruction Posse Comitatus Act.

On its face, the complaint does seem to have some merit under the statute cited in President Trump’s memorandum, but there are other statutes that he could have invoked that are not subject to the same objection. On consideration of those other statutes, this appears to be the kind of issue that calls for maximum deference to presidential authority. Continue reading . . .

Walz Dithered While Minneapolis Burned

by · Aug 14, 2024 8:54 am

VP Harris’s choice of Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as her running mate has prompted examinations of his role in the Minneapolis riot of May 2020. Heather MacDonald has this op-ed in the WSJ, with the above title.

The protests included widespread looting and arson. Rioters then attacked the firefighters as they responded to the fires, further aggravating the damage. The police and their station house were also attacked.

Despite repeated requests from the mayor, Gov. Walz sent only a small contingent of the National Guard on the evening of the second day of rioting–too little, too late. Not until the fourth day did the Guard arrive in force. Continue reading . . .

USCA9 Vacates SF Camping Injunction

by · Jul 8, 2024 11:00 am

In January, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit upheld an injunction against San Francisco, preventing the city from enforcing its ordinance against camping on public property based on its precedents in Martin v. City of Boise and Johnson v. City of Grants Pass. The decision was 2-1, with Judge Bumatay dissenting, noting that “there’s nothing in the text, history, and tradition of the [Cruel and Unusual Punishment] Clause that comes close to prohibiting enforcement of commonplace anti-vagrancy laws, like laws against sleeping on sidewalks and in parks.”

Last week the Supreme Court reversed in Grants Pass, taking the same view of the Eighth Amendment as Judge Bumatay. See this post.

Today, the Ninth withdrew its published opinion and replaced it with a brief “memorandum,” i.e., an unpublished opinion. Continue reading . . .

Prop. 47 Damage Control Initiative on Cal. Ballot as Prop. 36

by · Jul 4, 2024 8:58 am

The Homelessness, Drug Addiction & Theft Reduction Act, a California ballot initiative to limit the damage from 2014’s disastrous, Soros-funded, Proposition 47, among other things, will be on the November ballot as Proposition 36. The Cal. Secretary of State released the ballot measure number list yesterday.

The initiative’s provisions are summarized in Section 2: Continue reading . . .

Major Win on Homeless Encampments

by · Jun 28, 2024 10:48 am

Homelessness is a major problem, and it is a complex one. People become homeless for different reasons, and they have different obstacles to returning to the ability of obtaining their own shelter. Two of the most common are mental illness and addiction. These two problems are particularly difficult, as the conditions themselves may block the person’s willingness to accept and participate in the treatment needed to fix the problem. Sometimes an arrest is exactly what a person needs to provide the needed motivation. Fifty-six years ago, Justice Thurgood Marshall recognized similar considerations when he wrote the plurality opinion in Powell v. Texas. That opinion rejected the notion that the Eighth Amendment prohibited punishing an alcoholic for being drunk in public because the conduct was an involuntary result of his status. Such a constitutional mandate was too simplistic a way of dealing with a complex and difficult social problem.

Even so, the Ninth Circuit took the step that the Powell plurality rejected with regard to laws penalizing camping on public property as applied to the homeless. Today, the Supreme Court reversed that decision in City of Grants Pass v. Johnson. Justice Gorsuch wrote the opinion of the Court. Three Justices dissented. CJLF filed an amicus curiae brief in support of the city.

A key legal issue in the case involved the status and reach of an even earlier case, Robinson v. California. In that case, the Court declared a California statute unconstitutional because it made criminal the status of being addicted to drugs as opposed to the act of possessing or using an illegal drug. Oddly, the Court invoked the Eighth Amendment for this proposition, an argument only briefly mentioned by Robinson, rather than the Due Process Clause, which was Robinson’s main argument. Continue reading . . .