This month, Kansas residents met at the statehouse to voice their thoughts on a bill that would ban “public camping,” one of many bills across the country in recent years designed to target people experiencing unsheltered homelessness by making it illegal to sleep outside.

Specifically, the bill would make it a Class C misdemeanor to sleep in public, and would bar municipalities from blocking enforcement of the law, allowing the state attorney general to sue cities and counties if they try to pass a less hostile ordinance. While most of the speakers had a connection to the state, one speaker, Judge Glock, who was the only speaker to endorse the bill according to one attendee, spoke on behalf of the Cicero Institute, an Austin, Texas-based think tank. Glock, also a member of the conservative Manhattan Institute who has written op-eds for TheWall Street Journal and National Review, serves as a senior fellow at Cicero.

It might not be clear at first blush why a think tank based in Austin, Texas is invested in a camping ban being pushed in Topeka, Kansas. In fact, the Cicero Institute has spent the last few years pushing its own model anti-camping legislation in cities across the country in an attempt to criminalize homelessness and to divert funding away from permanent, supportive housing, which it has posited as too slow and costly to deal with public encampments. Cicero-authored bills have been passed statewide in Texas and in Missouri, and statewide bills are being...

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