I have my doubts about this story. For one thing, in my experience, politicians write, support, or oppose legislation. Other than that,they don't do much besidesjust showing up for pictures. For another, the street people with shopping carts tend to stick pretty close to them, and seem like they could get pretty unpleasant if someone tried to smash theirs up. I doubt that a politician could get a shopping cart away from even one one street person without being soundly trounced, let alone 30 of them.

And then there's the idea of smashing a shopping cart up with a sledge hammer in the first place. They're made of steel rods and tubing, and if you hit one with a car, usually the car gets the worst of it. If you hit it with a sledge hammer, you might make a dent at the point of impact, but there's just as good a chance that you wouldn't and that the hammer would bounce back and hit you. Also, being a cart, it might just roll away. What ever happened would be funny to watch, anyway.

So I am thinking that the legislator probably sent an intern out who gathered up a few stray shopping carts and took them back to their respective stores or some such thing.