#local control

Christopher Wiggins at The Advocate:

Idaho Republicans are moving to fine the state’s largest city thousands of dollars a day for flying the LGBTQ+ Pride flag, escalating a broader push targeting LGBTQ+ rights across the state. The state Senate passed House Bill 561 this week, which would allow Idaho to fine cities like Boise $2,000 per day, per flag, for displaying banners not permitted under state law. Each day would count as a separate violation, and the measure authorizes the Idaho attorney general to enforce the penalties. The measure is aimed squarely at the LGBTQ+ Pride flag, which has flown over city buildings in the state’s capital for years. The bill now returns to the House before heading to Gov. Brad Little, a Republican. The proposal builds on a 2025 law that restricted which flags could be displayed on government property but lacked a clear enforcement mechanism. The new legislation would impose daily fines and give the Idaho attorney general authority to pursue enforcement of violations, according to the Idaho Capital Sun.

After lawmakers passed last year’s restriction, Boise officials found a workaround: They designated the Pride flag as an official city flag, allowing it to remain in place. The new bill is designed to close that loophole, the Idaho Capital Sun reports, effectively forcing the city to take the flag down or face mounting penalties. The legislation clarifies that only a limited set of flags, such as the U.S. flag, the Idaho state flag, official government flags, and certain military or tribal flags, may be displayed on public property.

Republican Liberty Caucus: We Will Not Comply With Gun Ban

The Republican Liberty Caucus in Florida approved a ‘resolution of non-compliance’ against a proposed state constitutional amendment to get an “assault weapons” ban on the ballot this year. It’s by far not the only attempt to bypass “we the people” in Florida, but that’s for another article.

Their resolution reads, in part (Florida Today),

“We, the lawful citizens of the state of Florida and the…

Abby Monteil at Them:

An Idaho bill that would ban cities from enacting protections against discrimination on the basis of gender identity or sexual orientation is headed to the state House. House Bill 557 would overturn local governments’ anti-discrimination ordinances that extend beyond existing state law. According to the Idaho Human Rights Commission, the state prohibits discrimination in employment, education, public accommodations, and real estate on the basis of race, sex, color, national origin, religion, age, or mental or physical disability. However, 12 cities and counties — including Boise, the state’s capital — have added local protections for the LGBTQ+ community. The Boise Dev reports that House Bill 557 would also overturn existing ordinances passed to bar discrimination on the basis of source of income or familial status. The bill is sponsored by Republican Rep. Bruce D. Skaug, who claimed to Idaho’s House Local Government Committee that “local anti-discrimination ordinances are frequently weaponized against small businesses” in order to make business owners “violate their sincerely held religious beliefs.” He also used the example of wedding venue Hitching Post, whose owners filed a federal lawsuit against the city of Coeur d’Alene, Idaho in 2014 after a city official informed them that by refusing to perform a same-sex wedding ceremony, they had violated Coeur d’Alene’s LGBTQ+ non-discrimination ordinance.

Skaug drafted House Bill 557 in collaboration with Idaho Family Policy Center, a local conservative advocacy organization. In 2025, Idaho Family Center president Blaine Conzatti told Deseret News that he would support implementing “religious tests” for politicians who hold public office and dubbing Idaho a “Christian state.” Last year, the organization also faced pushback for using the false claim that a drag queen exposed their genitals to children to advocate for a state drag ban, pushing for a bill that would require public school students to read the Bible, and announcing plans to sue a Boise school district for allegedly violating a state law that prohibits trans K-12 students from using bathrooms that align with their gender identity.

Marco Margaritoff at HuffPost:

President Donald Trump declared Saturday morning on his Truth Social platform that Washington, D.C., will soon be a lot safer — and wrote in an oddly worded post that a White House press conference “will, essentially, stop violent crime” in the nation’s capital. “On Monday a Press Conference will be held at the White House which will, essentially, stop violent crime in Washington, D.C.,” the president announced. “It has become one of the most dangerous cities anywhere in the World. It will soon be the safest!!!” He ended the post with, “Thank you for your attention to this matter. President DJT.”

While it remains unclear what he plans to announce, Trump has supported congressional efforts for a federal takeover of the capital several times over the past six months. In February, the MAGA leader cited crime and homelessness as motivating reasons. Last month, Trump disclosed he’s already “testing” a federal takeover of D.C. Trump added at the time that his White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles has been “working very closely” with Mayor Muriel Bowser, a Democrat. Prompted by a question about the upcoming New York mayoral race, Trump then hinted that the East Coast city might be next. Trump has alluded to rampant crime in both cities as his reasoning for the idea, but the New York City Police Department announced in June that it experienced, from January through May, the lowest number of shootings and murders in the city’s recorded history.

D.C. appears to have experienced a similar drop. The district’s Metropolitan Police Department confirmed Friday that in a year-to-date comparison to the same period last year, violent crime had dropped by 26%.

Paul Rosenzweig for The UnPopulist:

We live in a time when increasing pressure is being brought to bear on local prosecutorial independence—i.e., the idea that local prosecutors should be free to individually determine which cases to bring to court, independent of outside political influence. Across America, elected prosecutors are being ousted by governors and investigated by newly created commissions. Two years ago in Florida, for instance, Gov. Ron DeSantis suspended local prosecutor Andrew Warren for allegedly saying he would not prosecute criminal violations of the state’s abortion ban. DeSantis’ rationale for the firing was rejected by the federal courts, though a final decision was never rendered. Then, last year, DeSantis acted a second time, suspending the only Black female elected prosecutor in Florida, alleging she was weak on gun and drug charges and too forgiving of juvenile offenders. Meanwhile, in Georgia, the state legislature has moved to rein in prosecutors who are perceived as soft on criminals by prohibiting prosecuting attorneys from choosing not to prosecute certain categories of crime and creating a commission that will weed out, according to Gov. Brian Kemp, “far-left prosecutors.” A Tennessee state legislative initiative to oust the district attorney in Memphis made less progress last year, but may be revived in the coming session.

Prosecutorial accountability is, assuredly, a good thing. When a prosecutor acts illegally or unethically, there need to be mechanisms to curtail the abuse of power—typically professional oversight boards, internal reviews or local citizens’ rejection of the prosecutor at the ballot box. But the recent efforts are different. They are state-level initiatives—to date, always involving “conservative” governors—to displace elected local prosecutors, who so far have invariably been “liberal” prosecutors representing more liberal enclave cities within the state.

These assaults on prosecutorial independence, however, are at odds with American history. They reverse the historical trend of locating public safety decisions at the local level and ignore the historical origins of how we came to have public prosecutors in the first place. Nothing could be less conservative than a governor who fires a local prosecutor, even if it’s in the name of “conservative” causes. Conservative ends just do not justify unconservative means—and I write this as a conservative who has served as a federal prosecutor. Good governance is about restraint, and governors—especially self-described “conservative” governors—should reserve the use of their power over local prosecutors for truly egregious malfeasance or ethical failures. Discretionary judgments made by local officials are not “wrong” simply because they diverge from those the governor might have made in their place.

When American Prosecutors Went Public

Local prosecutors are the embodiment in American practice of a key conservative principle. Social organization theorists call this principle “subsidiarity,” and when it’s applied to government, conservatives call it “federalism.” It’s the idea that government power generally ought to reside at the lowest feasible level—i.e., at the local or regional level—instead of the national or international level. As a theoretical choice, subsidiarity has both plusses and minuses, but as a practical matter, it is the historical choice Americans have made regarding locally elected prosecutors. That is why current efforts to exert authority over local prosecutors and to discipline them are, at bottom, fundamentally ahistorical and unconservative. The historical origins of today’s public prosecutor are much in dispute. Some attribute the American structure to an evolution from Britain. Others say it mirrors the French practice of the 18th century. A minority view even ascribes some aspects of our current prosecutorial structure to America’s early Dutch colonists. Whatever the origin, the evolution of the office was a slow one from the time of the first settlement until something like the current prosecutorial structure was adopted in the mid-19th century. By this time, it was uniquely American.

The greatest single change, and one with significance for the current debate, was the shift from private prosecution in Britain to public prosecution in America. Private prosecution is a simple idea: When a crime has occurred, the victim or the victim’s representatives hire a private prosecutor to present the case in court and seek a conviction. This approach was rooted in medieval British concepts of property. At the time of the American Founding, the British system drew little distinction between civil wrongs (compensated by money payment to the victim) and criminal wrongs (involving imprisonment). They saw all such wrongs as a “contest” between individuals. Private criminal prosecution was modeled on kingly private vengeance, and it was designed to protect the landed and the wealthy against the commoners, who couldn’t afford to hire representatives and participate in the system. But the elite nature of private prosecution was fundamentally inconsistent with America’s egalitarian roots and its collective belief that peace and justice were a public good. Private prosecution was therefore rare in the colonies. By 1704, one colony, Connecticut, had adopted a system of public prosecution, and the others would soon follow.

When Public Prosecution Went Local

Public prosecution is different. The victim doesn’t need to file a complaint. She is not a party to the prosecution, nor does she make the ultimate decision on whether to bring the case in the first instance. At trial, she may be either a reluctant witness or a willing one. To be sure, at the time of punishment, the victim will be heard and her injuries given significant weight in the court’s ultimate determination. But even there, she is an outsider to the process—an interested one, certainly, but still an outsider. Rather it is the public, in the form of the government prosecutor, who has the dominant relationship to the case and takes on the mantle of the controlling party in deciding whether to prosecute and how to do so. As the Connecticut Supreme Court put it in 1921 in Malley v. Lane: “The Peace is that state and sense of safety which is necessary to the comfort and happiness of every citizen and which government is instituted to secure.” In short, public prosecution is the vindication of public interests and rights, while the older style of private prosecution was for an individual’s benefit.

Another significant historical development in America emphasizes this close tie between the public and public prosecutors—the rise of elected prosecutors. America is the only country in the world that elects its local prosecutors. That change, which happened gradually and did not reach its culmination until the early 19th century, paralleled other U.S. institutions—the voting franchise, reapportioned legislatures, and even elected judges—that were becoming systematically more democratic.

[...] And that is why stripping away that local responsiveness and independence is the least “conservative” thing imaginable. To be sure, the conservative governors who are ousting local prosecutors have the nominal legal authority to do so. But the grounds for their actions amount to nothing more than squelching a political debate through an exercise of political power—a power that ought to be employed to address genuine misconduct or malfeasance, not to unseat a duly elected local prosecutor whom they deem “too liberal.” If a local prosecutor’s “liberal” policies are hurting the local public, then the true conservative answer is to go and win a local election on conservative grounds. If you want to see the system appropriately at work, consider again the case of Andrew Warren, one of the prosecutors improperly suspended by Gov. DeSantis.

By MDBayNews Staff Annapolis, Md. — A new bill moving through the Maryland General Assembly is igniting sharp debate over public safety, homelessness policy, and the role of law enforcement in local communities. House Bill 432 would repeal the authority for municipalities to enforce certain vagrancy laws — a move critics argue further weakens local control and limits tools available to police…

By MDBayNews Staff Annapolis, Md. — A new bill moving through the Maryland General Assembly is igniting sharp debate over public safety, homelessness policy, and the role of law enforcement in local communities. House Bill 432 would repeal the authority for municipalities to enforce certain vagrancy laws — a move critics argue further weakens local control and limits tools available to police…