The June assassination of former Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman prompted at least a dozen states to pass or consider legislation designed to bolster protections for state lawmakers. But the measures are facing sharp criticism from press freedom and government watchdog organizations that say the bills could be used to keep the public in the dark.
The new wave of lawmaker protection bills have passed in both red states like Florida and blue states like Oregon, as elected officials on both sides of the aisle worry about the safety of themselves and their families during a period of growing political violence nationwide.
The killing of Hortman and her husband, and the attack on state Sen. John Hoffman and his wife, were just the latest examples: In 2020, militia members plotted to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer from her vacation home. Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro’s official residence was targeted by an arsonist in April. And this week marked the one year anniversary of the attempted assassination of President Donald Trump.
Texas, New Jersey, California and Arizona are among the other states weighing similar proposals.
Democratic Oregon state Sen. James Manning is a lead sponsor of a bill to hide the addresses of Oregon elected officials all the way down to the school board level. That bill, passed just a few hours before the Minnesota killings, will take effect January 1.
Manning said that he knows firsthand what it’s like to be a target: After a particularly contentious vote on safe gun storage in Oregon a few years ago, Manning’s home address was posted online.
“Fortunately enough, no one came by my home,” he said. “But the mere fact that you’re putting [these] things out there, we should make it … a crime.”
Organizations like the ACLU of New Jersey and Reporters’ Committee for Freedom of the Press, however, have raised concerns about the extra hurdles laws like this place in the pursuit of holding lawmakers accountable, though both declined interview requests for this story.
Critics of the laws argue that making it difficult or impossible to get details about a lawmaker’s property ownership history, family employment, travel and finances will impair the ability of reporters to hold those lawmakers accountable.
Monitoring lawmakers’ personal travel and the sales of personal property have led reporters to uncover cases of fraud or bribery in the past, RCFP argued in a 2023 article against one such law. Other pathways are open to Congress and state legislatures, critics also point out: lawmakers have the ability to appropriate funds for their and their families’ protection.
“The sad reality is that if you’re someone that’s deeply disturbed and want to cause harm to someone, you don’t need FOIA and you don’t need financial disclosure statements,” said CJ Griffin, a New Jersey lawyer and director of the Justice Gary S. Stein Public Interest Center who focuses on transparency law. “All that’s really suffering by making these addresses confidential is the public’s interest in transparency.”
While many of these bills existed before the attack in Minnesota, the tragedy in June increased the urgency for their passage. The death of a state lawmaker, in her own home, seemed to galvanize colleagues across the nation.
“[It’s] very much in response to what happened in Minneapolis,” said New Jersey Assemblyman Christopher DePhillips, a Republican and lead sponsor of similar legislation.
DePhillips was in Minnesota visiting family the weekend of the attacks, and immediately got on the phone with both Republican and Democratic leadership in the New Jersey Legislature, he said. “It was clear that we needed more in our state to protect elected officials right from the same type of horror that happened in Minnesota,” he explained.
But Griffin and other critics worry that the tragedy is being exploited to push well intentioned, but misguided, limits on public information. Addresses, she points out, can be key in making sure a lawmaker still lives in the district they represent, and can give the public an idea of how wealthy they are.
“If you can’t look at someone’s land transactions… what property they have and what they sold it for,” cautioned Griffin, “then you’re getting into territory where maybe it’s easy for land transactions to be places where bribes are placed.”
Griffin also criticized these bills for picking who gets these legal protections, when many professionals — including journalists and teachers — are also potentially targets.
DePhillips said he’s already been contacted by the ACLU of New Jersey concerning his bill, and is open to working with the organization to make the legislation better.
“We can find a balance for transparency, disclosure, but also public safety,” DePhillips said. “If I live in an apartment building in Jersey City, New Jersey, do you need to know that it’s apartment number four?”
Nationwide protections already exist for judges in the form of Daniel’s Law — federal legislation passed after the death of Daniel Anderl, the son of U.S. District Court Judge Esther Salas of New Jersey. Anderl lost his life when a former litigant came to Salas’ home and opened fire. The federal Daniel’s Law is modeled after a New Jersey state law by the same name.
Some states have made sure to leave the door open for the public to access information that is useful in holding lawmakers accountable. In Oregon, for example, Manning says personal addresses can still be acquired through a public records request. And that still provides a layer of protection for lawmakers, he adds, because submitting a FOIA creates a record of who is looking for their addresses.
But Griffin says that while disclosing partial information or allowing addresses to be accessible via FOIA is better than blocking addresses altogether, there are other ways to protect lawmakers while still being transparent — like improving security technology and utilizing local law enforcement.
Even FOIA requests can add days, weeks or months to a reporting timeline, and may surpass the window when the public needs to know certain information about a specific lawmaker.
“It’s just a part of a trend, especially in New Jersey, of tragedies justifying secrecy,” Griffin said. “It will be very difficult to dig up the corruption that occurs, but eventually someone will dig it up, and then we’ll say, ‘Hey, if Daniel’s law hadn’t passed, we would have known about this sooner.’”