Spending money you disagree with is not a crime. It is politics, and the remedy for politics you hate is an election, not an indictment. That distinction is the whole ballgame in the campaign to sic the Justice Department on Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey, and everyone demanding her prosecution knows it.
The underlying facts are real enough. Massachusetts spent heavily to house a surge of migrant families, driven in large part by a 1983 right-to-shelter law that obligates the state to provide emergency housing. The bills ran into the hundreds of millions. Residents watched hotels fill up, saw the line items, and got angry. That anger is legitimate. Voters are allowed to conclude their governor blew the budget, misread the moment, and put a statutory obligation ahead of common sense.
But “I think she governed badly” and “she committed a federal crime” are not the same sentence, and collapsing them is how you wreck a country.
What the law actually punishes
Federal prosecutors go after fraud, bribery, embezzlement, obstruction — acts with a statute attached and an element to prove. Appropriating state funds through a legislature, administering a shelter program written into state law, declining to have local police do the federal government’s immigration enforcement: none of that is a crime on any statute book. You can call it foolish. You cannot call it a felony, because Congress never made it one.
Sanctuary policies, whatever you think of them, sit on solid constitutional ground. The federal government cannot commandeer state and local officers to carry out federal immigration work. That’s not a loophole liberals invented; it’s a limit on federal power that conservatives spent decades defending when the shoe was on the other foot. The Tenth Amendment does not switch sides based on who runs the DOJ.
The strongest version of the other side
Here is the best case the critics can make, and it deserves a fair hearing. Governors take an oath to serve the people of their state. When housing is scarce, when working families feel squeezed, when public services strain, a leader who directs vast sums toward new arrivals can fairly be accused of scrambling her priorities. Voters who feel unheard are not bigots for noticing the tab. That’s a serious argument about judgment and accountability.
The answer to it is also serious: you win that argument at the ballot box. You campaign on it, you flip the legislature, you repeal the right-to-shelter mandate, you elect a governor who spends differently. That is how a self-governing people corrects course. It is slower than a perp walk and far less satisfying to the people who want a villain in handcuffs. It is also the only method that doesn’t come back to bite you.
Be careful what you build
Because the tool you forge for your enemy does not stay in your hands. Once you establish that a governor can be criminally charged for policy choices the other party finds intolerable, you have handed that weapon to every future administration. Today it’s Healey, Newsom, Hochul, and Walz. Tomorrow it’s a Republican governor prosecuted for refusing to expand Medicaid, or for cutting a program a Democratic DOJ deems reckless. A country that jails officials over budgets is not fighting corruption. It is practicing it.
The list of names being circulated tells you this was never really about one shelter program. It’s about turning ordinary policy disputes into criminal charges, and dressing prosecution up as patriotism. That impulse should worry you no matter which team it’s aimed at this week.
Disagree with Maura Healey. Vote against her. Demand a full accounting of every dollar. Repeal the law that forced the spending if you can win the votes. All of that is fair, and some of it is overdue.
Just don’t confuse a policy you loathe with a crime you can prove. One is the stuff of elections. The other is the stuff of banana republics — and the door only swings one way once you open it.