In his constant effort to keep up with former President Donald Trump's anti-democracy rhetoric, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis launched his presidential campaign last month with a threat to democratically elected prosecutors everywhere.
"Florida has fought back against the plague of Soros-backed district attorneys," DeSantis said at his first presidential campaign speech on May 30. "When we had one of those prosecutors ... I removed him from his post. He is gone."
DeSantis was referring to state attorney Andrew Warren, who had been elected twice by the voters of Hillsborough County. DeSantis abruptly suspended Warren in August, after Warren said he would use discretion and not prosecute cases under the state's draconian abortion ban. A Florida judge ruled that DeSantis violated Warren's First Amendment rights in suspending him, and the case has now moved to the U.S. Court of Appeals.
This case isn't just about Andrew Warren, it's about the right of Americans to elect prosecutors to represent their communities. DeSantis' choice to make Warren a talking point in his stump speech is intended as a threat to all Americans and their right to choose their prosecutors—no governor should undo elections by removing elected officials who disagree with them. Never in the modern era has a presidential candidate openly campaigned on the platform of removing prosecutors based on ideology.
It's a dangerous step for democracy to have a presidential candidate advocating for overturning the will of the people. DeSantis has also pledged to direct the U.S. Department of Justice to "go after" local prosecutors who disagree with his vision on criminal justice. DeSantis' political attacks on prosecutors are only the latest extreme step in a national campaign to undo the results of elections won by reform-minded prosecutors.
In 2019, the people of Loudoun County elected me as the commonwealth's attorney because they wanted a safer and fairer approach to criminal justice reform that would save taxpayer dollars. The people gave me the most votes ever for a commonwealth's attorney in the county while flipping the office blue for the first time in a generation, making it loud and clear they wanted a smarter approach to how we address community safety and justice.
As the elected prosecutor in Loudoun County, I've seen this threat to democracy firsthand. Notwithstanding the overwhelming support of Loudoun voters, within 18 months of my election, nationally funded right-wing interest groups coordinated to launch recall campaigns against me. They launched, and re-launched, and re-re-launched recall efforts, generating dozens of headlines along the way to try to undermine the legitimacy of my election. Nonetheless, they had very little public support: Despite their three attempts over the past two years, they have still never managed to get 10,000 recall signatures in our county of 450,000 people.
And the threats haven't stopped there. As the first immigrant, the first woman, and the first Muslim American to serve as Loudoun's top prosecutor, I've faced death threats and come under attack from the John Birch Society's publication that called me an "immigrant prosecutor" and questioned my patriotism. It's all part of a campaign to undermine the will of the people—just like what Ron DeSantis is doing in Florida.
But I won't back down. In Loudoun County, that has meant smarter criminal justice policies that increased our investment in victim support, created a special Veterans Docket, and turned our focus to prosecuting violent crimes while saving taxpayers money.
The result: Violent crimes have decreased by 31 percent in Loudoun County since my election in 2019. Violent crimes went down 12.5 percent in Loudoun County in 2021, even while they increased by 7.1 percent statewide, according to Virginia State Police data.
Voters are seeing the results of smarter, modern approaches to criminal justice—and that's exactly why right-wing groups are targeting reform prosecutors like me and Andrew Warren. That's why it's critical that we take Ron DeSantis' words literally and seriously. His presidential campaign is built on the platform of removing democratically-elected prosecutors.
We shouldn't dismiss this as mere rhetoric—we must loudly call out DeSantis' words for what they are: a clear threat to our democracy and to Americans' ability to choose prosecutors who represent their communities.
Voters in Loudoun County and across the country have chosen a smarter, safer, and more modern approach to criminal justice: One that prioritizes violent crimes and common-sense solutions to rehabilitation while saving taxpayers money. DeSantis is the latest—and the most high-profile threat—in a movement trying to overturn the progress that voters have chosen.
Buta Biberaj is Loudoun County Commonwealth's attorney.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
Uncommon Knowledge
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Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
