How Conservatives Learned to Love Free Lawyers for the Poor

"hristy Perry, a Republican state representative and co-owner of a gun shop in Boise, regularly travels with her husband to gun shows to sell their wares. Voters come to her booth so often that her husband jokingly plunked a sign next to the AR-15s: “Gun talk only. No politics.” A couple of years ago, Perry began broaching a subject with her customers that was mostly unfamiliar to them: the nation’s crumbling system of free legal defense for the poor. In Idaho, where personal responsibility is a foundational value, anything that smacks of a government handout is looked at with deep suspicion. But Perry framed the idea in terms of another issue she knew the gun show attendees felt passionately about.This story was produced in partnership with Politico“I’d say, ‘What if you get convicted of a felony — and you shouldn’t have, because you didn’t get adequate defense — and now you’ve lost your gun?’ They recognized that this is really about limited government...”

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