Cite as: 523 U. S. 44 (1998)
Opinion of the Court
Moreover, certain deterrents to legislative abuse may be greater at the local level than at other levels of government. Municipalities themselves can be held liable for constitutional violations, whereas States and the Federal Government are often protected by sovereign immunity. Lake Country Estates, supra, at 405, n. 29 (citing Monell v. New York City Dept. of Social Servs., 436 U. S. 658 (1978)). And, of course, the ultimate check on legislative abuse—the electoral process—applies with equal force at the local level, where legislators are often more closely responsible to the electorate. Cf. Tenney, supra, at 378 (stating that "[s]elf-discipline and the voters must be the ultimate reliance for discouraging or correcting such abuses").
Any argument that the rationale for absolute immunity does not extend to local legislators is implicitly foreclosed by our opinion in Lake Country Estates. There, we held that members of an interstate regional planning agency were entitled to absolute legislative immunity. Bereft of any historical antecedent to the regional agency, we relied almost exclusively on Tenney's description of the purposes of legislative immunity and the importance of such immunity in advancing the "public good." Although we expressly noted that local legislators were not at issue in that case, see Lake Country Estates, 440 U. S., at 404, n. 26, we considered the regional legislators at issue to be the functional equivalents of local legislators, noting that the regional agency was "comparable to a county or municipality" and that the function of the regional agency, regulation of land use, was "traditionally a function performed by local governments." Id., at 401-402.5 Thus, we now make explicit what was implicit
5 It is thus not surprising that several Members of this Court have recognized that the rationale of Lake Country Estates essentially settled the question of immunity for local legislators. See Owen v. Independence, 445 U. S. 622, 664, n. 6 (1980) (Powell, J., dissenting); Lake Country Estates, Inc. v. Tahoe Regional Planning Agency, 440 U. S. 391, 407-408 (1979) (Marshall, J., dissenting in part); see also Spallone v. United States, 493
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