I don't think the other responses adequately explain what was attempted here. Laying down the law is an idiom. It doesn't have to do with the law. (Someone pos

I don't think the other responses adequately explain what was attempted here. Laying down the law is an idiom. It doesn't have to do with the law. (Someone posted an example specific to laws, which confuses the rhetorical device.) As laying down the law does NOT have to do with law (e.g. I could "lay down the law" by punching someone in the head for touching my stamp collection), they add "literally" because Dennis Herrera is, in fact, the city attorney and is specifically applying the actual law. So rather than doing something unrelated to the law, which is what the idiom "lay down the law" allows for, the idiom's loose definition now has a literal application regarding the word "law", in this case.