This Election Cycle’s Worst Idea: “Make America Florida”

Is That Really Ron DeSantis’ Campaign Slogan?

DeSantis was supposed be the viable, vaguely mainstream Republican alternative to Trump. Luckily for Joe Biden, no one looked closely enough. DeSantis has always been a kind of helminth worm to Señor Trumpanzee’s anaconda. Most people who really know DeSantis liken him to the Dioctophyme renale, a giant kidney worm, not technically a helminth but, still, a subspecies too disgusting for me to contemplate. Just watch this video if you want to understand why everyone compares Meatball Ron to a giant kidney worm:

Yesterday, CNN looked at DeSantis’ bizarre relationship with what incessantly calls “woke.” He keeps signing anti-woke bans and judges keep striking them down as unconstitutional. “In his early outreach to Republican voters,” wrote Steve Contorno, “DeSantis has portrayed himself as a fighter and, crucially, a winner in the cultural battles increasingly important to conservatives. If elected to the White House, he’ll take those fights to Washington, he has said. ‘I will go on offense,’ DeSantis said in Iowa last month. ‘I will lean into all the issues that matter.’ But back in Florida, the agenda at the centerpiece of his pitch remains unsettled. Still ongoing are more than a dozen legal battles testing the constitutionality of many of the victories DeSantis has touted on the campaign trail. Critics say DeSantis has built his governorship around enacting laws that appeal to his conservative base but that, as a Harvard-trained lawyer, he knows are unconstitutional and not likely to take effect.”

In addition to halting parts of the Stop WOKE Act, judges have also intervened to freeze implementation of other DeSantis-led laws cracking down on protesters and Big Tech. The six-week abortion ban he signed this year— which he has called the “heartbeat bill” when speaking to conservative, and especially evangelical, audiences— won’t take effect unless the state Supreme Court determines that a privacy clause in Florida’s constitution doesn’t protect access to the procedure. Disney— the most famous of DeSantis’ political adversaries— has argued in court that the governor overstepped his power when he orchestrated a takeover of the entertainment giant’s special taxing district to punish the company for speaking out against his agenda. So did Andrew Warren, the twice-elected Tampa prosecutor whom DeSantis suspended last year in another act of political retaliation.

…On Friday, a federal judge blocked a new Florida law that gave the DeSantis administration the power to shut down bars or restaurants that admit children to certain “adult live performances,” widely seen as a crackdown on drag shows.

Another federal judge said Wednesday that Florida could not restrict transgender adults on Medicaid from receiving gender-affirming care. The same judge earlier this month had stepped in to allow three transgender children to receive puberty blockers while a lawsuit seeking to overturn a state ban on the treatment proceeds. In both rulings, the judge said there was “no rational basis” to prevent the care and declared “gender identity is real,” casting doubts on the future of the state’s prohibition.

…DeSantis of late has also taken credit for the GOP’s narrow US House majority, noting the highly partisan map he pushed through his state legislature, which ultimately helped Republicans net four critical seats. But those suing Florida to invalidate the state’s congressional boundaries have new reason for optimism after the US Supreme Court ordered Alabama officials to redraw its map to allow an additional Black-majority district. The DeSantis map was similarly criticized as diminishing the power of minority voters in Florida.

“Many of the things coming from the governor are form over function,” said Cecile Scoon, president of the League of Women Voters of Florida, one of plaintiffs in the redistricting lawsuit. “They want to get to a certain result, so they find a means to do it, whether it makes logic or legal sense or not.”

The US District Court for the Northern District of Florida has in particular stymied DeSantis’ agenda. Two judges on the bench, Mark Walker and Robert Hinkle, have repeatedly ruled against the governor, often punctuating their opinions with harsh and colorful repudiations.

Walker, in one ruling blocking parts of the Stop WOKE Act, compared Florida’s treatment of the First Amendment under DeSantis to the “Upside Down,” the nightmare alternative dimension from the Netflix series “Stranger Things.” In another lawsuit over the law, this one filed by college professors, Walker called the law “dystopian” and wrote that DeSantis and Florida Republicans had “declared the state has unfettered authority to muzzle its professors in the name of ‘freedom.’”

Hinkle, in January, chided DeSantis’ suspension of Warren as political, unconstitutional and executed with “not a hint of misconduct,” though he ultimately ruled he was powerless to intervene. Warren is appealing, though he suffered another defeat when the state Supreme Court on Thursday rejected a separate request to reinstate him.

Ruling this month against the state in the two cases dealing with transgender care prohibition, Hinkle called the law “an exercise in politics, not good medicine.”

“Nothing could have motivated this remarkable intrusion into parental prerogatives other than opposition to transgender status itself,” he wrote.

…“We will never surrender to the woke mob,” the governor recently told an audience in Greenville, South Carolina. “We are going to leave woke ideology in the dustbin of history where it belongs.”

It increasingly looks like Meatball Ron is going to be left in the dustbin of history. He's still #2 among Republicans for their choice of nominees-- but with negative momentum. Most polls show him losing ground to Trump. The latest Real Clear Politics average shows Trump at 52.1% and Meatball at just 21.5%. Even as mediocre a political adversary like Gavin Newsom has him on the run. Appearing on Hannity’s show, a conduit into the bloodstream of MAGA America, Newsom delighted in trolling DeSantis, predicting that Señor T will “clean his clock” and immediately accepted Hannity’s challenge to debate the GOP stiff, who should be fighting with Trump and Biden, not Newsom. Team Newsom, wrote Taryn Luna, “celebrate[s] each time DeSantis takes the bait, elevating Newsom’s national profile and giving him an opportunity to fight DeSantis in a way that helps Biden in the presidential race. “Newsom’s performance earned national praise from Democrats and some Republicans. DeSantis’ decision to respond in kind— and his answer— show that he ‘isn’t ready for prime time,’ [former Newsom chief of staff Jim DeBoo said. ‘He answered it the way a sixth grade bully would have answered something, as opposed to a presidential candidate.’… Newsom called DeSantis ‘a small, pathetic man’ and threatened kidnapping charges after his administration helped transport migrants from Texas to California. In the Fox interview, he questioned what kind of ‘faith tradition’ supports moving people from one state to another and dehumanizing them in an effort to score political points.”

Back to crazy ideological right-wing judicial ideas. As we saw earlier, at one time, John Eastman clerked for conservative appeals Court Judge Michaell Luttig. When Mike Pence showed Luttig the memo that Eastman has written about how to overturn the 2020 election, Luttig advised him that Eastman was more or less out of his mind and to ignore his crackpot theories. Fortunately, Pence did. The California Bar, however, did not and now Eastman is fighting to keep his law license. In the case that opened last week in L.A., the state bar is arguing that “he knowingly and willfully pushed false and outlandish allegations of voter fraud in the 2020 election, promoted an ‘unlawful’ scheme to overturn the election results, and should lose his law license. ‘Dr. Eastman and President Trump conspired to disrupt the electoral count on Jan. 6,’ said Duncan Carling, an attorney with the State Bar's Office of Chief Trial Counsel, in his opening statement.”

A former [fired] dean of the law school at Chapman University, Eastman was a key player in former President Trump's effort to block Joe Biden's victory in the Electoral College, including the plan to send alternate slates of pro-Trump electors to Congress. In addition to working on Trump's legal challenges, he appeared at the Jan. 6, 2021, pro-Trump rally alongside former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, fired up the crowd with claims of voter fraud, and pressured then-Vice President Mike Pence to toss out Joe Biden's Electoral College victory. Hours later, a violent pro-Trump mob stormed the U.S. Capitol.

Carling said Eastman's conduct related to the election was "fundamentally dishonest" and the legal theory he advanced "was baseless, completely unsupported by historical precedent or law, and contrary to our values as a nation."

…On Wednesday, the State Bar called Greg Jacob, counsel to Vice President Pence, as a witness, and Jacob testified about his interactions with Eastman in the days leading up to Jan. 6.

According to Jacob, Eastman admitted that the Supreme Court would likely block his plan for Pence to reject several states' electors by a vote of nine-to-zero. (Though Jacob testified Eastman initially thought he could possibly win the vote of conservative justice Clarence Thomas, for whom Eastman worked as a law clerk.)

Jacob was in the Capitol during the Jan. 6 insurrection, and while under lockdown due to the violence, Jacob sent an email to Eastman that ended by saying: "Thanks to your [bullshit] we are now under siege."

Eastman responded that the evidence that the election was "stolen" was "already overwhelming."

"The 'siege' is because YOU and your boss did not do what was necessary to allow this to be aired in a public way so that the American people can see for themselves what happened," Eastman wrote.

In court, Jacob said he thought Eastman's theories and pressure campaign on Pence helped inspire rioters to descend on the Capitol, even though Pence's role in the electoral count was essentially ceremonial.

“It was apparent to me that the people who marched on the Capitol did so because they believed that there was a momentous decision that was going to decide who was going to be president of the United States to be made in that building that day," Jacob said.

Jacob testified that he was offended by Eastman's conduct as a lawyer, and said he "brought our profession into disrepute."

Other pro-Trump attorneys who worked on election-related challenges have also faced disciplinary action from state legal authorities, including Rudy Giuliani, Jenna Ellis, and Sidney Powell.

Aside from disbarment for, as Carling put it, concocting a baseless theory to overturn the 2020 election, "fully aware in real time that his plan was damaging the nation," Eastman is also facing almost certain indictment in both Atlanta and Washington for his role as a Trump co-conspirator. And even if he no longer has a law license, he'll still be able to represent himself.