Recent editorials from Florida newspapers:
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Sept. 23
The Orlando Sentinel on Gov. Ron DeSantis’ decision to make blocking traffic during a protest a third-degree felony:
In 1965, Alabama Gov. George Wallace tried to use traffic problems as a pretext to halt the march from Selma to Montgomery to demand voting rights.
The march was “not conducive to the orderly flow of traffic and commerce,” Wallace said in forbidding it. “(The) march cannot and will not be tolerated.”
On Monday, 55 years later, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis declared his state will not tolerate protest marches - peaceful or not - that obstruct traffic.
Anyone who does could be charged with a third-degree felony, which puts blocking traffic on par with auto theft and aggravated assault. That’s quite a jump from the current penalty for obstruction: A pedestrian citation. Oh, the proposal also gives tacit permission for motorists to mow down protesters with cars if the motorist feels threatened by “a mob.”
The traffic obstruction hammer is one of several gems in a law-and-order package that’s doing double duty as a message to protesters that they shouldn’t count on the First Amendment’s right to assemble, at least not in Florida.
To be fair, Monday’s crackdown announcement also could serve the useful political purpose of further exciting the Trump voter base, making his white voters even more fearful of protesters than they already are. Plus, DeSantis scored a five-minute spot on Tucker Carlson’s popular Fox News show to talk about it, so there is that.
Either way, jumping on the George Wallace bandwagon is the low point for DeSantis since he took office less than two years ago.
This disregard for the First Amendment is disorienting in a state that once decided that a doctor asking patients about guns at home constituted a threat to Second Amendment rights.
It’s instructive that, during a 30-minute announcement in Polk County Monday, DeSantis didn’t even attempt to address the constitutional alarms that would be raised by such a sweeping proposal directed at the fundamental American right to protest. He never once mentioned the state and federal constitutions and their guarantees of freedom to assemble.
Polk Sheriff Grady Judd briefly acknowledged that constitutional right “to speak freely,” but only to transition into the violence that some parts of the nation have experienced.
DeSantis admitted that Florida didn’t really have those kind of problems after people took to the streets when George Floyd, a Black man, was choked to death by a white police officer in Minneapolis. Never mind that, it got the governor some Tucker time and provided a distraction from the news that our nation had just passed the 200,000 milestone for COVID-19 deaths.
The DeSantis crackdown looks like something political consultants scratched out on a cocktail napkin after knocking back some shots and brainstorming what would play best on Fox News.
Besides making it a felony to block traffic, it goes after protesters who harass someone eating lunch. It has a provision so broad that it might mean everyone at a protest - including the sign-holding grandma who did nothing - could be subject to prosecution if someone in her group damages property or injures someone.
It gives prosecutors the power to seize the assets of protest organizers they way they do for underworld bosses or drug cartels. It creates mandatory sentences and provides prosecutors with the ability to argue against bail for arrested protesters, which could run afoul of the Eighth Amendment.
And it threatens to cut off state funding to local governments that defund the police, even though “defund” is undefined. Yes, the state now wants to tell local governments how to pay for police protection.
No reasonable Floridian condones violence against people or property during protests. Constitutional guarantees protect peaceful protests. But that’s not the point. Many of the offenses identified in this crackdown, like attacking a police officer, already are felonies in Florida.
Republican state Sen. Jeff Brandes of St. Petersburg seemed taken aback by the proposal, telling the Tampa Bay Times he wondered why existing laws on the books aren’t sufficient. An excellent question, senator.
Never mind that. At Monday’s announcement, DeSantis demanded that lawmakers immediately pledge their support to his cocktail napkin ideas right now rather than wait to see what the actual bill looks like. Clearly, the governor missed the Schoolhouse Rock episode on how a bill goes from idea to law.
All of this from a governor who, while making noises about the injustice of George Floyd’s death, is bereft of ideas about how to get at the problem of institutional discrimination against Black Floridians.
DeSantis is full of proposals on what to do about sustained, violent protests that we haven’t had, but he’s an empty vessel when it comes to addressing the racism that we do have.
Perhaps the greatest insult is that DeSantis is making this a top priority, possibly the subject of a special session in November.
Democrats have been begging the governor for a special session to do something about the pandemic that’s infected nearly 690,000 Floridians and killed more than 13,000 in our state, created a gaping hole in the budget and subjected people who lost their jobs to an disastrous unemployment system that his party created.
No, instead of that we may see legislators take up what do to about protest violence the law already provides remedies for.
These are dark days in the Sunshine State.
Online: https://www.orlandosentinel.com/
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Sept. 22
The Miami Herald on former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg raising $20 million to help ex-felons in Florida vote in the presidential election:
Last week, the Editorial Board urged Michael Bloomberg to “write a big old check” to help ex-felons in Florida vote in the presidential election. The editorial was picked up by several national outlets.
This week, he announced that he has raised almost $20 million for the cause. Bravo!
After decades of being denied the right to vote, most former prisoners in the state still are being denied access to the ballot box, even though, in 2018, a solid majority of voters approved a constitutional amendment allowing them to cast a ballot. Gov. DeSantis and the Republican Legislature erected what they knew would be a roadblock: an added provision that ex-felons have to pay all court fees and fines before having their right to vote restored. It was a caveat that voters never intended.
We don’t know if the ex-New York mayor and former Democratic candidate for president even read our Sept. 17 editorial, “Write a big old check, Mr. Bloomberg and help Florida’s ex-felons vote in November.” But at the very least, we’re going to pat ourselves on the back for having a good idea that Bloomberg, too, thought was worthy.
He is fulfilling his promise to do anything in his money’s power to pull Florida into Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden’s camp in November. He already had pledged to spend $100 million in Florida alone for Biden ads. Tuesday, he announced the strategy championed by the Editorial Board to get more Florida voters to the polls by paying off many former inmates’ fines and fees. Bravo!
On Tuesday, Bloomberg announced his team has raised at least $16 million to pay the court fines and fees of nearly 32,000 of the 776,000 Florida voters with felony convictions, many of them Black and Hispanic.
After Bloomberg committed to spending $100 million in the state, we followed up by saying that, with legal challenges to overturn the fee requirement for ex-felons seemingly at an end, Bloomberg “could be their last hope, empowering hundreds of thousands of new voters to cast their ballots in Florida.”
“With such a significant donation, Bloomberg’s money won’t get lost in the miasma of campaign ads and yard signs, it will have a direct effect on ensuring the democratic process.”
Bloomberg’s fines-and-fees money now goes to the fund created by the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition, which has been collecting money to pay what’s owed by former prisoners who want to vote.
The onus now is on the coalition to quickly reach out to those disenfranchised voters in Florida, settle up their fines and fees and get them registered to vote before the Oct. 5 deadline.
Online: https://www.miamiherald.com/
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Sept. 21
The Sun Sentinel on U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio and his thoughts on replacing Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg
Mark these words: “I don’t think we should be moving forward with a nominee in the last year of this president’s term. I would say that even if it was a Republican president.”
So said U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio, Republican of Florida, after the death of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia four years ago.
Here’s what Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Senate majority leader, similarly said.
“The American people should have a voice in the selection of their next Supreme Court justice. Therefore, this vacancy should not be filled until we have a new president.”
Scalia died nearly nine months before the election. When Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died last Friday, there were just 47 days to go before the next election.
As history also recalls, after Scalia died, McConnell would not allow the Senate to even hold a hearing, let alone a vote, for Merrick Garland, the superbly qualified and decidedly moderate federal appeals court judge whom President Barack Obama had nominated to replace him. Only two Republican senators spoke up to say Garland deserved at least a hearing. His nomination languished for 293 days until it expired when that term of Congress did.
However, almost immediately upon hearing of Ginsburg’s death, McConnell and President Donald Trump began plotting to replace her right away, no matter her “fervent last wish” that she not be replaced “until a new president is installed.”
It is usually an exercise in futility to encourage Rubio to stand up to the president who belittled him during the 2016 primaries or to the majority leader who takes his obedience for granted.
But Rubio isn’t supposed to be working for them. He represents the people of Florida, who, the polls say, are deeply divided about President Trump.
It would behoove Rubio to consider what happened to two other Senate Republicans in closely fought states after they agreed to block the Garland nomination. Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire and Mark Kirk of Illinois both lost. Rubio may not be up for re-election this year, but 2022 is right around the corner.
Rubio hasn’t said whether he feels bound by what he said four years ago, but to succeed Ginsburg, he, Sen. Rick Scott and Gov. Ron DeSantis are said to be feverishly promoting Barbara Lagoa, one of two Floridians whom Trump appointed to the Eleventh U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals last year.
It wouldn’t matter who they have in mind.
There couldn’t be a greater hypocrisy than for McConnell’s Senate to confirm any nominee this president might appoint - not after stealing that Supreme Court seat from Obama just four years ago.
The difference, as some Republicans have been saying, is that Obama was a lame duck nearing the end of his constitutional two terms.
But that is more a distinction than a difference.
Remember what else they said then - that the forthcoming election would be a referendum, in effect, on who should appoint Scalia’s successor.
That is exactly the situation now. Trump might well be - as he deserves to be - a lame duck himself in barely six weeks.
For the Senate to confirm anyone before then would break nomination speed records, even those that were relatively noncontroversial.
For the Senate to confirm any Trump nominee before or after he loses the election would give the Democrats more than enough justification - should they win the White House and the Senate - to retaliate by adding two seats to the court.
“Court packing,” as it’s called, has had a bad name since President Franklin D. Roosevelt took after a Supreme Court that was killing his vital New Deal legislation during the depths of the Great Depression.
But that was a different situation. There was no rush to fill a vacancy before FDR succeeded Herbert Hoover, as he eventually did.
In any case, there is no magic to the number nine. There are more judges on all but one of the 13 circuit courts of appeals. Moreover, the Republicans did pack the court, in effect, by holding the seat open until President Trump could nominate Justice Neil M. Gorsuch.
The rush to replace Ginsburg is not just a staggering hypocrisy. It is also a potential constitutional crisis. Any justice confirmed before the election, or even in the month after, would be in position to decide on challenges to the election. The American public, having put up with so much these past four years, should not have to bear that, too.
Do most Americans want Trump to have that opportunity? The polls say no.
In one respect, Lagoa’s nomination would reek of a political payback. The ink is still wet on the Eleventh Circuit’s 6-4 decision, in which she cast the deciding vote, to keep nearly a million people from voting in Florida this year.
That ruling upheld the new Florida law that requires ex-felons to pay all fines, costs and restitution they owe - regardless of their ability to pay or the state’s ability to tell them what they owe - before registering under the voting rights restoration initiative that nearly two-third of Florida voters approved two years ago.
The Senate Judiciary Committee’s Democrats called on Lagoa to sit out that case because she had heard related arguments while sitting on the Florida Supreme Court. She refused. As a result, only wealthy ex-felons may register to vote.
In the developing crisis over the Ginsburg vacancy, two Republican senators, Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, have said the Senate should not confirm a nominee now. It would take only two more to prevent it. Most of the rest, including several who are in danger on Nov. 3, spoke out strongly four years ago for waiting until after the election.
Will Rubio stand by his word?
According to a 17th Century maxim by the Duc de La Rochefoucauld, “Hypocrisy is the homage that vice pays to virtue.”
It was difficult to discern much virtue in what the Republican Senate did in 2016, but there is vice in what they and Trump propose to do now.
Online: https://www.sun-sentinel.com/
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