Florida

Subterms

    More stories

    • 175 Shares189 Views

      in Elections

      Trump claims protective order against him would infringe his free speech rights – live

      by

      From 19m agoAhead of an afternoon deadline for his lawyers to respond to a request from special counsel Jack Smith for a protective order in the January 6 case, Donald Trump said such a ruling would infringe on his free speech rights.From his Truth social account:
      No, I shouldn’t have a protective order placed on me because it would impinge upon my right to FREE SPEECH. Deranged Jack Smith and the Department of Injustice should, however, because they are illegally “leaking” all over the place!
      The former president’s attorneys have until 5pm eastern time to respond to the request from Smith, who asked for the protective order after Trump on Friday wrote, “IF YOU GO AFTER ME, I’M COMING AFTER YOU!” on Truth.Smith wants Trump’s attorneys barred from publicly sharing “sensitive” materials including grand jury transcripts obtained during the January 6 case’s pre-trial motions.Aileen Cannon, the federal judge presiding over Donald Trump’s trial on charges related to keeping classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago resort, appeared to disclose an ongoing grand jury investigation in a court filing today, the Guardian’s Hugo Lowell reports:Cannon was appointed to the bench by Trump, and faced scrutiny last year for a decision in an earlier stage of the Mar-a-Lago case that some legal experts viewed as favorable to the former president, and which was later overturned by an appeals court.Cannon’s is presiding over Trump’s trial in Florida on charges brought by special counsel Jack Smith, who alleges the former president illegally stored classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago resort, and conspired to hide them from government officials sent to retrieve them.In response to the charges filed against him over January 6, Donald Trump’s lawyers have argued the former president did not know that he indeed lost the 2020 election. But as the Guardian’s Hugo Lowell reports, that defense may not be enough to stop prosecutors from winning a conviction:Included in the indictment last week against Donald Trump for his efforts to subvert the 2020 presidential election was a count of obstructing an official proceeding – the attempt to stop the vote certification in Congress on the day his supporters mounted the January 6 Capitol attack.The count is notable, because – based on a review of previous judicial rulings in other cases where the charge has been brought – it may be one where prosecutors will not need to prove Trump knew he lost the election, as the former president’s legal team has repeatedly claimed.The obstruction of an official proceeding statute has four parts, but in Trump’s case what is at issue is the final element: whether the defendant acted corruptly.The definition of “corruptly” is currently under review by the US court of appeals for the DC circuit in the case titled United States v Robertson. Yet previous rulings by district court judges and a different three-judge panel in the DC circuit in an earlier case suggest how it will apply to Trump.In short: even with the most conservative interpretation, prosecutors at trial may not need to show that Trump knew his lies about 2020 election fraud to be false, or that the ex-president knew he had lost to Joe Biden.“There’s no need to prove that Trump knew he lost the election to establish corrupt intent,” said Norman Eisen, special counsel to the House judiciary committee in the first Trump impeachment.“The benefit under the statute is the presidency itself – and Trump clearly knew that without his unlawful actions, Congress was going to certify Biden as the winner of the election. That’s all the corrupt intent you need,” Eisen said.Donald Trump’s team has clearly been paying attention to Ron DeSantis’s NBC News interview, with a spokeswoman attacking the Florida governor for his comments dismissing the ex-president’s false claims about his 2020 election loss:Speaking of Republican presidential candidates, NBC News scored a sit-down interview with Florida governor Ron DeSantis, and got him to again say that his chief rival Donald Trump lost the 2020 election.DeSantis, whose campaign for the White House is in troubled waters, had been vague on the issue until last week, when he started saying publicly that he did not believe the former president’s false claims about his election loss.Here he is saying it again, on NBC:In his final days as vice-president, Mike Pence faced pressure from Donald Trump to go along with his plan to disrupt Joe Biden’s election victory. Pence refused his then-boss’s request, and the two running mates are now foes, but could Pence potentially be a witness in the trial on the federal charges brought against Trump over the election subversion plot?In an interview with CBS News broadcast over the weekend, Pence, who is running for the Republican presidential nomination, said he has “no plans to testify”, but added “people can be confident we’ll obey the law. We’ll respond to the call of the law, if it comes and we’ll just tell the truth.”Far from being worried about what Trump’s former deputy might have to say about him, the former president’s attorney John Lauro said his legal team would welcome Pence’s testimony.“The vice-president will be our best witness,” Lauro said in a Sunday appearance on CBS, though he didn’t exactly say why he felt that way. “There was a constitutional disagreement between the vice-president [Pence] and president Trump, but the bottom line is never, never in our country’s history, as those kinds of disagreements have been prosecuted criminally. It’s unheard of.”Good morning, US politics blog readers. Mere days have passed since special counsel Jack Smith indicted Donald Trump for his failed effort to reverse his 2020 election loss, but the two sides are already battling over what the former president can say and do. On Friday, Trump wrote “IF YOU GO AFTER ME, I’M COMING AFTER YOU!”, prompting Smith’s prosecutors to request a protective order that would restrict what the former president’s legal team can share publicly, saying it is necessary to guard people involved in the case against retaliation.Trump’s lawyers have until 5pm eastern time today to respond. It’s an early salvo in what is expected to be the lengthy process Smith’s case is expected to take, and which will undoubtedly hang over the 2024 election, where Trump is currently the frontrunner. Either way, the former president has not been shy about sharing his thoughts regarding the unprecedented criminal charges leveled against him, and do not be surprised if today is no different.Here’s what else is happening:
      Voters in Ohio are gearing up to decide on Tuesday whether to approve a Republican-backed proposal that will raise the bar for changing the state’s constitution. What this is really about is a ballot initiative scheduled to be put to a vote in November that would enshrine abortion protections in the state’s laws, but which would face a much more difficult road to passage if tomorrow’s vote succeeds.
      Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor whose presidential campaign appears to be floundering, just sat down for an interview with NBC News, where, among other things, he reiterated that he believed Trump lost the 2020 election.
      Joe Biden is hosting World Series winners the Houston Astros at the White House today, before heading to the Grand Canyon. More

    • 138 Shares149 Views

      in US Politics

      Orlando Magic NBA team donated $50,000 to Ron DeSantis super PAC

      by

      The Orlando Magic NBA team has donated $50,000 to a super PAC supporting Florida’s Republican governor Ron DeSantis’s presidential bid.According to Federal Election Commission records, the Never Back Down super PAC received the donation made by the basketball team on 26 June. Further results showed the team making donations to other political causes in past years, with $500 going to Conservative Results in 2016, $2,000 to Maverick PAC USA in 2014 and another $500 to Linda Chapin for Congress in 2000.In an initial statement to Popular Information, a Magic spokesperson said: “We don’t comment publicly on political contributions.” However, in a later follow-up statement, a spokesperson clarified the donation, saying that the check was “dated/delivered on May 19”, five days before DeSantis declared his presidential bid.“This gift was given before governor DeSantis entered the presidential race. [It] was given as a Florida business in support of a Florida governor for the continued prosperity of Central Florida,” the spokesperson said.According to Never Back Down’s website, the super PAC describes itself as a “grassroots movement to elect governor Ron DeSantis for president in 2024”.The donation has drawn criticism online, particularly given the Magic’s claims of supporting “diversity, equity and inclusion all year long” and DeSantis’s culture wars in which he announced plans to block DEI programs in state colleges among other legislation targeting minority and marginalized groups including LGBTQ+ communities.The Orlando Magic team is under Amway North America, a multi-level marketing firm co-established by Richard DeVos, the late father-in-law of Trump’s education secretary Betsy DeVos.Over the years, the DeVos family has made multiple donations to conservative organizations. In 2006, the Richard and Helen DeVos Foundation made a $540,000 donation to Focus on the Family, a Colorado-based organization that opposes same-sex marriage and abortions, HuffPost reports. In 2008, Richard DeVos donated $100,000 to Florida4Marriage, a group that campaigned to add a state constitutional ban on same-sex marriages.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“That’s just a sacred issue of respecting marriage,” Richard DeVos said in a 2009 interview in reference to his donation. More

    • 88 Shares99 Views

      in Elections

      DeSantis Unveils Economic Plan Slamming ‘Failed Elites’

      by

      Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida introduced a 10-point economic plan geared toward the blue-collar voters with whom he has struggled to resonate.Attempting to meld his “anti-woke” politics with economic policy, Gov. Ron DeSantis on Monday unveiled a plan that he claimed took on corporate interests, business elites, federal government bureaucrats and foreign trade relations — forces he blamed for derailing the prosperity of American families.“We will declare our economic independence from the failed elites that have orchestrated American decline,” Mr. DeSantis said during a speech at a bustling New Hampshire logistics-company warehouse, laying out the economic vision for his presidential campaign. “We the American people win; they lose.”The governor linked a decline in U.S. life expectancy to suicides, drug overdoses, alcoholism and the struggles facing the nation’s working class. “This is not normal, this is not acceptable, and yet entrenched politicians in Washington refuse to change course,” he said.His populist, anti-corporatist comments seemed intended to lift his standing with non-college-educated voters, a crucial Republican constituency that polling shows is not supporting Mr. DeSantis’s candidacy in large numbers. Only 13 percent of Republican voters without a college degree nationwide back Mr. DeSantis, according to the first New York Times/Siena College poll of this election cycle. Former President Donald J. Trump, the race’s front-runner, has attacked Mr. DeSantis as a “globalist” and a “RINO,” or Republican in name only.Mr. DeSantis’s somewhat scattershot 10-point plan also includes goals to achieve energy independence, end President Biden’s climate change policies, rein in federal spending, expand vocational education and make colleges responsible for student loans. He also proposes revoking China’s preferential trade status, limiting “unskilled” immigration and cutting taxes.In sum, the plan largely repeats standard conservative promises to stoke economic growth by reducing taxes on corporations and investors, and by cutting government regulation — proposals that are typically cheered by business lobbyists, despite Mr. DeSantis’s anti-corporate, “anti-woke” rhetoric. He would prioritize fossil fuel development, another longtime conservative plank. And his proposals to further reduce America’s economic links with China echo the plans of an emerging populist wing of Republican candidates, including Mr. Trump.The governor’s speech is part of an effort to recalibrate his campaign, which laid off more than a third of its staff this month, as it failed to meet fund-raising goals. National polls show him trailing Mr. Trump badly. Mr. DeSantis has already reshaped the tactics of his campaign in the past week, opening himself up to more questions from voters and the media; holding smaller, less formal events; and condensing his lengthy stump speech. Now, his advisers say he is also resetting his message, with plans to talk more about the policies he would implement as president, as well as about his biography, rather than about his record in Florida.Mr. DeSantis has already unveiled proposals on immigration and the military. Ahead of the first Republican debate on Aug. 23, he is also expected to introduce his foreign policy plans, using that topic and his economic strategy as the cornerstones of his campaign in the coming weeks.But Mr. DeSantis, who prides himself as a policy expert, has a tendency to delve deep into details and to use a sometimes bewildering series of acronyms in his stump speeches. His allies say that getting into kitchen-table issues like the economy is a necessary shift.“The average voter probably needs to be talked to on a higher level, not getting down into the weeds so much,” said Jason Osborne, the New Hampshire House majority leader who has endorsed Mr. DeSantis. Still, Mr. Osborne said, many party activists appreciated the governor’s attention to the finer points of policy.On Monday, Mr. DeSantis littered his speech with references to the C.C.P. (the Communist Party of China), E.S.G. (environmental, social and governance standards used by corporations), D.E.I. (diversity, equity and inclusion policies) and C.B.D.C. (a central bank digital currency).He saved some of his harshest words for China, saying that its Communist Party was eating “this country’s lunch every single day.”In addition to revoking China’s “most favored nation” trading status, the governor said he would ban imports made from stolen U.S. intellectual property and would prevent companies from sharing critical technologies with China.Mr. DeSantis also notably accused big corporations of contributing to what he called the nation’s “economic malaise” by adopting political ideologies.Those comments reflected Mr. DeSantis’s embrace of the New Right, which argues that leftists have taken over many boardrooms and that conservatives must overcome their historical aversion to limited government interference in corporate matters and fight back. The governor has attacked those he calls “Chamber of Commerce Republicans,” meaning those more traditional members of the party who have criticized his ongoing feud with Disney.”There’s a difference between a free-market economy, which we want, and corporatism, in which the rules are jiggered to be able to help incumbent companies,” he said, adding that he would ban individual stock trading by members of Congress and executive branch officials.In addition, Mr. DeSantis derided government bailouts, citing the financial crisis in 2008 and the stimulus signed by Mr. Trump in response to the coronavirus pandemic.And he pledged to make institutions of higher education, instead of taxpayers, responsible for student debt, a menacing shot at universities that escalates policies he has proposed as governor to overhaul Florida’s higher education system.He also proposed a plan that borrows from traditionally liberal agendas: allowing borrowers to discharge their remaining student loan balances if they declare bankruptcy. While it is now possible for debtors to do that, many have found the process difficult and cumbersome, and liberal groups like the Center for American Progress in Washington have embraced such reforms in the past.“It’s wrong to say that a truck driver should have to pay off the debt of somebody who got a degree in gender studies,” Mr. DeSantis said. “At the same time, I have sympathy for some of these students because I think they were sold a bill of goods.”On the campaign trail, Mr. DeSantis often highlights his economic acumen by pointing to Florida’s surging economy, influx of new residents and the formation of new businesses. But the picture has grown less rosy this year, with inflation in Florida’s biggest metro areas rising faster than the national average. A troubled property insurance market and an affordable housing crisis have also complicated his message.In response to a question from a reporter on Monday, Mr. DeSantis defended his record on the state’s economy, saying that his landslide re-election had allowed him to pass major legislation addressing the property insurance and housing issues.“We’ve been working on this for a number of years,” he said.Mr. Trump’s campaign has hit Mr. DeSantis repeatedly for his management of the state.“Ron DeSantis should pack his knapsack and hitchhike his way back home to focus on the serious issues facing the great state of Florida,” Steven Cheung, a spokesman for Mr. Trump, said in a statement.Jim Tankersley More

    • 138 Shares99 Views

      in US Politics

      Why Ron DeSantis’s slavery curriculum is so dangerous | Saida Grundy

      by

      In the mid-20th century, a generation after the civil war, the United Daughters of the Confederacy set out to rebrand the image of slavery. The group, composed of female descendants of Confederate soldiers, was fixated on returning the country’s social order to its antebellum racial hierarchy. It sought to reimagine slavery as a benign institution, and to glorify the “lost cause” of white southern insurrectionists who attempted to overthrow the government in slavery’s defense. The place that served as ground zero for the UDC’s revisionist-history effort? Schools.In one of its most successful campaigns, the UDC called for the widespread adoption of textbooks that trivialized the horrors of slavery. As a result, a 1954 middle school textbook titled History of Georgia claimed that a typical slave owner “often had a barbecue or picnic for his slaves. The [enslaved] often had a great frolic. Even while working in the cotton fields they sang songs.” (It is no coincidence that the book was published the same year the NAACP won the supreme court case to desegregate public schools.) And while most contemporary school texts have since moved towards acknowledging that slavery and the subsequent Jim Crow era were reprehensible, organized efforts against teaching accurate racial history continue to occur.The UDC’s legacy of revision emerged again in Florida recently, when the Republican governor and presidential candidate Ron DeSantis introduced legislation that would de-emphasize racism in the state’s public education curricula. Last week, DeSantis announced that Florida texts will teach students that slavery benefited African Americans who “gained skills” that “eventually parlayed … into doing other things in life”. Civil-rights leaders, educators, and scholars were quick to criticize this minimization of slavery’s cruelty as ignorance at best and deliberate misrepresentation at worst. Vice-President Kamala Harris even reacted, calling the policy an attempt “to replace history with lies”.The backlash to DeSantis’s move is warranted and necessary, but most of the critiques miss the mark on identifying the Florida law’s deeper insidiousness. What the architects of this legislation are really attempting to do – as the UDC attempted a century before – is galvanize a political right and hold on to conservative white rule in a country with rapidly changing demographics. By denying the true ills of slavery, DeSantis is working to release the American government from the obligation of correcting for its present-day inequalities. The violence of slavery is not just limited to a series of heinous acts that happened in the past, it also includes a deliberate process of disinformation that enables future generations to maintain the power yielded by that violence.Though DeSantis’s career has relied heavily on making power gains by denying violence, the political strategy is not his invention. The practice of violence denial has long been a hallmark of the modern world’s most oppressive regimes. Take, for example, the British empire. During her 21st birthday address in 1947, the heir apparent Elizabeth II memorably declared that her life would be lived in “service of our great imperial family to which we all belong”. Her characterization of upholding Britain’s unrelenting and exploitative colonial system as “service”, and her assertion of an “imperial family” that included subjugated African, Asian and Caribbean people, are examples of the same whitewashing tactic employed by DeSantis. Even his efforts to ban “controversial” texts were cribbed – the British crown consistently prohibited books that challenged colonial rule in conquered territories.Another world power that has sought to subvert the historical record is Turkey, with regard to the government’s refusal to acknowledge the Armenian genocide. To aid in its denial, Turkey spent millions of dollars to control the massacre’s narrative and enacted laws that criminalized anyone who accurately used the term “genocide” in reference to the killing, starvation and forced removal of an estimated 800,000 to 1.5 million Armenians in the country from 1915 to 1916. Even today, Turkish loyalists dismiss dissenters who speak up about the genocide as having an agenda or being backed by foreign agitators.Ultimately, regimes exploit disinformation about the past because the truth threatens their grip on power. But it should surprise no one when those tactics to win a political advantage also spill over into present-day issues. DeSantis’s war on reality doesn’t stop at slavery. During the pandemic, his administration also banned mandates on masks, quarantines and vaccines, and suppressed facts about the ballooning number of Covid cases, even as the death toll for Floridians soared ahead of other states.Calling out the information that DeSantis and his supporters are distorting in textbooks and other messaging is important. However, it is just as important to not lose sight of the larger threat that violence denial poses for societies. Organized efforts to document and broadcast the truth of our past are the most significant defense we have against disinformation. More

    • 113 Shares129 Views

      in US Politics

      ‘Stop’: Black Republican congressman attacks DeSantis over slavery curriculum

      by

      Florida governor and presidential hopeful Ron DeSantis has “gone too far” in defending his state’s new educational standards which require public schools to teach that enslaved Black Americans benefited from their forced labor by learning useful skills, Republican congressman John James has said.James – who is Black – made his remarks in a post on X, the social media platform previously known as Twitter.“Nothing about that … evil was a ‘net benefit’ to my ancestors,” James, from Michigan, said in reference to DeSantis’s support of the recently approved Florida state education board curriculum teaching schoolchildren that enslaved Black Americans “developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal” gain.James continued by saying that DeSantis’s education board “is re-writing history”, leaving him “so far from the party” of Abraham Lincoln, the Republican president who emancipated enslaved Black Americans before his 1865 assassination.“You’ve gone too far,” James wrote. “Stop.”The comments from James constituted an impassioned defense of his fellow Black Republican federal lawmakers Byron Donalds and Tim Scott. Donalds, a Florida congressman, and Scott – a South Carolina senator and declared 2024 presidential candidate – each criticized the curriculum in question and DeSantis’s support of it.Donalds had asserted that “the attempt to feature the personal benefits of slavery is wrong [and] needs to be adjusted”. Scott had said “slavery was really about separating families, about mutilating humans and even raping their wives”.DeSantis rebuked both men, suggesting they sounded too similar to Democratic vice-president Kamala Harris, who dismissed the curriculum as “propaganda”.During a 21 July speech in Jacksonville, Florida, Harris – the first woman and Black person to hold her office – had also said: “They want to replace history with lies.”James cautioned DeSantis against assailing Donalds and Scott, who make up 40% of the population of Black Republicans in Congress.“There are only five [B]lack Republicans in Congress, and you’re attacking two of them,” James’s X post said of DeSantis. “My brother in Christ … if you find yourself in a deep hole put the shovel down.”DeSantis joins Scott and several others in a field of Republicans who for the moment are trailing former president Donald Trump in the polls for their party’s White House nomination next year. All are trying to unseat the Democratic incumbent, Joe Biden, who is running for re-election.James, meanwhile, has announced that he intends to seek a second term representing Michigan’s 10th congressional district. The businessman and former US army captain won his seat after a relatively close victory over Democratic candidate Carl Malinga during the November midterms. More

    • 138 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      States’ rights make a comeback as Republicans rush to defy Washington

      by

      The message was blunt: “Texas will see you in court, Mr President.”The words of defiance came from Greg Abbott, the governor of Texas, making clear that he would not comply with a justice department request to remove floating barriers in the Rio Grande. And Abbott is not the only Republican governor in open revolt against Washington.In May Ron DeSantis of Florida signed a bill allowing the death penalty in child rape convictions despite the supreme court banning capital punishment in such cases. Earlier this month, Kay Ivey of Alabama signed into law a redistricting map that ignored a supreme court ruling ordering the state to draw two Black-majority congressional districts.The disobedience is sure to score points with the Republican base. It reflects a trend that has seen state parties embrace extreme positions in the era of Donald Trump and Maga (Make America great again). And while there has always been tension between states and the federal government, it now comes with the accelerant of political partisanship and blue (Democratic) v red (Republican) state polarisation.“This is an onslaught against the federal government’s reach, power, effectiveness,” said Larry Jacobs, director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the University of Minnesota. “We’re seeing it across the board in immigration, healthcare, education – it is defiance. If you think about America breaking into red and blue states, this is like the culmination. It’s literally the red states separating from the federal government and the rule of national law.”With Democrat Joe Biden in the White House, Republican governors are seeking to assert their independence, with red states such as Florida and Texas styling themselves as bulwarks of resistance even if that means rattling America’s increasingly fragile democracy.In Texas, Abbott has been testing the legal limits of states’ ability to act on immigration for more than two years, erecting razor-wire fencing, arresting migrants on trespassing charges and sending busloads of asylum seekers to Democratic-led cities in other states. The governor recently introduced a roughly 1,000ft line of bright orange, wrecking ball-sized buoys on the Rio Grande to stop migrants from entering the US.This week the justice department sued Abbott over the floating barrier, claiming that Texas unlawfully installed it without permission between the border cities of Eagle Pass and Piedras Negras, Mexico. The White House has also raised humanitarian and environmental concerns. Abbott sent Biden a letter that defended Texas’s right to install the barrier and tweeted: “Texas has the sovereign authority to defend our border, under the US Constitution and the Texas Constitution.”The lawsuit is not the first time the Biden administration has sued Texas over its actions on the border. In 2021 the attorney general, Merrick Garland, accused the state of usurping and even interfering with the federal government’s responsibility to enforce immigration laws after Abbott empowered state troopers to stop vehicles carrying migrants on the basis that they could increase the spread of Covid-19.But it is not just a Democratic president feeling the backlash. Even the supreme court, now heavily tilted to the right by Trump’s appointment, is facing defiance from states over rulings that they do not like.The court made a surprise decision that upheld a lower court ruling that a map in Alabama – with one Black-majority district out of seven in a state that is 27% Black – probably violated the Voting Rights Act by diluting the voting power of Black residents. But six weeks later the Alabama state legislature approved a new map that failed to create a second majority-Black congressional district.A group of voters who won the supreme court decision say that they will challenge the new plan. A three-judge panel has set a 14 August hearing and could eventually order a special master to draw new lines for the state. The outcome is likely to have consequences across the country as the case again weighs the requirements of the Voting Rights Act in redistricting.Chris England, a state representative and Black Democrat, noted that change in Alabama has often happened only through federal court order. “Alabama does what Alabama does,” he said in a speech. “Ultimately, what we are hoping for, I guess, at some point, is that the federal court does what it always does to Alabama: forces us to do the right thing. Courts always have to come in and save us from ourselves.”In Florida, meanwhile, DeSantis declared that the supreme court had been “wrong” when its 2008 ruling found it unconstitutional to use capital punishment in child sexual battery cases. He signed a law – authorising the state to pursue the death penalty when an adult is convicted of sexually battering a child under 12 – intended to get the court, now under conservative control, to reconsider that decision.The posturing comes within the context of years of anti-Washington rhetoric from politicians led by Trump, who has long railed against the “deep state” and vowed to “drain the swamp”. Other Republicans have used Washington as a punchbag, a symbol of political elites out of touch with ordinary people.Jacobs added: “This has been a battle that’s been going on for hundreds of years. At this moment you’ve got this toxic mixing of state resentment of the national government when in the hands of the other party along with this really virulent populism. What’s unique about this period is pushing back against and defying Washington is now good politics. Ron DeSantis’s main campaign theme is: I said no to Washington.”Trump has also spent years sowing distrust in institutions and fanning online conspiracy theories. Loss of faith in elections led a violent crowd to storm the US Capitol on 6 January 2021. The supreme court has compounded the problem with a series of extremist rulings and ethics scandals. A recent Quinnipiac poll found that the court has a 30% approval rating among registered voters – the lowest since Quinnipiac first asked the question in 2004.Edward Fallone, an associate professor at Marquette University Law School in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, said: “The integrity of the court has definitely been eroded. Both liberals and conservatives have less faith and feel less obligated to follow its rulings. It’s entirely a situation of the supreme court’s own making.“The justices have been acting politically, the shadow docket [where the court rules on procedural matters], the refusal to be transparent about ethics and gifts, and some of the comments that Justice [Samuel] Alito for example has made in public forums that sound more like a politician’s comments.“When the court acts politically then people see it as a political institution. It just follows as night follows day. It’s going to be difficult to have state governors and legislatures follow supreme court rulings when they have less faith in the integrity of the body and the general public has less faith.”Yet until recently, talk of rebellion against the government had seemed to belong only in the history books. The supremacy clause in the US constitution says the federal government, when acting in pursuance of the constitution, trumps states’ rights.In the mid-19th century, southern states believed that they had the right to nullify federal laws or even secede from the Union if their interests, including the exploitation of enslaved labour, were threatened. With the north increasingly turning against slavery, 11 southern states seceded in 1860-61, forming the Confederate States of America. It took four years of civil war to reunite the nation and abolish slavery.A century later, the landmark supreme court case of Brown v Board of Education declared racial segregation in public schools unconstitutional, but many southern states resisted integration and refused to comply with the decision. President Dwight Eisenhower sent federal troops to enforce the desegregation of Little Rock Central high school in Little Rock, Arkansas, in a case known as the “Little Rock Nine”.In 1963, the Alabama governor, George Wallace, declared “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever” and stood in a doorway at the University of Alabama to express resistance to the court-ordered integration. In response, President John F Kennedy federalised national guard troops and deployed them to the university, forcing Wallace to yield.Daniel Ziblatt, co-author of How Democracies Die, said: “Sometimes we have the idea that the local level is where grassroots democracy thrives but actually, in the history of American democracy, federal power has been used for ill but it’s also been used as a democratising force. We haven’t seen this confrontation reach this same level since the 1950s, 1960s.”Ziblatt, a political scientist at Harvard University, added: “The major breakthroughs in American democracy have come when the federal government has either passed national legislation – think of the Civil Rights Act or the Voting Rights Act – or had to intervene.“Major moments of backsliding have happened when the federal government turns a blind eye to what’s happening in the states. The 1890s are replete with examples of the supreme court essentially turning a blind eye to abuses at the state level. So in a way the confrontation between the states and the federal government is a confrontation over democracy.” More

    • 88 Shares169 Views

      in Elections

      Why Ron DeSantis Isn’t Beating Donald Trump

      by

      As he flails to reverse a polling decline that is beginning to resemble a rockslide, Gov. Ron DeSantis must be feeling a little clueless about why his political fortunes are crumbling so quickly. Attacking wokeness and bullying transgender people seemed to work so well in Florida, so why aren’t national Republicans in awe of the divisions he’s deepened? Making repeated appearances with racial provocateurs never stopped him from getting elected as governor, so why did he have to fire a young aide who inserted Nazi imagery into his own video promoting Mr. DeSantis’s presidential campaign?But the political bubble inhabited by Mr. DeSantis is so thick — symbolized by the hugely expensive private-plane flights that are draining his campaign of cash, since he and his wife, Casey, won’t sit with regular people in a commercial cabin — that he has been unable or unwilling to understand the brushoff he has received from donors and potential voters and make the changes he needs to become competitive with Donald Trump in the Republican primaries.For years, Mr. DeSantis has created an entire political persona out of a singular crusade against wokeness, frightening teachers and professors away from classroom discussions of race, defending a school curriculum that said there were benefits to slavery, claiming (falsely) that his anti-vaccine crusade worked and engaging in a pointless battle with his state’s best-known private employer over school discussion of sexual orientation and gender identity. He had the support of the Florida Legislature and state Republican officials in most of his efforts and presumably believed that an image of a more effective and engaged Trump would help him beat the real thing.But it’s not working. A Monmouth University poll published on Tuesday showed Mr. Trump with a 20-point lead over Mr. DeSantis in a head-to-head match, and the advantage grew to more than 30 points when all the other candidates were thrown in. Major donors have started to sour on him, and The Times reported on Thursday that they are disappointed with his performance and the management of his campaign, which he says he will somehow reboot.“DeSantis has not made any headway,” wrote the poll’s director, Patrick Murray. “The arguments that he’d be a stronger candidate and a more effective president than Trump have both fallen flat.”The most obvious fault in his strategy is that you can’t beat Donald Trump if you don’t even criticize him, and Mr. DeSantis has said little about the multiple indictments piling up against the former president or about his character. Granted, there are downsides to a full-frontal attack on Mr. Trump at this point, as other Republicans have become aware, and Mr. DeSantis still needs to establish some kind of identity first. But he can’t become an alt-Trump without drawing a sharp contrast and holding Mr. Trump to account for at least a few of his many flaws. There are graveyards in Iowa and New Hampshire full of candidates who tried to ignore the leader through sheer force of personality, and even if he had one of those, Mr. DeSantis hasn’t demonstrated the skills to use it. Both men will speak Friday night at the Lincoln Dinner in Des Moines, and if Mr. DeSantis leaves his rival unscathed, it’s hard to imagine how he goes the distance.The deeper problem, though, is that Mr. DeSantis is peddling the wrong message. Only 1 percent of voters think that wokeness and transgender issues are the country’s top problem, according to an April Fox News poll — essentially a repudiation of the governor’s entire brand. Race issues and vaccines are also low on the list.Lakshya Jain, who helps lead the website Split Ticket, which is doing some really interesting political analysis and modeling, said Mr. DeSantis misinterpreted what Florida voters were saying when they re-elected him by a 19-point margin in 2022.“The economy was doing well in Florida, and Democrats didn’t put up a good candidate in Charlie Crist,” Mr. Jain told me. “I’m not sure the majority of Florida voters really cared what he was saying on wokeness. It’s not really an issue people vote on.”The economy, naturally, is what people care most about, but Mr. DeSantis hasn’t said much about his plans to fight inflation (which is already coming down) or create more jobs (which is happening every month without his help). Clearly aware of the problem, he announced on Thursday that he would unfurl a Declaration of Economic Independence in a major speech in New Hampshire on Monday (a phrase as trite and tone-deaf as the name of his Never Back Down super PAC).That appears to be the first fruit of his campaign reboot, but there are good reasons he doesn’t like to stray from his rigid agenda, as demonstrated by his occasionally disastrous footsteps into foreign policy. Bashing Bidenomics means he’ll immediately have to come up with an excuse for why inflation is so much higher in Florida than the nation as a whole. Though the national inflation rate in May was 4 percent compared with a year earlier, it was 9 percent in the Miami-Ft. Lauderdale-West Palm Beach area for the same period and 7.3 percent in the Tampa-St. Petersburg-Clearwater area.The primary reason for that is the state’s housing shortage, an issue that Mr. DeSantis largely ignored during his first term and has only belatedly taken a few small steps to address. When the issue inevitably comes up on the campaign trail, you can bet that Mr. DeSantis will find some way of blaming it on President Biden. That way he can quickly pivot to his preferred agenda of rewriting Black history, questioning science and encouraging gun ownership.He really can’t help himself; just this week he said he might hire the noted anti-vaccine nut Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to work at the Food and Drug Administration or the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Then he got into an online fight with Representative Byron Donalds, Florida’s only Black Republican member of Congress, over the state’s astonishingly wrong curriculum on slavery, and a DeSantis spokesman called Mr. Donalds a “supposed conservative.”Great way to expand your base. Remind me: When does the reboot start?The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

    • 175 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      Ron DeSantis sued over bid to restrict voting rights for people with past convictions

      by

      A voting rights group in Florida filed a lawsuit against the rightwing governor and presidential candidate Ron DeSantis, saying his administration created a maze of bureaucratic and sometimes violent obstacles to discourage formerly incarcerated citizens from exercising their right to vote.Florida voters in 2018 overwhelmingly passed a constitutional referendum, called amendment 4, that lifted the state’s lifetime voting ban for people with felony convictions.Yet what ensued in the years since 2018 was an aggressive campaign, led by DeSantis, to sow confusion and fear among formerly incarcerated people. The Florida Rights Restoration Coalition (FRRC), which championed amendment 4, said state officials have continued to disenfranchise 1.4 million Florida residents – roughly a quarter of the state’s eligible Black voters.“Who is the public supposed to rely on to determine voter eligibility?” said the FRRC’s executive director, Desmond Meade. “We’re saying that it is the responsibility of the state. The law says it is the responsibility of the state.”DeSantis appears to disagree. The lawsuit, resubmitted on Friday by the FRRC, comes a year after the Florida governor ordered the arrests of dozens of people who participated in the 2020 election, including people who had been issued voter registration cards from the Florida department of state.“If the state dropped the ball by incorrectly verifying these people’s eligibility to vote, before you take someone’s liberty, they should fix their broken system,” Meade said.In 2019, Florida lawmakers passed a controversial bill requiring people with felony convictions to repay all outstanding debts before having their voting rights restored under amendment 4. But the state has no centralized database that records how much each individual person owes in court fines. Each county clerk’s office has a different method of calculating the amount of money that a formerly incarcerated person owes the state, complicating the process of paying off fines.“So you’re telling people that you have to pay your debt before you’re able to vote,” said Meade. “But there’s no guarantee that the state could even tell them exactly what they owe?”The lawsuit said this system, in which local and state election officials cannot be trusted to dole out accurate information about voter eligibility, is part of an intentional, state-sponsored campaign to dismantle amendment 4.“This is not simply the result of administrative failures or bureaucratic ineptitude,” the complaint reads.According to documents shared with the Guardian, the FRRC repeatedly contacted the state election officials between 2018 and today, offering potential solutions to streamline the process of registering voters.When the Florida department of state declined to hire additional staff to tackle a mounting backlog of voter registration applications from formerly incarcerated people, the FRRC offered to shoulder the costs. The advocacy group could identify and reach out to people whose court fines had been paid, easing the state officials’ workload.The state’s response has been lukewarm. Efforts to establish a public-private partnership have been slow to advance over five years.“We’ve had three different secretaries of state since the passage of amendment 4, each with different staff,“ said the FRRC deputy director, Neil Volz. “We still have not seen this become a priority.”Natalie Meiner, a spokeswoman for the Florida department of state, said: “The department does not comment on pending litigation.”The FRRC said it was still in talks with the state department.“We just want the state to do its job,” said Volz.The lawsuit is a last-ditch attempt to make accurate voter registration a priority for elected officials. But they worry that, without court intervention, state officials will keep amendment 4 in holding pattern, rejecting offers of assistance.Volz wants people who had their voting rights restored under amendment 4 vote in the 2024 presidential election without fear of prosecution. But the memory of last year’s arrests, announced by DeSantis just days before the 2022 primary elections in Florida, is still fresh in the minds of millions of Florida residents.Romona Oliver was driving home from work last August when she saw a group of Florida law enforcement officers in her driveway.“She was upset, and asked what she was being arrested for, and they’re telling her voting fraud,” said her attorney, Mark Rankin.Shortly after taking her case, Rankin learned that Oliver had submitted a voter registration application before the 2020 election. The state approved her application and sent her a voter registration card.“She even went to the DMV at a later date to change her driver’s license because she got married, and the state issued her a second voter registration card in her new name,” said Rankin “So now she’s been basically told twice that she’s eligible to vote.”The government had made a mistake. Oliver was ineligible to vote because she was convicted of second-degree murder in 2000 – amendment 4 does not restore the rights of people convicted of murder or felony sex offense.Prosecutors offered Oliver a plea deal of “no contest” to the charge of voter fraud.The other felony charge against Oliver was dismissed. She agreed to spend time in county jail on the day of her arrest. The court fines were waived.“So basically, you just let her walk away to make it go away,” Rankin said. “But because she pleaded no contest, they were able to have what they wanted, which was a newspaper headline that says, ‘local defendant accepts plea deal,’ which I think is the point of all this.”FRRC leaders said the highly publicized arrests were the final step in a complex scheme of voter intimidation designed by the DeSantis administration.Millions of Florida residents, including the plaintiffs in the new lawsuit, watched as people like Oliver were taken away in handcuffs just days before the 2022 midterm elections in Florida. The videos of arrests were a grim warning of what might happen to individuals who misunderstand the parameters of amendment 4.“Those videos showed me that even if you honestly believe you are able to vote, they can arrest you anyway,” said Rhoshanda Bryant-Jones, one of the four individual plaintiffs in the case.Bryant-Jones was convicted over a decade ago for narcotics-related crimes. Since her release from prison, she recovered from substance abuse issues and created a small business that helps other people battle addiction.“I am not willing to risk my freedom, and all that I have accomplished,” she said. “Even though the day I thought I had my rights restored by amendment 4 was one of the great blessings of my life.”By raising the specter of arrest, DeSantis sent a message to Bryant-Jones and all other Florida residents who might have had their rights restored under amendment 4: don’t bother trying to understand if you’re eligible to vote, the risks are not worth it.Most of the August 2022 arrests follow a similar pattern: voters had assumed that they were eligible to vote because election officials had told them so.If Oliver had rejected the plea deal, prosecutors would need to prove that she somehow knew the government had erred by approving her voter registration application.“But it doesn’t really matter if you ultimately prove that you didn’t violate the law because you had no idea you were ineligible to vote,” said Blair Bowie, an attorney at the Campaign Legal Center who specializes in restoring voting rights for people with felony convictions.Most of the people who DeSantis targeted, like Oliver, do not have the financial resources to fight a prolonged legal battle, so they opted for a plea deal.“And you have to remember that these are people who have already been through the wringer of the criminal legal system and really, really don’t want to go back to prison,” Bowie said.“This organized push to arrest people who seem to clearly have made good faith mistakes,” Bowie added. “It is something I don’t think we’ve seen at this scale since the end of the civil rights era.” More