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      Ron DeSantis sees ‘freedom’ in Florida – thanks to Republican supermajority

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      Ron DeSantis sees ‘freedom’ in Florida – thanks to Republican supermajorityThe governor – believed by many to mount a 2024 presidential campaign – is ramping up an ‘anti-woke’ crusade with a veto-proof supermajority in state legislature If there’s one word Floridians have heard plenty of since their Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, was sworn in for a second term last month, it is “freedom”. The rightwing politician, expected by many to seek his party’s 2024 presidential nomination, sprinkles the word freely as he ramps up the “anti-woke” crusade he believes can propel him to the White House.Nikki Haley says Florida’s ‘don’t say gay’ law does not go ‘far enough’Read moreIt turns out, following a special legislative session last week that handed DeSantis victory after victory in his culture wars against big corporations, the transgender community, students, migrants and racial minorities, the person with the greatest freedom in Florida to do exactly as he pleases is the governor himself.In November, voters granted DeSantis’s wish of a veto-proof Republican supermajority in the state legislature. In a five-day session, those politicians validated every one of his demands.They granted DeSantis total control of the board governing Disney, the theme park giant with whom he feuded over his anti-LGBTQ+ “don’t say gay” law.They gave him permission to fly migrants from anywhere in the US to destinations of his choosing, for political purposes, then send the bill to Florida’s taxpayers.And they handed unprecedented prosecutorial powers to his newly created, hand-picked office of election “integrity”, pursuing supposed cases of voter fraud.The special session is over but DeSantis’s devotion to seeking retribution against those who disagree with him is not.Last week, after a backlash, the Florida High School Athletic Association backed away from forcing female students to chronicle their menstrual histories on medical forms, a requirement seen by many as a thinly-veiled attempt to keep transgender athletes out of girls’ sports.Exactly one week later, a Republican House committee proposed allowing DeSantis to turf out those who made the decision and replace them with his own appointments.It’s a familiar playbook: the Disney legislation allows the governor to supplant sitting officials on its governing tax authority with his own picks; his “hostile takeover” of the liberal New College of Florida last month was accomplished by swamping its board of trustees with hand-picked allies and conservative Christians.In what critics say was a particularly petty act earlier this month, DeSantis moved to strip the liquor license from the non-profit Orlando Philharmonic Plaza Foundation because it hosted a drag show, which some children attended with parents.The threats keep coming. The notoriously thin-skinned DeSantis wants to cut state ties with the College Board, which criticised him for a “PR stunt and posturing” when he demanded it revise an advanced placement college course on African American studies he said “lacked educational value”.“No politician should silence the stories of Black and brown people who helped create our country. Our democracy and constitutional values must transcend such hateful and callous political agendas,” said Tiffani Lemon, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida.Others accuse DeSantis of fascism, among them the progressive Democratic congressman Maxwell Frost, whose vocal criticism of the governor long predated his election in November.“If you disagree with Ron DeSantis he’ll abuse his power to close down your business, take over your school, remove your classes and unconstitutionally fire you,” Frost said in a tweet. “I encourage folks to look up the definition of fascism then read these headlines.”Other Florida Democrats see the DeSantis-ordered special legislative session as his “get out jail free card”, sweeping away legal obstacles and other hurdles that threatened to stall his policy objectives.His original plan to abolish the Disney authority would have saddled residents with $1bn in bond debt, so instead he asked the legislature to rename and restructure it.Judges threw out charges against several ex-felons the governor said voted illegally because his state office lacked prosecutorial authority, so a new law was drafted to give it.DeSantis’s administration was sued for flying migrants from Texas to Massachusetts in a “vile political stunt” stunt last year, because the existing law restricted migrant removals to those physically in Florida. So he changed the law.“It’s just a clear example of DeSantis changing the law because he broke the law,” said Anna Eskamani, a Democratic state congresswoman who voted against the new measure to allow the governor to fly migrants anywhere.“Republicans like Ron DeSantis don’t care about the rules. If they don’t like the rules, they change them. And if they can’t change them they try to destroy them, as we saw with the [January 6] insurrection.”Gregory Koger, chair of political science at the University of Miami, said the issues the legislature addressed suggested “speed over thought” when the DeSantis administration was planning its strategies.“It’s not unusual at all to see legislators and executives fixing problems in the laws that they have passed,” he said.DeSantis wins new power over Disney World in ‘don’t say gay’ culture warRead more“You could have had a slow, bipartisan, well-thought-out approach to changing the relationship between Florida and Disney, but that isn’t what we observed. We saw a law being drafted and passed as an act of retribution, and now they have to come back and say, ‘Well, when we passed our act of retribution, here’s what we actually meant.’“Same with changing the guidelines for Florida to fly migrants. That seems like an effort to back out of a legal challenge to their behavior by retroactively saying the legislature is actually OK tricking people into getting on a plane in Texas and flying them from there, rather than finding actual undocumented people in Florida.”In an email to the Guardian, DeSantis’s press secretary, Bryan Griffin, defended the governor, saying he was bringing “a new era of accountability and transparency” to Disney, Florida’s biggest employer.“Businesses in Florida should operate on a level playing field,” Griffin said. “In 1967, the Florida legislature created the Reedy Creek Improvement District, which gifted extraordinary special privileges to a single corporation.“Until Governor DeSantis acted, the Walt Disney Company maintained sole control over the district. This power amounted to an unaccountable corporate kingdom.”TopicsRon DeSantisRepublicansFloridaUS politicsUS elections 2024US domestic policyfeaturesReuse this content More

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      Nikki Haley says Florida’s ‘don’t say gay’ law does not go ‘far enough’

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      Nikki Haley says Florida’s ‘don’t say gay’ law does not go ‘far enough’Republican presidential candidate makes comments in New Hampshire on controversial law signed by governor Ron DeSantis02:41Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley told a New Hampshire audience the controversial “don’t say gay” education law signed by the governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis, does not go “far enough”.DeSantis wins new power over Disney World in ‘don’t say gay’ culture warRead more“Basically what it said was you shouldn’t be able to talk about gender before third grade,” Haley said. “I’m sorry. I don’t think that goes far enough.”DeSantis’s law bans classroom instruction on sexual orientation or gender identity through third grade, in which children are eight or nine years old. The law has proved hugely controversial, stoking confrontation with progressives but also corporations key to the Florida economy, Disney prominent among them.Some pediatric psychologists say the law could harm the mental health of LGBTQ+ youth already more likely to face bullying and attempt suicide than other children.Haley, a former South Carolina governor and UN ambassador, this week became the second declared major candidate for the Republican nomination in 2024, after Donald Trump.Widely expected to run, DeSantis is the only candidate who challenges Trump in polling. Surveys have shown Haley in third place, with the potential to split the anti-Trump vote and hand the nomination to the former president.New Hampshire will stage the first primary of the Republican race. In Exeter on Thursday, Haley said: “There was all this talk about the Florida bill – the ‘don’t Say gay bill’. Basically what it said was you shouldn’t be able to talk about gender before third grade. I’m sorry. I don’t think that goes far enough.“When I was in school you didn’t have sex ed until seventh grade. And even then, your parents had to sign whether you could take the class. That’s a decision for parents to make.”As reported by Fox News, Haley also said Republicans should “focus on new generational leadership” by putting “a badass woman in the White House”.Speaking to Fox News, Haley was asked about DeSantis and the “don’t say gay” law and she doubled down on her comments.She said: “I think Ron’s been a good governor. I just think that third grade’s too young. We should not be talking to kids in elementary school about gender, period.Nikki Haley: video shows Republican candidate saying US states can secedeRead more“And if you are going to talk to kids about it, you need to get the parents’ permission to do that. That is something between a parent and a child. That is not something that schools need to be teaching. Schools need to be teaching reading and math and science. They don’t need to be teaching whether they think you’re a boy or a girl.”Haley also claimed to be focused not on Republican rivals but on “running against Joe Biden”, adding: “I’m not kicking sideways. I’m kicking forward.”Haley, 51, has also attracted attention by controversially proposing mental competency tests for politicians over the age of 75.She said: “This is not hard. Just like we go and we turn over our tax returns … why can’t you turn over a mental competency test right when you run for office? Why can’t we have that?”Biden is 80. Trump is 76.TopicsNikki HaleyUS politicsRepublicansRon DeSantisFloridaNew HampshireLGBTQ+ rightsnewsReuse this content More

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      DeSantis wins new power over Disney World in ‘don’t say gay’ culture war

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      DeSantis wins new power over Disney World in ‘don’t say gay’ culture warFlorida legislature gives governor right to name members of board supervising theme park, claiming: ‘There’s a new sheriff in town’ Florida’s far-right governor, Ron DeSantis, has won the right to appoint the members of the board that supervises the development of the state’s famous Walt Disney World theme parks after a fight over a law that restricts sexual orientation and gender identity discussions in schools.Disney as a result is set to lose some of the autonomy it has enjoyed in Florida during the last nearly six decades, but the company has held on to some of its key privileges amid the culture war leveled at it by DeSantis.DeSantis ramps up ‘war on woke’ with new attacks on Florida higher educationRead moreNonetheless, with his usual bluster, DeSantis declared victory over the conglomerate whose mascot is Mickey Mouse, saying: “There’s a new sheriff in town.”DeSantis directed his ire at Disney after the media titan decided to suspend political donations in Florida after the state’s legislature last year passed a “don’t say gay” law that limited mention of LGBTQ+ issues in schools.Florida’s Orlando area is home to the 25,000-acre Disney World theme park complex, which first opened in 1971 and reportedly attracted nearly 13 million visitors last year. And to retaliate, DeSantis sought to strip Disney of a special tax district designation that let the company govern them autonomously, including by issuing tax-exempt bonds and advancing building plans without oversight from certain local authorities.The governor’s move against Disney had the full support of the state legislature, which is controlled by his fellow Republicans and voted to strip the company of its tax district status beginning on 1 June 2023. But then the steep cost of following through on DeSantis’s wishes for Disney became apparent.Letting the district dissolve would require taxpayers in Orange and Osceola counties – which are adjacent to the theme parks – to begin paying for the firefighting, police and road maintenance services that Disney had been paying. And the counties’ taxpayers would also have to cover the Disney tax district’s debt of $1bn or so.So this week, Florida’s legislators adjusted course. They drafted a measure that would empower the state’s governor to appoint the five members of the tax district’s controlling board. It also would leave Disney vulnerable to possibly being forced to pay taxes to fund road projects outside the theme park complex’s vicinity, and new construction costs might increase because the measure eliminated some of the company’s exemption from certain regulatory processes, the New York Times reported.Nonetheless, the new measure would permit Disney – one of Florida’s largest private employers – to retain its special tax district status. And the board would remain powerless as far as influencing what content the company chooses to present to guests at its theme parks as well as viewers of its movies and shows.Florida’s house of representatives approved the legislation on Thursday, and the state senate did the same on Friday.DeSantis said the legislation definitively buried previously aired concerns that Floridians would end up paying more in taxes because of his differences with Disney.“This puts that to bed,” DeSantis said, while also boasting that he was now the new sheriff in town.The president of Disney World, Jeff Vahle, issued a notably apolitical statement to the Times that described the complex as “focused on the future and … ready to work within this new framework”.Separately last week, DeSantis announced plans to block state colleges from having programs on diversity, equity and inclusion, as well as on critical race theory – the study of how racism has shaped American history. That plan comes on the heels of his blocking public high schools from teaching a new advanced placement course on African American studies.DeSantis, who has long advocated to keep firearms as accessible to the public as possible, caught some political fire on Friday after the Washington Post reported that he had asked for guns to be banned from a party celebrating his re-election to a second term last year.DeSantis’s campaign staff also asked the Tampa city officials in control of the convention center hosting the party to take responsibility for the gun ban so as not to upset his supporters, the Post’s report added, citing emails obtained by the newspaper.One county-level Republican leader told the Post that such a ban was “a little hypocritical” given how DeSantis has presented himself as a pro-gun rights advocate. A spokesperson for DeSantis told the Post that its reporting was “speculation and hearsay” and that the governor was “strongly in support of individuals’ constitutional right to bear arms”.Many expect DeSantis to pursue the Republican nomination for the 2024 presidential election. As of Saturday, the former president Donald Trump was the only Republican candidate to have declared an intention to challenge Democratic incumbent Joe Biden.TopicsRon DeSantisWalt Disney CompanyUS politicsFloridanewsReuse this content More

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      Joe Biden attacks Republican ‘dream’ to slash Medicare and Social Security

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      Joe Biden attacks Republican ‘dream’ to slash Medicare and Social SecurityPresident makes comments in Florida speech, vowing to safeguard programs ahead of anticipated 2024 re-election campaign Joe Biden amplified his attacks on Republicans over Medicare and Social Security during a visit to Florida on Thursday, arguing that it was the party’s “dream” to slash the federal programs and vowing to be the “nightmare” that stops them.Speaking in Tampa, Biden outlined his administration’s plan to safeguard the popular entitlement programs as part of an ongoing war of words with his Republican opponents that began during his second State of the Union address on Tuesday.Ahead of an anticipated 2024 re-election campaign, the president has seen an opportunity to put Republicans on the defensive on an issue that resonates deeply with voters, and particularly seniors who rely on the programs and are a key part of their base.Joe Biden has steadied the nation – why don’t his polling numbers reflect this? | Robert ReichRead more“I know that a lot of Republicans – their dream is to cut Social Security and Medicare,” Biden said, during his remarks at University of Tampa. “If that’s your dream, I’m your nightmare.”Republicans have flatly rejected the assertion, despite a long record of proposing to do just that. During the midterms, several prominent Republicans opened the door to Medicare and Social Security cuts as part of their effort to reign in the federal budget.Many Republicans have accused Biden of lying about their fiscal agenda. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy said this week that cuts to Medicare and Social Security were “off the table” as part of any plan to reduce the nation’s debt.Their objection to the accusation on Tuesday night – loud howls from the chamber and shouts of “liar” – prompted a remarkable back-and-forth during the State of the Union, in which Biden paused to engage his hecklers. “Liar!” screamed the congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Republican of Georgia.Recalling the exchange, which he referred to as a “spirited debate”, Biden boasted that he had extracted assurances from them that they would not cut the programs. “Granted, I’ll believe it when I see it,” he told the audience on Thursday, as he highlighted individual Republican plans that he said would make the programs more vulnerable to budget cuts.Among them was an idea put forward by the Republican senator Rick Scott of Florida, who proposed sunsetting nearly all federal spending programs after five years. Holding up a pamphlet with the senator’s plan, Biden said subjecting Social Security and Medicare to periodic renewal votes would raise the likelihood of dramatic cuts.“The very idea the senator from Florida wants to put Social Security and Medicare on the chopping block every five years I find to be somewhat outrageous – so outrageous that you might not even believe it,” he said.In a tweet welcoming Biden to Florida, Scott accused the president of “lying to Floridians about Social Security and Medicare” and challenged him to a debate on the issue.Biden enjoys State of the Union reviews as Republicans stoke culture-war fireRead moreResponding to the senator’s pushback, Biden quipped: “Maybe he’s changed his mind; maybe he’s seen the Lord, but he seemed to want a sunset.”Despite vehement protests, Republicans have not yet said how they plan to reduce spending to meet their goal of putting the US on a path toward a balanced budget. Without touching those programs, which alone count for a substantial piece of the nation’s federal budget, it is unclear how they would meet that objective without making painful cuts to defense spending or raising taxes, options many Republicans have categorically ruled out.Biden has appeared to relish sparring with Republicans over the issue, which the White House has long seen as politically potent. Democrats tried to wield the issue against their opponents in the November midterms, but they struggled to rally voters against the hypothetical cuts despite a better-than-anticipated performance.Many Democrats now believe that changed on Tuesday, when Americans saw the debate unfold in primetime. Biden departed the House chamber confident he had bested his political foes, just as he intends to seek a second term. A formal announcement is expected sometime this spring.But recent opinion polls show Biden struggling to unite Americans behind his agenda, with few giving him credit for his legislative accomplishments. Most voters, including a majority of Democrats, say they would prefer someone else to be the party’s standard-bearer in 2024, though a primary challenge has become increasingly unlikely.With 2024 coming into focus, Biden brought his message to Florida, once the consummate presidential battleground that has slipped from Democrats’ reach in recent elections. It is also home to a large retiree population and two of the president’s potential 2024 Republican rivals: Donald Trump, who announced his candidacy shortly after the November midterms, and Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, who won re-election by a dominating 19 percentage points in November.The Guardian view on Biden’s State of the Union: deft politics – now to persuade voters | EditorialRead moreTargeting DeSantis, Biden called on the governor to expand Medicaid in the state, estimating an additional 1.1 million Floridians would be eligible for the program.“This isn’t calculus,” Biden said. “The only reason Medicare expansion hasn’t happened here is politics.” He also repeated his calls for Congress to raise taxes on the wealthiest households and corporations as well as to extend a $35 monthly cap on the cost of insulin to all Americans.In a statement ahead of Biden’s visit, Ronna McDaniel, chair of the Republican National Committee, said the president’s plans to rebuild the economy were “too blissfully out of touch to care”.The visit was the second stop on his post-State of the Union “blitz”, which has seen the president, vice-president and cabinet officials travel the country to promote his administration’s legislative agenda. His first stop was at a union training facility in Wisconsin.TopicsJoe BidenUS politicsFloridaUS MedicareRepublicansDemocratsnewsReuse this content More

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      What Liberals Can Learn From Ron DeSantis

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      Is there anything liberals can do about Ron DeSantis other than quietly seethe, loudly condemn him every time he makes headlines and hope that his political flaws — his distaste for glad-handing, his less-than-inspiring public-speaking style, his conspicuous unlikability — will take him down before he gets anywhere close to the presidency? It would be tempting to write off DeSantis, the bombastic Republican governor of Florida, as another unelectable right-wing lunatic unfit for national office.We’ve made that mistake before.It’s reliably depressing to revisit 2016 and the misbegotten liberal conviction that America couldn’t possibly elevate Donald Trump to the presidency. We’ve already cataloged the mistakes in media coverage and dissected what we missed that somehow made Trump a viable, let alone a desirable, candidate to occupy the Oval Office. But here we go again. As the Democratic political strategist Lis Smith has remarked, the left’s reaction to DeSantis looks just like its reaction to Trump: “He’s picking these fights. He’s saying and doing abhorrent things. And all the same characters — whether in the media, Democratic politics, the punditry class, whatever it is — have the same freakout.”Let’s pay closer attention this time.First, we shouldn’t underestimate DeSantis. He may resemble Trump in his politics — but not in his intellect or resolve. Compare their respective backgrounds: Whereas Trump’s acceptance into the University of Pennsylvania, after an academic record notable only for its mediocrity, was an egregious example of leveraging personal connections to get into a prestigious university, DeSantis, the son of a TV ratings box installer and a nurse, actually earned his way into the Ivy League. People bent over backward to ascribe some accidental form of grifter street smarts to Trump. But DeSantis is demonstrably intelligent and industrious. He worked his way through Yale while playing baseball and graduated magna cum laude.Whereas Trump skirted military service with a convenient discovery of bone spurs, DeSantis was a commissioned officer in the Navy. He graduated from Harvard Law School. He may share Trump’s taste for bluster, but this is not someone who bumbled his way into public office. As Dexter Filkins observed last year in a New Yorker profile, “DeSantis has an intense work ethic, a formidable intelligence and a granular understanding of policy.”Because we can assume DeSantis knows what he’s doing, we should make careful note of his record in Florida, where he has been governor since 2019. His approval rating in Florida is consistently over 50 percent and includes high ratings among Latinos and in former liberal strongholds like Miami-Dade and Palm Beach Counties.The jury is still out on whether DeSantis’s unorthodox response to Covid-19 was a colossal error or an unexpected success or, more likely, something in between, but the fact that he took an aggressive approach to avoid the pains of lockdown on small businesses and families wasn’t lost on Florida voters. While other politicians prevaricated and dithered, DeSantis spoke with conviction and seemed to be doing something, and to many working families in Florida, that mattered.When I visited Miami from Covid-conscious New York in 2021, the vibe in bars and restaurants in the Wynwood art district — where nobody asked for proof of vaccination and I was the only person in a mask — was euphoric. In that young, overwhelmingly liberal corner of the city, people weren’t faulting DeSantis for his pandemic policies. He also acted decisively last year during Hurricane Ian, a response that won strong bipartisan approval.In a country where government often looks sclerotic, DeSantis’s knack for action bears notice. We can decry his stunt in shipping migrants to Martha’s Vineyard, but we should also be attending to the real concerns of people living in areas of heavy immigration. Lest we forget, Hispanic voters in Florida preferred DeSantis to his Democratic opponent in last year’s election for governor; they also supported his Martha’s Vineyard escapade, according to a Telemundo/LX News poll. “There are lots of Hispanic voters in this state who really like the governor’s style, this strongman who won’t back down,” one pollster explained at the time.Democrats need to grapple with this appeal. It would be easy to write DeSantis off as a cartoon culture warrior or as racist, homophobic, transphobic and xenophobic. He may well be all those things, and so may some of his constituents. But he may not be, and either way, it would be foolish to characterize all his followers as such. Assuming a stance of moral superiority will do us no good. (See: Hillary Clinton, “deplorables.”)Finally, we shouldn’t let DeSantis co-opt positions on which Democrats have historical strength and a natural advantage: education, health care, jobs. There are reasons so many Americans are relocating to the Sunshine State beyond the balmy weather. This month, DeSantis released a budget plan that featured targeted tax cuts aimed at parents, salary increases for state employees, including teachers, and significant investments in schools, including programs in civic education.DeSantis’s maverick approach to primary, secondary and higher education has brought widespread condemnation from Democrats, particularly from their more progressive wing. But we should pay attention to why his policies land better with voters than with progressive critics. A law like the Stop WOKE Act of 2021 (later partly blocked by a federal court), which limited the discussion of certain racial issues during diversity training sessions offered by private employers and in the classroom, may come with an incendiary name and some egregious efforts to curtail free speech. But it’s important to recognize that aspects of it appeal to Floridians tired of racial and ethnic divisiveness and the overt politicization of what’s taught in the classroom.As many liberals will quietly acknowledge, the Parental Rights in Education Act, which DeSantis signed last year and which opponents nicknamed the “Don’t Say Gay” law, has reasonable and legitimate attractions for a broad range of parents who worry about the focus, efficacy and age appropriateness of what their kids are learning in primary and secondary school. Democratic leadership should worry, too. Keeping quiet or pretending those concerns aren’t real won’t make them go away.Then there’s college. The challenges of higher education have never been a strength for the Republican Party, which has long ignored the myriad needs of indebted students and the financial and existential pressures on academic institutions. If ideological conformity has taken root in American universities, long a bastion of liberal ideals, then Democrats are the ones with the knowledge, experience and record to attend to the problem. It’s on liberals to check the excesses of illiberal orthodoxies rampant among those on its far-left wing. It’s on us to ensure academic freedom and the kind of educational system parents can trust.It should be cause for alarm that recent polls show Republicans holding an advantage on educational issues. Rather than dismiss parents’ concerns as somehow unfounded or wrongheaded, we should be listening to them and finding better solutions to their grievances. Telling parents they’re bigots or are unenlightened for not embracing the latest faddish orthodoxy is not a winning message.Which brings us back to Trump. We know that he takes DeSantis seriously because Trump has shown signs that he’s scared of DeSantis as a competitor. If even Trump knows that much, Democrats are capable of knowing more. Trump may think the best way to defang DeSantis — whom he calls “DeSanctimonious” — is to mock and belittle him. Democrats should recognize it will take far more than that.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

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      First case in DeSantis voter fraud crackdown ends with split verdict

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      First case in DeSantis voter fraud crackdown ends with split verdictFlorida man Nathan Hart, 49, acquitted of illegal voting but found guilty of false registration in closely watched case A Florida man on Tuesday was acquitted on charges of illegally voting but convicted of lying on his voter registration application in a closely watched voter fraud case.The split verdict in Hillsborough county was the first time a Florida jury weighed in on a case of one of the 19 people Ron DeSantis announced were being charged with voter fraud in August. Nearly all of the 19 have said they did not know they were ineligible to vote and believed they could do so because they received a voter registration card from the state. Man arrested at gunpoint in DeSantis voter fraud crackdown, video showsRead moreVoter fraud is extremely rare in the United States and voting rights advocates have decried the prosecutions as a thinly-veiled effort to intimidate people from voting. The Florida Rights Restoration Coalition, a group that works with people with felonies to get their voting rights back, said they heard from several people ahead of last year’s midterm election who chose not to risk voting because they were afraid of getting prosecuted.Nathan Hart, 49, was convicted on Tuesday of false affirmation in connection with an election, a third degree felony punishable by up to five years in prison. Prosecutors in the case are requesting he serve five years’ probation in the case, according to the Tampa Bay Times. Sentencing is set for 27 February.The Hillsborough county public defender’s office, which is representing Hart, declined to comment on the verdict. Neither DeSantis nor the office of the statewide prosecutor immediately returned a request for comment.The conviction comes as DeSantis is seeking additional personnel and funding for the office of election crimes and security, the new statewide agency that handled Hart’s case.Florida Republicans are also seeking expanded powers for the statewide prosecutor to charge people for it. Three of the 19 cases filed this summer have been dismissed because judges ruled that the statewide prosecutor did not have authority to bring the cases. But a new bill in the legislature would explicitly give the statewide prosecutor the power to do so.Since 2019, Florida has allowed people with felonies to vote once they complete their sentence, unless they are convicted of murder or a sexual offense. Hart and the other 19 people charged all had prior crimes that fell into the latter two categories, but nearly all have said they did not know they were disqualified.Hart registered to vote as a Republican in March of 2020. He checked a box on the voter registration form acknowledging his prior conviction, but said his right to vote had been restored. The local election office in Hillsborough county approved Hart’s application, sent him a voter registration card in the mail, and he voted in the 2020 elections.Prosecutors charged Hart with two different felonies, one for lying on the voter registration form, and another for voting knowing he was ineligible. The jury on Tuesday convicted him on the registration charge but acquitted him of illegally voting.During the trial, which lasted a day, Hart said that he registered at the urging of a man who approached him outside of a driver’s license office in 2020, according to the Times. The man, Hart said, told him that a new Florida law made people with felonies eligible to vote once they completed their sentence.Hart recounted a similar version of events to police officers when they came to his house to arrest him last summer, according to bodycam footage obtained by the Times. One of the officers even appeared to sympathize with Hart, telling him “then there’s your defense,” one of the officers replied. “You know what I’m saying? That sounds like a loophole to me.”Joseph Kudia, Hart’s lawyer, told jurors that prosecutors would not be able to prove Hart’s actions were wilfully illegal, according to the Tampa Bay Times.But Nathaniel Bahill, the prosecutor in the case, pointed out that Hart had signed the voter registration form affirming his eligibility in 2020. He also questioned whether the story about being approached outside the driver’s license office was true.Hart previously turned down two plea agreements that would have resulted in light punishments. Prosecutors had offered him a shorter probation and the judge overseeing the case had offered no additional punishment beyond the time Hart had already served in jail. Hart rejected both, the Tampa Bay Times reported. “”I don’t think that I willingly did, or knowingly did, anything wrong,” he said . “So I would like to fight to get it dismissed.”Michael Gottlieb, a Democratic state lawmaker who is representing one of the 19 other people charged, said that the illegal voting charge was easier to get an acquittal on.“When they gave him the voter reg card and he goes and he votes, they’re telling him you’re OK to do this. So I think it’s much harder to get a conviction in that regard,” said Gottlieb, who said he did not follow Hart’s trial. “To go to a jury trial and say ‘hey I’m a convicted felon I didn’t know I was breaking the law when I registered to vote.’ I think a lot of people are gonna look at that and say you knew or should have known the law but you didn’t.”Neil Volz, the deputy director of the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition, said the conviction highlighted the need for the state to improve its system for flagging ineligible voters and creating a reliable system for Florida voters.“This trial highlights the need for a better voter verification system. There would have been no need to spend tax dollars on arrests, investigations, court costs and trials if our election process actually verified and assured a voter of their eligibility on the front end,” he said in a statement.TopicsFloridaThe fight for democracyUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      Schools and universities are ground zero for America’s culture war | Moira Donegan

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      Schools and universities are ground zero for America’s culture warMoira Donegan It’s easy to get people riled up and panicked about kids, about a changing culture and about lost innocence. That’s exactly what the right is doing You could be forgiven for losing track of all the lurid and inventive ways that Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor with presidential ambitions, has attacked education in his state. Last year he signed the Don’t Say Gay bill, a nasty little law that bans classroom discussion of sexuality or gender identity issues – effectively forcing children and teachers alike to stay silent about their families and lives, under the threat of lawsuits. The bill caused confusion and controversy, frightening gay students and teachers, leading to preemptive compliance in some sectors and defiant disobedience in others – and, not coincidentally, drawing quite a bit of culture-war attention to DeSantis himself.Since then, the Florida governor has repeated the playbook in increasingly ambitious fashion. Last April, DeSantis signed the exhaustingly titled “Stop Woke Act,” which restricts lessons on racial inequality in public schools. The bill prohibits the teaching of material that could cause a student to “feel guilt, anguish, or other forms of psychological distress,” due to US racial history – the implication being that these are not appropriate responses to an encounter with this history, or that protection from such emotions is more important than a confrontation with the facts.In mid-January, DeSantis’ Department of Education issued new guidance to educators, saying that all books that have not been approved by a state compliance censor – euphemistically termed a “school media specialist” – should be concealed or removed from classrooms. Because the law deems some books “pornographic” or “obscene,” it also creates the possibility that teachers who provide books that feature LGBT content to students could be given third-degree felony charges. The guidance prompted teachers in several populous counties to remove books from their classrooms altogether. Photos of bare shelves in classroom libraries went viral; other teachers hid the books from students’ view, draping them behind ominous curtains of paper. There were reports of children crying, and begging for the books back.DeSantis has also set about narrowing the scope of inquiry for all students – not just those in Florida – by picking a very public fight with the College Board. The private organization runs much of America’s standardized testing regime, as well as the nationwide Advanced Placement, or AP, program, a series of courses that allow high school students to receive college credits at a lesser cost.Last month, DeSantis announced that he would ban the AP African American studies course, saying that the course, which had initially included readings on Black feminism, the Black queer experience, and the Black Lives Matter movement, violated his Stop Woke Act, and was “pushing an agenda on our kids.” In response, the College Board almost immediately dropped the offending material from their curriculum, eliminating instruction in the work of Black feminist thinkers like bell hooks, Angela Davis, and Audre Lorde, and making study of the Black Lives Matter movement “optional.” Instead, the course now encourages research into Black conservatism. The changes to the curriculum are not localized to Florida – they apply to students nationwide. DeSantis’ war on education, it seems, is now a national affair.As for the activities that are still permitted in schools, DeSantis seems determined to make them as invasive, dangerous, and unpleasant as possible. His administration is weighing whether to require all girls on school athletic teams to answer detailed questions about their menstrual periods in order to participate in sports. The interrogations could come as DeSantis fights to keep trans girls out of sports, and as his Florida Republican party moves to tighten Florida’s abortion ban from an already-strict 15 weeks, to six. The questions would likely discourage sports participation for teenage girls, who would be made to face invasive, intimate, and embarrassing inquiries from prurient adults as a precondition of their athletic lives.And that’s just DeSantis’ agenda for K-12 education. Last week, the governor announced a sweeping agenda to overhaul the state’s public universities, aiming to make their curricula more conservative by eliminating tenure protections for progressive faculty and requiring courses on “Western Civilization.” He’s started with the New College of Florida, a small liberal arts honors college with an artsy reputation. There, DeSantis installed a new board made up of Christian college administrators, Republican think-tank denizens, and the right-wing online influencer Christopher Rufo. The board promptly fired the college president, and has set about reshaping the mission and instruction of the college in DeSantis’ image.Much of the right-wing culture war that has emerged since the onset of the pandemic has focused on schools, and in crass political terms, it’s not hard to see why DeSantis has chosen to attack education. Schools are spaces where lots of voters – and crucially, lots of the white, conservative voters that DeSantis needs to mobilize – feel they have a stake. It’s easy to get people riled up and panicked about kids, easy to pray on people’s protectiveness towards their children as a way to exploit their anxieties about the future, about a changing culture, about lost innocence. And frankly, it’s easy to get people to be mad at teachers: you would be surprised how easily grown men can be prodded into reviving an old adolescent resentment of a teacher’s scolding authority.But there is a more foundational reason why DeSantis and the far right are attacking education: it is the means by which our young people are made into citizens. Schools and universities are laboratories of aspiration, places where young people cultivate their own capacities, expose themselves to the experiences and worldviews of others, and learn what will be required of them to live responsible, tolerant lives in a pluralist society.It is in school where they learn that social hierarchies do not necessarily correspond to personal merit; it is in school where they discover the mistakes of the past, and where they gain the tools not to repeat them. No wonder the DeSantis right, with it’s fear of critique and devotion to regressive modes of domination, seems to hostile to letting kids learn: education is how kids grow up to be the kinds of adults they can’t control.
      Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist
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      Conservatives angry about school ‘indoctrination’ are telling on themselves | Jan-Werner Müller

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      Conservatives angry about school ‘indoctrination’ are telling on themselvesJan-Werner MüllerIdeologues like Ron DeSantis aren’t angry at politics in education; they’re angry their politics don’t have a monopoly The rightwing governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis, and his administration recently blocked a proposed black studies course for advanced placement high school students, as well as announced policies that would inhibit state universities from teaching programming about racial diversity, equity and inclusion or so-called “critical race theory”. These moves follow on the heels of Florida’s “don’t say gay” legislation, last year, restricting teachers from discussing sexual orientation.DeSantis and other conservative politicians argue that they are saving America’s young from leftwing indoctrination, and that students should instead be exposed to “civic education” that extolls a patriotic vision of America. When DeSantis and his growing number of acolytes present themselves as champions of civic education, however, they are in fact undermining the whole point of civics: not to make children “patriotic” or just fill brains with facts (how many branches of government are there again?), but to enable individuals to be fearless, critical citizens.That very enterprise is threatened by these systematic intimidation campaigns. In fact, DeSantis’s anti-education crusade is doubly authoritarian – most obviously in its use of state power to suppress ideas and information, but also in its more subtle assumption that teaching is ultimately about imposing doctrines of one sort or another.It is an open question whether the College Board did cave to pressure from conservatives when they removed supposedly controversial material from the new African American history AP course. It is also an open question to what extent civil rights lawyers and free speech advocates can stop DeSantis’s censorship laws in court. But one thing is clear: damage to US democracy is being done already. Despite valiant resistance, on the whole, teachers and professors are intimidated. As we know from the rise of authoritarianism in other countries and periods, all-out repression is not always necessary: people obey in advance, make small adjustments, or altogether vacate a territory where the red lines which must not be crossed are left purposefully vague.We also know from anti-education crusades disguised as culture wars in states such as Hungary that defenders of academic freedom are faced with a dilemma, one that is being reproduced in the US today. On the one hand, defenders can try to deny that anything they do is political at all. Education, they might insist, is about science and telling the kids what’s what only in terms of facts.Less obviously, they might seek to escape politics by emphasizing worthy enterprises like “service learning”. Yet community service, as valuable as it can be both for students and the community, cannot substitute for genuine political education, in which students learn to discuss and, above all, to disagree. As John Hopkins president Ron Daniels has pointed out, students are ever more willing to volunteer, which is great (of course, volunteering also always looks good on CVs, one might add), but less eager to engage democratic politics more directly – and colleges seem complicit in this trend.Teachers are rightly worried that, in an age of hyper-polarization, politics can make their classrooms explode; often enough, they also lack the time, resources and skills to deal with what can be a drawn-out and difficult process of young people learning how to negotiate their differences in a democratic manner. Add to that the sense that we are falling behind globally in Stem, and hence should not waste time on soft subjects that won’t help us compete with China.But there is no escape: those declaring the supposed “education establishment” their enemy won’t accept claims that schools aren’t doing politics. The likes of Viktor Orbán and his de facto pupil DeSantis will frame professors as purveyors of dangerous ideologies no matter what. For that is their political business model. Moral panics happen because political entrepreneurs want to spread panic; responses that come down to “don’t panic!” or “let’s talk about something else” won’t work.That is especially so with propaganda about pedagogy: schooling is so damn close to home, and yet not under the control of those at home; appeals to deep worries about what is happing to the kids when they are out of our hands can be very effective. (It is not an accident that conspiracy theories like QAnon use the quasi-natural resource of parental fears for generating panic and hate.)So, should one simply concede that it’s all politics, all the time, all the way down, and that everyone is simply spreading their ideology? Of course not. Education is political not because everyone gets to teach their politics to innocent charges, but because it is indispensable for democracy. As John Dewey, the greatest 20th-century philosopher of education put it, “democracy has to be born anew every generation and education is its midwife”. Countries with well-functioning democracies also do well on civic education scores. But that is not just a matter of knowledge about democracy, but doing democracy, which can be uncomfortable, even distressing and guilt-inducing (feelings which the Sunshine State Inquisitors try to banish by law from the classroom).Good teachers will assist students with how to think through issues; they don’t tell them what to think about issues. It is telling that some conservative crusaders – with an obvious tendency to project their own approach on to others – cannot conceive of teaching this way. To them, education is a weapon; content is not to be debated, but imposed. It is one thing to find fault with the specifics of the “western civ”-style curricula that DeSantis cadres want to do; it’s another to point out that the very approach is a continuation of Trump’s unprofessional 1776 Commission, which can only see history as a patriotic confidence-booster and, indeed, indoctrination.
      Jan-Werner Müller teaches at Princeton and is a Guardian US columnist. His most recent book is Democracy Rules
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