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      ‘People will die’: why is Ron DeSantis loosening gun laws that most Floridians support?

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      Governor Ron DeSantis went to the Florida capitol earlier this month to sign a bill behind closed doors with a handful of his allies. The bill, one of many hard-right proposals that Florida Republicans hope to pass during this legislative session, has stoked fear and outrage among gun safety advocates: permitless carry.With Republicans’ sweeping control of the state legislature and governorship, the bill – which would allow Floridians to carry guns without a permit or training – easily passed both chambers before being signed into law by DeSantis. The Florida house approved the bill late last month in a vote of 76 to 32, and the senate then passed the proposal in a vote of 27 to 13.The Republicans’ latest push reflects a broader rightward lurch in Florida’s politics since DeSantis took office in 2019, even though Trump carried the battleground state by just three points in 2020. Polls show that a majority of Floridians oppose the policy, and previous surveys have indicated that Florida voters overwhelmingly support other gun safety measures like universal background checks and mandatory waiting periods.Gun safety groups have provided evidence suggesting the permitless carry law will contribute to an increase in violence. They accuse the governor of prioritizing presidential ambitions over his constituents’ safety in a state that has witnessed two of America’s deadliest mass shootings.“It all has to do with talking points and setting him up to run for higher office,” said Congressman Maxwell Frost, a Democrat of Florida. “And as a result, people will die.”No ‘permission slip’ requiredRepublican legislators across the country have embraced permitless carry, or “constitutional carry” to its supporters, in recent years. The policy has won praise from rightwing activists who view any firearm-related regulation as a violation of their second amendment right to bear arms. Florida law previously stipulated that those who wish to carry a concealed gun must complete safety training and undergo a more detailed background check, but Republicans moved to do away with those requirements.“I believe that this comes down to one pretty clear thing that shall not be infringed,” the Republican state senator Jay Collins said at a committee hearing last month. “We don’t need to have the government get in the way of law-abiding citizens’ rights.”Twenty-five states have already enacted laws allowing residents to carry concealed firearms without a permit, and Florida will become the 26th in July, when the policy goes into effect.“A constitutional right should not require a permission slip from the government,” DeSantis said in his State of the State address last month. “It is time we joined 25 other states to enact constitutional carry in the state of Florida.”The proposal had been endorsed by the Florida Sheriffs Association, which represents the 67 elected sheriffs across the state.“Violent career criminals are not applying for a state permit to carry a gun,” Al Nienhuis, the association’s president and sheriff of Hernando county, said at a January press conference. “Removing the permitting process will assist our law-abiding citizens with the protections they need to defend themselves and their families from those criminals who intend to do them harm.”Florida crime statistics appear to challenge that argument. The 2021 Annual Uniform Crime Report showed Florida’s crime rate had reached a 50-year low, a fact that DeSantis himself touted in his state of the state address.Research suggests that removing the permitting requirement to carry concealed guns may instead contribute to a rise in violent crime. One study released in 2019 found that states saw an increase of 13% to 15% in violent crime rates in the years after they loosened regulations on carrying concealed firearms.Those concerns have fueled a divide among Florida’s law enforcement officers. Although the Florida Sheriffs Association supported the bill, a number of officers said they fear the policy will only further endanger them and their colleagues.“It’s not going to make our communities safer,” Sheriff John Mina of Orange county said on The Problem With Jon Stewart. “It’s going to make them more dangerous.”At the March committee hearing on the permitless carry bill, dozens of Florida residents echoed those fears. Isabella Burgos, a volunteer with the gun safety group Students Demand Action and a first-year student at Florida State University, gave emotional testimony about how she regularly fears for her life as she walks around campus. Burgos spoke just weeks after a gunman attacked Michigan State University, killing three students.“I’m at war with the terrors of the chance I may die young,” Burgos said through tears. “This epidemic will turn to utter war with this bill in place. So I urge you all to oppose this deadly bill that would be destructive to our minds and destructive to society – vote no. My life, my children’s lives and your children’s lives depend on it.”A ‘uniquely heinous proposal’In February, Florida marked five years since the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas high school in Parkland, which claimed the lives of 14 students and three educators. The attack came less than two years after a gunman killed 49 people at Pulse, an LGBTQ+ nightclub, in Orlando.For gun safety advocates, Republicans’ introduction of a permitless carry bill on the heels of the Parkland anniversary feels cruel. Debbie Mucarsel-Powell, a former Democratic congresswoman from Florida and now senior adviser to the gun safety group Giffords, described Republicans’ actions as “shameful”.“We are one of the largest states in the country, where we have seen two of the worst mass shootings,” Mucarsel-Powell said. “And we have to continue to do the work to make sure that we protect the lives of Floridians.”As Mucarsel-Powell noted, Florida legislators came together in the aftermath of the Parkland shooting to craft a bipartisan gun safety bill. The legislation, which raised the age requirement for buying a long gun from 18 to 21 and established a “red flag” law allowing law enforcement to seize firearms from those deemed to be dangerous, was signed by the then governor, Rick Scott, a Republican.“Everybody can say that partisanship has increased and the partisan divide is getting bigger, and I think that’s really evident in Florida,” said Cate Allen, a survivor of the Parkland shooting and leader of Students Demand Action. “Our representatives, our congressmen are pursuing political ambitions and personal gain over what their constituents actually want.”Surveys indicate that Florida residents broadly oppose permitless carry. One recent poll conducted by the University of North Florida’s Public Opinion Research Lab showed 77% of Florida voters, including 62% of Republicans, do not support the proposal.“I’m not going to say that the bills that [DeSantis] pushed in the past were good, but I think this one in particular is uniquely heinous,” said Alyssa Ackbar, a Tallahassee-based organizer for the gun safety group March for Our Lives. “The notion of getting rid of the permitting for concealed carry is honestly devastating.”To DeSantis’s critics such as Frost, the governor’s robust support for permitless carry is a particularly alarming example of how his political aspirations have endangered Floridians.“This is just one in a laundry list of legislation that will result in deaths, that will result in harm, that will result in trauma,” Frost said. “But it’s all part of a greater plan here because he’s more interested in running for president than he is in running the state of Florida.”‘Bullying people into submission’Although the permitless carry bill has now passed, gun safety advocates say they are still committed to holding Republican legislators accountable for supporting the widely unpopular bill.“I think it’s important to let lawmakers know that we’re watching them,” said Shannon Watts, founder of the gun safety group Moms Demand Action. “If they do the right thing, we’ll have their back, and if they do the wrong thing, we’ll have their job.”Advocates put a significant share of the blame for the bill on the shoulders of DeSantis, accusing Republican legislators of allowing their allegiance to the governor to take priority over the wishes of their constituents.“We’re seeing a rise of extremism and radicalism from DeSantis and the legislators that are completely loyal to him,” Mucarsel-Powell said. “They will not do anything that he doesn’t support.”Ackbar said she had heard from legislators that some of their colleagues only expressed support for the permitless carry bill because they want to stay in DeSantis’s good graces.“DeSantis has a way of bullying people into submission, into doing what he wants, and I truly believe that this bill is part of that as well,” Ackbar said.Gun safety advocates fear DeSantis will only escalate his demands to relax Florida’s gun regulations as he prepares to launch a presidential campaign, given that he has previously received criticism from hardline gun rights activists. The governor faced accusations of hypocrisy from gun safety advocates and gun rights activists alike in February, after the Washington Post reported on emails showing that DeSantis’s campaign team quietly sought to ban concealed weapons from his own election night party in Tampa last November.Watts mocked DeSantis’s stance as “guns everywhere for thee but not for me”, adding: “The governor knows that it is dangerous for people to have easy access to guns and then show up at his events. And yet, he wants those same people in our schools and in public places. It is the height of hypocrisy.”Gun rights activists have similarly criticized DeSantis for holding events where firearms are prohibited. A gun rights protester was arrested in October for trespassing at an Alachua county Republican party event where DeSantis was speaking, although those charges were later dropped. The protester held a sign reading: “I will not be disarmed by DeSantis.”Even the permitless carry proposal has sparked frustration among gun rights activists, who say the legislation does not go far enough. Those activists instead want a law similar to the one used in Texas, which allows residents to openly carry a gun in public without a permit instead of limiting the policy to concealed weapons. DeSantis’s failure to enact an open permitless carry law reflects “political impotence”, as one gun rights supporter put it at the committee hearing last month.Given those complaints from rightwing activists, gun safety advocates worry that DeSantis will eventually push for an open permitless carry policy in his quest to woo Republican primary voters. The human toll of such a political strategy, they say, could be devastating.“All of his political moves and all of the bullying that he does to have people vote his way, it costs lives,” Ackbar said. “They’re not just talking points. They’re not just political notions. They are real, and there are young people in communities in this state that are constantly harmed by the ways that he pushes these bills.” More

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      Nashville council votes to reinstate expelled Democrat Justin Jones

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      The city of Nashville’s governing council on Monday afternoon voted unanimously to return expelled Black lawmaker Justin Jones to the Tennessee state legislature.The body’s Republican majority state lawmakers had expelled Jones and fellow house member Justin Pearson late last week because they led protests in the chamber demanding gun control after yet another mass shooting in an American school, this one at an elementary school in the city days before.Moments later, Jones marched to the Capitol several blocks away. He took the oath of office on the steps and entered the building while supporters sang This Little Light of Mine.A loud round of applause erupted as Jones walked into the chamber with Democratic representative Gloria Johnson, who was also targeted for expulsion, but spared by one vote.“To the people of Tennessee, I stand with you,” Jones said in his first statement on the house floor. “We will continue to be your voice here. And no expulsion, no attempt to silence us will stop us, but it will only galvanize and strengthen our movement. And we will continue to show up in the people’s house.“Power to the people,” he shouted, to cheers.The other lawmaker, Justin Pearson, could be reappointed Wednesday at a meeting of the Shelby county commission.There was uproar last week and the act was condemned by many as an extraordinary act of political retaliation. Thousands of protesters flocked to the Tennessee state capitol to support the three Democratic members and their expulsion was slammed as racist. Joe Biden had called the move “shocking, undemocratic and without precedent” in a statement.And US vice-president Kamala Harris rushed to Nashville on Friday evening and praised the lawmakers, whom she said “chose to show courage in the face of extreme tragedy”.Jones’ appointment is on an interim basis. Special elections for the seats will take place in the coming months. Jones and Pearson have said they plan to run in the special election.Before the special council session was to begin, a couple of hundred people gathered in front of the Nashville courthouse, and more were pouring in. Some held signs reading, “No Justin, No Peace.” Inside the courthouse, a line of people waited outside the council chambers for the doors to open.Rosalyn Daniel arrived early and waited in line to get a seat in the council chambers. She said she is not in Jones’ district but is a Nashville resident and concerned citizen.“I grew up in Birmingham, Alabama, during the civil rights movement, so I understand why this is so important,” she said.Republican house speaker Cameron Sexton’s spokesperson, Doug Kufner, indicated that whoever is appointed to the vacancies by the Nashville and Shelby county governments “will be seated as representatives as the constitution requires”.House majority leader William Lamberth and Republican Caucus chairman Jeremy Faison said they will welcome back the expelled lawmakers if they are reinstated.“Tennessee’s constitution provides a pathway back for expulsion,” they said in a statement. “Should any expelled member be reappointed, we will welcome them. Like everyone else, they are expected to follow the rules of the house as well as state law.”“The world is watching Tennessee,” attorneys for Jones and Pearson wrote to Sexton in a letter Monday. “Any partisan retributive action, such as the discriminatory treatment of elected officials, or threats or actions to withhold funding for government programs, would constitute further unconstitutional action that would require redress.”Johnson, the third Democrat targeted for expulsion, also attracted national attention.She had suggested race was likely a factor in why Jones and Pearson were ousted but not her. Johnson told reporters it “might have to do with the color of our skin”.GOP leaders have said the expulsions – a mechanism used only a handful times since the civil war – had nothing to do with race and instead were necessary to avoid setting a precedent that lawmakers’ disruptions of house proceedings through protest would be tolerated. More

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      Senate Democrats urge supreme court investigation of Clarence Thomas

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      The US Senate judiciary committee’s Democratic members on Monday unanimously urged the supreme court chief justice, John Roberts, to investigate luxury trips taken by associate justice Clarence Thomas that were paid for by a hugely wealthy Republican party donor.The senators deemed the justice’s conduct inconsistent with ethical standards for “any person in a position of public trust”, they said.The committee will hold a hearing in the coming days on the matter, chairman Richard Durbin, the senior senator from Illinois, and the panel’s 10 other Democratic members wrote in a letter to Roberts.The hearing, they said, would focus on “the need to restore confidence in the supreme court’s ethical standards”.“And if the court does not resolve this issue on its own, the committee will consider legislation to resolve it,” they told Roberts. “But you do not need to wait for Congress to act to undertake your own investigation into the reported conduct and to ensure that it cannot happen again. We urge you to do so.”ProPublica reported last Thursday that Thomas accepted expensive trips from Republican donor and real estate magnate Harlan Crow over decades without disclosing them.Thomas defended the trips on Friday, saying he had been advised he was not required to report that type of “personal hospitality”. But the conservative justice said he would abide by new, tighter rules that recently took effect.Crow told ProPublica he had “never sought to influence Justice Thomas on any legal or political issue”.The senators in the letter told Roberts: “You have a role to play as well, both in investigating how such conduct could take place at the Court under your watch, and in ensuring that such conduct does not happen again.”The report by ProPublica found that Thomas had repeatedly vacationed with Crow, including on his private jet and superyacht in the US and around the globe. The news outlet said the frequency of the gifts has “no known precedent in the modern history of the US supreme court”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“The report describes conduct by a sitting justice that he did not disclose to the public and that is plainly inconsistent with the ethical standards the American people expect of any person in a position of public trust,” the senators wrote.Democratic US representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said on Sunday she wants Thomas impeached over his trips.“It is the House’s responsibility to pursue that investigation in the form of impeachment,” she told CNN in an interview.Ocasio-Cortez acknowledged, however, it was unlikely the Republican majority in the House of Representatives would want to take action against the conservative justice. More

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      The Tennessee GOP presents itself as a defender of democracy. Do not fall for it | Jan-Werner Müller

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      This past week, a Republican supermajority voted to expel two young African American men from the Tennessee legislature; a third Democrat – who happens to be white and female – only narrowly escaped this punishment. The charge? The lawmakers, who are now being called “the Tennessee Three”, had participated in a protest against the GOP’s cynical inaction after the elementary school shooting in Nashville on 27 March.According to Republicans, using bullhorns breached the “decorum” of the legislature. This de facto disfranchisement demonstrates yet again that the problem with the GOP is not one lone demagogue (who may or may not be consumed by lawsuits), but a commitment by plenty of its members to authoritarianism at federal, state and local levels.What’s more, Republicans, in a typical form of projection, now present themselves as defenders of democracy, and Democrats as a source of “disorder” and “dishonor” for sacred political institutions. They even draw a parallel between peaceful protest and the January 6 insurrection. We must not fall for this false equivalence; and we must remember that even measures beyond ordinary protest – namely civil, which is to say peaceful, disobedience – can be legitimate if they serve democratic ends.US states have long functioned as laboratories for autocratic measures, be it vote suppression or gerrymandering. Ron DeSantis and other pioneers of what scholars call autocratic legalism are experimenting in state assemblies to see how they can entirely disempower their opponents through measures that violate the spirit of democracy, but are passed in procedurally correct ways.This happens even in situations where Republicans already have supermajorities and Democrats appear to be condemned to griping from the sidelines. In Oklahoma, a Black, Muslim and non-binary representative, Mauree Turner, was censured and relieved of committee assignments by the GOP-controlled legislature after a transgender activist found refuge in their office. Such measures obviously have a chilling effect; they also send a not-too-subtle signal of what kind of minorities Republicans deem dangerous.Of course, as we have learned the hard way in recent years, knowing how to lose matters greatly in a democracy. Rightwing politicians will charge that protesters against outcomes they don’t like are simply sore losers who throw “temper tantrums”, as the Tennessee GOP sponsor of the expulsion measures put it; maybe not insurrectionists, but, ultimately, in the same category as the January 6 rioters. The right thus turns the charge habitually levelled against Trump and his autocratizer allies around: it is the “woke mob” that is breaking both formal and informal norms on which democracy ultimately depends.This is the politics of false equivalence. For one thing, losers in a democracy do of course remain free to criticize the outcome; all the losers are asked to do is put up with the results, not to shut up about the results. And, at the risk of stating the obvious: a noisy protest is not the same as trying to hang the vice-president and kill the speaker of the House. In situations, however, where results evidently do not reflect what majorities actually want, it is also perfectly legitimate to dramatize this fact in a peaceful manner. After all, the reason why the US remains a country where civilians can brandish assault rifles is not due to some age-old American tradition, nor to the second amendment (which – do we really need a reminder? – regulates militias and does not license individuals to acquire technology made for mass shootings). Rather, it is the multiple veto points that allow well-resourced minorities to block legislation which, in less dysfunctional democracies, would long have long been pushed through. It is not protesters who cause “disorder” and “dishonor” here; it is the cynical defenders of a long-discredited status quo.In the face of such a tyranny of the minority, what some legal scholars call a distinctly democratic form of disobedience – which is to say, peaceful and primarily symbolic, lawbreaking – can be justified. The idea is different from the kind of peaceful law-breaking associated with the civil rights movement; the latter was alerting majorities to a fundamental injustice which absolutely had to be rectified. Democratic disobedience, by contrast, gives leeway for people to decide what they consider legitimate outcomes – but it has to be genuine majorities who make the call, as opposed to special interest groups, or, for that matter, justices apparently beholden to such groups.Democracy is not about decorum or, as the communitarian kitsch endlessly repeated in our age has it, “civility”. Its purpose is to help us deal with disagreements and divisions; the latter will not magically heal if we just keep our voices down or refrain from grabbing bullhorns. Those targeted by the radical right now dominant in many GOP-controlled state legislatures have every reason to make what John Lewis famously called “good trouble, necessary trouble”. More

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      Republicans are a mess right now, and voters know it. Does the party? | Moira Donegan

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      It was supposed to be the Republican party’s last stand, in a state where they had exercised near-absolute control for years, and they had every hope of putting up a good fight. Yet in the end, it wasn’t even close.Millions of dollars had poured into Wisconsin ahead of an election for a seat on the state supreme court, a hotly contested race between a liberal judge and one backed by moneyed rightwing interests. The stakes were high: Wisconsin’s state legislature has been gerrymandered out of competitiveness for more than a decade, for one thing, meaning that the state, which has a roughly even split between Democratic and Republican voters, had nevertheless become a grim experiment in one-party rule, with Republicans commanding a majority of statehouse seats despite receiving far fewer votes proportionally. Federal elections in Wisconsin seemed worryingly vulnerable, too: when Trump sued over his 2020 loss there, making spurious claims of election fraud, the Republican-controlled state supreme court ruled against him by only one vote.But most pressing was abortion. After the US supreme court’s Dobbs decision, the state was thrown into chaos when a wildly sexist law from 1849, banning all abortions, went back into effect. The law is poised to be challenged at the state supreme court, and the rights of half of the Wisconsin population could depend on who controls that court.One of the candidates in the judicial race, Janet Protasiewicz, was open about her beliefs: she frankly described herself as pro-choice. The other, Dan Kelly, brushed off questions about abortion. But he was backed by anti-choice groups, and had long been on the payroll of the Republican party, including in representing them in legal matters pertaining to their 2020 election denial.While Protasiewicz relied on small-dollar donations, Kelly raised plenty of money – much of it from large, out-of-state megadonor funds like the Richard Uihlein-backed Fair Courts America. But Protasiewicz blew him out of the park: she won with a lead of 10 percentage points. Voters’ top concern? Abortion rights.Protasiewicz’s blowout victory in Wisconsin came on the same day that another high-stakes political contest was playing out in New York: the arraignment of Donald Trump on charges of falsifying business records. True to form, Trump incited a chaotic, carnivalesque, and extremely tacky scene outside the Manhattan criminal courthouse as the charges were read against him. The media breathlessly followed every moment of the arraignment, with cable-news cameras even following his plane from Mar-a-Lago, his gaudy resort home in Palm Beach, up to New York.The arraignment has renewed attention on Trump, elevating him from the sideshow status that he has occupied for much of the Biden presidency back into the center of national attention. It has also made it seem much more likely – if still not inevitable – that he may become the Republican nominee. The party’s elite wants to ditch him, and his rivals for the nomination want to defeat him, but Trump still reigns in the hearts of Republican voters. He’s the one they’re comparing every other candidate to – and why settle for imitations when you can have the real thing?But Trump, still, represents a liability for the Republican party, even as he fulfills many of their voters’ most ardent desires and least honorable impulses. He’s a crooked buffoon, and he’s getting weirder and worse; outside of the Republican party itself, most voters don’t like him, don’t find him funny any more, don’t want to put up with his chaos, and don’t like what he’s done to their country.The Republican party, then, is like the dog that caught the car: it had its deepest desires fulfilled, in the form of the withdrawal of abortion rights in Dobbs, and in the form of a candidate who embodies its grievances, in Trump. Republicans got what they wanted. Now, they risk being destroyed by it.The Republican party today is messy, internally divided, filled with self-serving carnival-barkers like Trump and his descendants – George Santos, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert, Matt Gaetz – more interested in garnering publicity for themselves than in securing electoral or policy victories for their party, and most of all, beholden to positions, most notably on abortion, that inflict untold suffering and are increasingly abhorrent to the average voter.Republicans propose sadistic abortion bans that are unpopular with voters, then reject amendments that would allow doctors to save women’s lives without fear of prosecution – making a self-righteous display of their own femicidal barbarity. They enact bans on transgender girls in sports and harness the full power of the state against trans student athletes – who number, in many states, fewer than a dozen.Although party elites periodically propose alternatives to Trump – Ron DeSantis this week, Glenn Youngkin the next – they as yet have no viable presidential candidates who seem able to mount a real challenge to the former president, a man whose legal liabilities are only going to worsen over the coming year, and whom voters already soundly rejected in 2020.But the party’s problems go beyond Trump and the extremist anti-choice regime that his judicial nominees have ushered in. The party has yielded to extremists in its base, placing candidates for office that range from the out of touch to the intensely creepy. Mehmet Oz, who ran for Senate in Pennsylvania last year, has the affect of a snake-oil salesman; Blake Masters, the Peter Thiel lackey who ran in Arizona, comes off as sinister. George Santos, a congressman from New York, seems to have lied about absolutely everything, possibly including his own name.These candidates are not accidents: they are who the Republican voters chose in their primaries, and who the Republican party has cultivated. This is the face that Republicans are putting forward to the country as they head into the 2024 cycle: cruel, creepy, and corrupt.Like the voters themselves, Republican party insiders don’t seem to have much interest in changing course. In January, just weeks after anger over abortion bans and disgust at the extremism of Republican candidates drove the party to a historically weak showing in the 2022 midterms, the Republican National Committee re-elected Ronna McDaniel, a Trump loyalist, for a fourth term as chair. As voters become more and more alienated from the party, Republicans seem serenely confident in their own losing strategy – or, at least, unwilling to change it. Like the Wisconsin supreme court race, the RNC contest became heated, with multiple factions hurling recriminations. But just as the liberal Protasiewicz had a blowout victory in her election, McDaniel’s victory in the RNC chair election was a landslide, too.
      Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More

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      Fewer pronouns, more guns: Ron DeSantis’s plan to turn the US into Florida

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      The title of Governor Ron DeSantis’s book, which he is zealously promoting across the nation, is less important than the subtitle. The Courage to Be Free is a forgettable title shared by a volume by actor and gun rights activist Charlton Heston. But the subtitle, Florida’s Blueprint for America’s Revival, unlocks DeSantis’s national ambitions.While former US president Donald Trump labours under the frayed slogan of “Make America great again”, DeSantis is building a case to “Make America Florida” – a phrase that appears on caps, flags and other merchandise.The governor argues that he has made glorious summer in the Sunshine state. If and when he announces a run for US president in 2024, he will claim that he can repeat the formula in state after state across the US. Florida, his theory goes, is an incubator of conservative ideas that work.He dangles a carrot to Republicans who, weary of Trump’s losing streak, are seeking a saviour. DeSantis writes that when he was elected in 2018, there were nearly 300,000 more registered Democrats than Republicans in Florida; by October 2022, there were more than 300,000 more registered Republicans than Democrats.“What Florida has done is establish a blueprint for governance that has produced tangible results while serving as a rebuke to the entrenched elites who have driven our nation into the ground,” DeSantis writes in The Courage to Be Free.But the governor’s critics question whether his fixation on culture wars (“Florida is where woke goes to die!”) is quite as popular as it seems. They also contend that, with numerous climatic, economic and social problems, Florida is not quite the paradise that DeSantis likes to portray.“What it is is a blueprint for is people who want to abuse their power in order to target people who disagree with them politically,” said Maxwell Frost, the youngest member of Congress, who represents a Florida district. “That’s what we’ve seen from someone like Governor DeSantis.“What we’re exporting out of Florida is fascism. For him to sit there and say, ‘Oh, yeah, my bill on banning trans kids from talking about who they are is now equated to a top education system,’ it’s just a bunch of bullshit, to be honest. Most Floridians hopefully will see through that.”DeSantis, 44, as governor of the third most populous state has imposed limits on how race and sexuality can be taught in schools, forcing some teachers to remove books from their libraries. He has also banned transgender girls from school sports, redrawn the state’s political maps to favour Republicans, attacked Disney and other businesses that disagree with his ideology, and cracked down on Black Lives Matter protests.Then there was the coronavirus pandemic. The governor mostly followed guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention during the early months, closing Florida’s beaches, bars and schools. But he pivoted in early 2021, reopening schools before other states and banning face mask and vaccine mandates in businesses and government. When the media questioned his approach, he hit back pugnaciously to the delight of a base that revels in “owning the libs”.DeSantis claimed vindication last year when he smashed fundraising records and won re-election by nearly 20 percentage points in what used to be a swing state, albeit against a weak candidate from a disorganised Democratic party. Republicans saw hope that DeSantis has cracked the code for a party that has lost the popular vote in six of the last seven presidential elections.The party now enjoys a supermajority in the Florida state legislature and is pushing issues such as telling teachers which pronouns they can use for students, making guns more available and easier to carry, keeping immigrants who are in the country illegally out of the state and criminalising some drag shows.Republicans argue that DeSantis’s agenda explains why Florida ranks number one in the nation for net in-migration. About 319,000 people moved there last year, according to an analysis of census data by the National Association of Realtors, while California lost the most residents, with 343,000 departing.Christian Ziegler, chairman of the Florida Republican party, said: “You’re seeing people leave other states that have completely opposite ideology and political positions and policy positions. California, New York – everyone’s leaving those states and everyone’s flocking to our state. That validates the claim that Florida is a working model. If it was a cellphone, it would probably be the Apple iPhone. Everyone wants it, everyone’s buying it and everyone’s gravitating towards it.”Part of the attraction, Ziegler claims, is DeSantis’s “pro-freedom” approach to the pandemic, which allowed businesses and tourism to bounce back more quickly than elsewhere, and his support for what Republicans frame as “parents’ rights”.“I can’t tell you how many parents have moved here from other states because they want their kids in school not shut down, not to have masks forced on them, not to have a vaccine forced on them,” he said.Critics of DeSantis present a very different version, noting that Florida has long been a magnet because of its sunny weather and lack of state income tax. The pandemic, and the rise of remote working, made it especially attractive to people fleeing expensive big cities such as New York. (The trend may be temporary: latest census data shows that Manhattan’s population grew last year.)Speaking from Sarasota, Ziegler also defended DeSantis’s controversial policies on the teaching of US racial history. “From my standpoint, I can tell you we learned about the injustices of slavery. We learned about the heroic efforts of Harriet Tubman or Dr Martin Luther King Jr,” he said. “That is far different than the critical race theory, where they’re trying to point out that everyone in society is oppressed or an oppressor or that just the colour of your skin is going to make you biased and hateful.”This is a misrepresentation of critical race theory, which examines the ways in which racism was embedded into American law and other modern institutions, maintaining the dominance of white people. It is not typically taught in public schools.Progressives dispute the assertion that DeSantis’s focus on hot-button culture war issues is working.“He’s selling a blueprint for hate and bigotry,” said Brandon Wolf, press secretary of the LGBTQ+ rights organisation Equality Florida and a survivor of the Pulse nightclub shooting in 2016. “Ron DeSantis is being honest about one thing and that is that he is trying to sell the snake oil of his authoritarian tactics in Florida to the rest of the country.”Wolf pointed out that, beneath the veneer of prosperity that the governor projects, there are plenty of shadows in the state. A haven for retirees, Florida has the worst long-term care for elderly people among all 50 states, according to the American Association of Retired Persons. It is among 10 states that have refused to expand Medicaid, a public health insurance programme for people with low income, under the Affordable Care Act. It ranks 16th worst for healthcare among the 50 states, says the Commonwealth Fund, a grant-making foundation that supports independent healthcare research.Meanwhile the cost of living is spiralling. Norada Real Estate Investments found that Florida home values have risen by 80% over the past five years. The cost of home insurance is rising fast as the market struggles to deal with stronger hurricanes and more intense rainstorms due to the climate crisis.“Leaning into the culture war issues was successful for him and the challenge that I pose to that is ask any everyday Floridian: what are the top five things keeping them up at night? I guarantee you, they’re not going to say someone in a wig reading Red Fish Blue Fish at the library,” Wolf said.“The question of has Florida been wildly successful is best posed to people who are kept up at night by the cost of housing, the potential for dangerous storms,” he added. “You just ask them if Florida feels like the most successful and freest state in the nation.”Education is another such example. While DeSantis has created political theatre around pandemic measures and racial and sexual identity, the state faces a severe shortage of teachers in its long-underfunded public schools. Florida ranked 49th in the country for average teacher pay in 2020, according to the National Education Association.Tim Canova, a law professor at Nova Southeastern University in Fort Lauderdale and a former congressional candidate, said: “Teachers are underpaid, understaffed, the curriculums are dictated centrally on down, whether it’s Common Core federal standards or from the state in Tallahassee.“It’s a miserable job for teachers. They don’t have much autonomy. They’ve got big class sizes. They don’t get paid much. They’ve got to constantly fill out reports about their teaching. It’s a problem that’s way beyond Florida but the schools in Florida have been weak for a long time.”Research by Data for Progress, a progressive polling firm and advocacy group, also raises questions about the viability of DeSantis’s hard-right policies beyond Florida’s borders, with independent voters across the country largely siding with Democrats on culture war issues.A survey of 1,252 likely voters nationally from 17 to 20 March found that 41% support and 50% oppose mandating K-12 libraries to immediately remove and review books flagged as inappropriate; 37% support and 47% oppose eliminating college diversity, equity and inclusion programmes; 39% support and 46% oppose banning college majors and minors in critical race theory.Danielle Deiseroth, interim executive director of Data for Progress, said: “Most Americans might agree that they like Florida’s weather. They certainly don’t like policies being put forward by Governor DeSantis and Florida lawmakers, especially on some of these culture war issues that have been dominating, especially on rightwing news media.”“In terms of DeSantis positioning himself for a potential presidential run in ’24, which seems all but certain at this point, these extreme policies are going to alienate a lot of voters right off the bat,” she said. “Women in particular were one of the groups most opposed to many of these policies.”Last year’s midterm election results appear to support this view as far-right Republicans underperformed among female voters, in part because of their extreme positions on issues such as abortion after the supreme court’s decision to overturn Roe v Wade. DeSantis is expected to sign a six-week abortion ban, even though polls show that a majority of Floridians oppose it.DeSantis critic Rick Wilson, a fifth-generation Floridian and Republican strategist, has been involved in more than 30 political campaigns in the state, and co-founded the Lincoln Project, an anti-Trump group. Based in the state capital, Tallahassee, Wilson is sceptical of the notion that Florida could be the laboratory of ideas for a Republican revival.Recalling Texas governor Rick Perry’s failed presidential campaign, he said: “Perry came out and said, ‘I did all these conservative things, I’m the champion, I could make Washington work like Texas.’ That was his biggest line and it fell flatter than a pancake. That was also Jeb Bush’s argument: ‘I was Florida’s most conservative governor, I accomplished all these amazing conservative reforms.’”Far from a blueprint for America, Wilson describes Florida as “the Petri dish of bad ideas”. He added: “There is a slowly emerging theme among some conservatives I’ve been talking to of ‘I wish he’d do more about tax cuts and less about book banning, and talk more about smaller government and less about using government to punish people.’“In Maga world, that authoritarian stuff sells pretty well. But again, you can’t out-Trump Trump.”That authoritarian streak alarms activists who say DeSantis and his allies have pushed voter suppression bills to marginalise people of colour. His Florida model, they argue, would pose a fundamental threat to civil rights if exported elsewhere.Jasmine Burney-Clark, founder of Equal Ground, a Black-led civic engagement organisation, said: “It is not a state where people of colour, particularly Black people who have been on the other end as targets of his attacks, are feeling like this is a model for success, freedom or liberation.“If you are invested in a world that is seeded in white supremacy, hate and racist policies, then it is absolutely the perfect blueprint for the rest of the nation.” More

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      Trump bets indictments could make him 2024 nominee

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      Donald Trump appeared angry and shaken during his arraignment in Manhattan criminal court on Tuesday, but he had brushed off the moment by the weekend, contending that the indictment and other legal troubles would carry him to the 2024 Republican nomination, people close to him said.With his status as a criminal defendant subjecting him to the structures of the judicial process, the former president is playing an increasingly high-stakes game to inextricably tie his legal strategy to his political gameplan as he seeks to recapture the Oval Office next year.Trump’s wager is that using his legal troubles as a campaign issue will harden support from his base and Republican elected officials, and that support could undercut or falsely delegitimize prosecutions in Georgia or by the US justice department in other various criminal investigations.The approach may or may not work, and Trump’s advisers acknowledge that campaigning on his personal legal issues that appeal to Republican primary voters could backfire in a general election where independent voters might recoil at re-electing a former president who is charged with 34 felonies.But the benefits to Trump of using for campaign purposes his indictment over hush money allegedly paid to adult film star Stormy Daniels in 2016 has been readily apparent, providing him with a boost across all areas: in polling, in fundraising and in wall-to-wall media coverage.The person most hurt by the indictment, his advisers contend, was his expected rival for the Republican nomination: the Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, who was forced to come to Trump’s defense and still fell behind him in multiple polls, which suggested a trend rather than an outlier result.In a recent Yahoo news poll, Trump was beating DeSantis 57% to 31% in a hypothetical one-to-one contest and was attracting majority support, at 52%, when pitted against a wider, 10-candidate field including DeSantis as well as the UN ambassador in the Trump administration, Nikki Haley.Trump improved his lead over DeSantis in internal polling by McLaughlin and Associates, which surveyed 1,000 likely 2024 general election voters and found Trump would beat DeSantis 63% to 30%, improving his lead from January when he was at 52% and DeSantis at 40%.Trump’s allies also noted the indictment snapped Republican members of Congress into line, with House judiciary committee chair Jim Jordan sending a flurry of subpoenas to the Manhattan district attorney’s office to get confidential information about the case against him.And Trump received a boost in fundraising, with his campaign claiming it raised more than $12m in donations in the week after the indictment. Roughly a third was from first-time donors, though the actual figure won’t be available for confirmation for several weeks.Whether the political pressure – as well as the personal attacks on prosecutors that Trump has vowed to launch – works to dissuade prosecutors is less clear. In Georgia, prosecutors expect to charge Trump and dozens of others over efforts to overturn the 2020 election in that state, a person familiar with the matter said.But if Trump cannot actually stave off prosecutions, then the next best outcome for him is to at least raise suspicions among voters across the country that the cases are politically motivated, his advisers have suggested in conversations with his legal team.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionEven beyond the major news events like Trump’s indictment or his arraignment in the New York hush money case, advisers and associates have discussed for weeks about how tying the legal strategy to the political strategy remains a winning formula, if only in the short term.At least one Trump associate noted that the former president was a “guilty pleasure” for everyone in the political ecosystem, describing how Trump-related developments give Democrats an issue to rail against and Republicans an issue to rally behind, and boost ratings for cable news outlets.The wall-to-wall coverage of Trump’s arraignment – including helicopter shots following Trump boarding his plane from his Florida Mar-a-Lago resort to New York and speedboats dogging his motorcade as it drove down FDR Drive in Manhattan – increased ratings for every major TV network.On the evening after the arraignment, Fox News topped 6.4 million viewers on Tucker Carlson’s show. MSNBC hit 2.8 million viewers and CNN peaked at 2.2 million viewers for their special coverage, exceeding their top-rated shows in the first quarter of 2023, which had respectively hauled in 3.3 million, 1.4 million and 0.6 million viewers.The Trump team has been watching cable news viewership closely. Last month, when Trump spoke at the Conservative Political Action Conference, he mocked an aide for talking to CNN because of its recent ratings dip and later laughed at how TV networks would hire a speedboat “only for Trump”. More