ANNALS OF DeSANTISTAN: Ron DeSantis crosses the line in war against abortion rights | Commentary. (Nate Monroe, Jacksonville Times-Union, September 6, 2024)

Harkening back to the August 2012 primary, I remember seeing cocky then-Congressional candidate RONALD DION DeSANTIS (R-KOCH INDUSTRIES) at the St. Johns County Auditorium, in an aspiring public forum (not really a "debate") sponsored by the League of Women Voters and the St. Augustine Record, which was then a newspaper of general circulation.  (Under hedge fund controlled GANNETT's oligopolistic ownership, SAR has dumbed down its coverage and it no longer prints the news, so much as covers for corporations and their pet politicians).  Great column on DeSANTIS's peculiar abuse of our rights to fair elections by Nate Monroe from the Jacksonville Florida Times-Union: 

Ron DeSantis crosses the line in war against abortion rights | Commentary

Nate Monroe

Jacksonville Florida Times-Union

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis isn't merely campaigning against a popular abortion-rights amendment set to appear on the November ballot: He is turning the organs of state government against it, making a mockery of the notion, enshrined in law, that there should be a firewall between governing and electoral politics. Florida's tinpot governor, whose political potency has been diminished by electoral loss and recent scandal, has abandoned persuasion in lieu of coercion.

Attorney General Ashley Moody unsuccessfully fought to keep the amendment off the ballot entirely. A DeSantis-backed board of bureaucrats successfully dreamed up a bogus disclosure that will be attached to the proposed amendment warning voters that the restoration of abortion rights could somehow "negatively impact the state budget." DeSantis has also marshaled the state's investigative power, having his elections chief lean on county supervisors to examine petition signatures in a wild goose chase for fraud, according to the Tampa Bay Times, even though the deadline to challenge the validity of such signatures, which were needed to get the amendment on the November ballot, has long passed.

Most brazenly, Jason Weida, DeSantis' secretary of the Florida Agency for Health Care Administration, this week shared a special landing page on the agency's official website that contains explicit anti-abortion campaign material, including a claim that the amendment "threatens women's safety" and aspersions cast about the "self interested out of state groups" that support the amendment's passage. Weida dubiously referred to this as a "transparency page," but its true intentions are barely masked: This is an in-kind contribution to opponents of the abortion-rights amendment courtesy of state government and taxpayers.

It's inconceivable this campaign activity didn't involve a substantial use of official state resources beyond Weida's core competencies, which may or may not include web design but definitely include coming up with creative ways to boot needy kids off health insurance. This was — at best — only a marginally legal use of state power but certainly a violation of the spirit of the law. "Absolutely wild how far DeSantis and his admin will go to keep abortion banned in Florida," state Rep. Anna V. Eskamani said this week of Weida's ploy.

This obsequiousness recalls the final, frigid days of DeSantis' presidential primary campaign, when scores of Florida's elected and government officials — including the heads of important regulatory agencies, charged with carrying out non-political work — flocked to Iowa to prop up the illusion DeSantis remained a viable candidate. It was a pitiful but revealing moment: gone was the notion of public service in DeSantis' Florida, replaced instead by service to one.

DeSantis' campaign to fight the amendments expanding abortion rights and legalizing marijuana has attracted out-of-state investment, notwithstanding his administration's suspicion of such money when it supports causes he doesn't like. The largest individual contributor, for example, to the Florida Freedom Fund — a political committee chaired by DeSantis' chief of staff — is Michael Charles Dearing, a venture capitalist with a Wyoming address, according to the group's financial disclosure form. Dearing's $500,000 contribution is about 20 percent of the $2.5 million the committee reported raising through last month.

DeSantis has been on the defensive since signing a six-week abortion ban after a legislative session last year intended to bolster his then-nascent presidential primary campaign. For DeSantis, that presidential campaign was a catastrophe, having robbed him of the electorally invincible "Top Gov" persona he worked for years to cultivate. For Floridians, his political posturing left them saddled with noxious campaign-season policies, like his draconian and unpopular abortion ban.

The six-week restriction is so toxic even Donald J. Trump has run from it, calling it a "terrible mistake" in real time. He continues to tweak DeSantis over it, refusing to back it even under pressure from his evangelical base.

The abortion-rights ballot issue, called Amendment 4, is pretty basic: It would overturn the state's six-week ban and permit abortions until fetal viability, or 24 weeks, the standard under which the country operated for decades until the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022. Although Trump was the architect of that landmark moment, he, unlike his one-time protege, clearly understands how fraught the issue is for Republicans and has clumsily and dishonestly grasped for some kind of softer tone. Not DeSantis.

The state's elected leadership long ago forfeited any claim to be representing a majority of Floridians' interests, and so citizens have time and again forced the issue by organizing and then approving constitutional amendments that often reflect a more moderate vision for the state than the Florida GOP prefers. Wary of this, Florida's non-representative representatives have crafted onerous barriers for citizens pursuing such a path. Amendments have to win 60 percent approval — an enormous difficulty, particularly in this polarized age — and even then the governor and legislature have shown they are willing to defy popular will.

In 2018, for example, Floridians might have been under the impression they overwhelmingly approved the restoration of voting rights to people with past non-violent felony convictions. What they got instead, thanks to after-the-fact hijinks by the governor and legislature, was an impenetrable poll-tax-like scheme that makes it difficult for ex-felons to vote without risking charges of voter fraud.

DeSantis' extreme efforts to fight the expansion of abortion rights and recreational marijuana telegraph a similar future were either or both to become law: If DeSantis can't beat Floridians at the ballot box, he'll try to legislate their popular will into oblivion.

Nate Monroe is a Florida columnist for the USA Today Network. Follow him on Twitter @NateMonroeTU. Email him at nmonroe@gannett.com.