First saw and heard RONALD DION DeSANTIS in a League of Women Voters/St. Augustine Record forum when he was a Congressional candidate in the 2012 closed Republican Primary. He was our Congressman from 2013-2018, and has since encumbered the office of Governor of Florida. What rough beasts aspire to high office, based on meanness? DeSANTIS was unable to carry a single one of Iowa's 99 counties in Republican presidential primaries. His constant bloviating bumptiousness is a disgrace. From Florida Times-Union:
Opinion: DeSantis dishonestly casts Florida doctors as villains in abortion-rights fight
Nate MonroeOctober 29, 2024
This online-only column is part of a series of shorter opinion essays by USA Today Network-Florida columnist Nate Monroe on the constant flow of outrageousness and shadiness in the Sunshine State.
It's lose-lose for doctors in Gov. Ron DeSantis' Florida: Perform a medically necessary abortion past the state's draconian six-week limit and risk future prosecution; decline to do so and face a massive medical-malpractice lawsuit should something go awry with the patient. That is DeSantis' view of Florida's abortion policy, at least taken at his word.
Don't say he banned it, but don't say he didn't ban it, either.
This incompatible slop is DeSantis' latest effort to contort the state's near-total abortion ban into something that sounds more supportive of women: the point being to undermine a proposed constitutional change, called Amendment 4, on the November ballot that would restore the more expansive Roe-era reproductive rights he and his legislative allies deleted last year. During a news conference Tuesday — the latest in an unprecedented multi-million dollar political campaignsponsored by taxpayers — DeSantis rejected arguments raised by Amendment 4 supporters that the narrow medical exceptions to the state's six-week ban were not enough to assuage doctors. What's to stop a prosecutor from determining down the road that a doctor who performed such an abortion did not exercise "reasonable medical judgment," as the state law requires?
Hooey, DeSantis said. "If you have a physician not providing needed health care in these situations ... you should not only get sued, you should have to pay a massive money damage, massive malpractice verdict." He added that he would support reforming the state's medical malpractice law to specifically address this situation.
So now, doctors who never supported this ban in the first place, and want more flexibly to provide abortions, are the villains? Yeah, OK.
It'd be one thing if DeSantis were going around the state telling people to vote against Amendment 4 because he is a practicing Christian and believes abortion is a sin — long the animating motivation for anti-abortion advocates. Instead, he's had state agencies essentially, and temporarily, rewrite the law to make it sound as if women can obtain abortions more or less whenever they need one, the six-week ban notwithstanding. This interpretation will, of course, expire at midnight Nov. 6 should Amendment 4 fail: Florida law will revert back to its antediluvian spirit in short order, and DeSantis, still harboring presidential ambitions, will cast himself as an anti-abortion champion. All that deceptive claptrap (which you paid for) about Florida government support for women and their health needs will vanish from the airwaves.
Nate Monroe is a Florida columnist for the USA Today Network. Follow him on Twitter @NateMonroeTU. Email him at nmonroe@gannett.com.
People in this country have been kept grossly undereducated so that they could be grifted to a husk politically and financially by the upper middle class and above and this countries dysfunction systems. Irrational ideology has been allowed to flourish to the detriment of society. Some of these people are proof and evidence for transitional human species...many even de-evolving before our very eyes.
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