Saturday, September 07, 2024

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


Portrait of Nate MonroeNate 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.

Abortion-rights and anti-abortion activists voice their opinions outside the Florida Supreme Court in February.

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.

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