Author Topic: Gov. Ron DeSantis  (Read 34228 times)


DougMacG

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Re: Gov. Ron DeSantis: Let's send illegals to Delaware and Martha's Vineyard
« Reply #51 on: December 15, 2021, 06:39:09 AM »
Perfect.  And keep sending them until the rich liberals tell us how many is too many, and why.  Overrunning resources, they don't care.  MS13 gangs, they don't care.  In their front and back yard and on their streets and sidewalks and half of them voting Republican, now they care. They might demand the border be closed and put a work requirement on welfare.


Crafty_Dog

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Gov. Ron DeSantis moves to pull FL pension funds out of China
« Reply #53 on: December 22, 2021, 03:51:30 AM »
DeSantis aims to pull all state pension funds out of China

Investors accused of ties

BY JAMES VARNEY THE WASHINGTON TIMES

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and some of his administration’s top officials moved Monday to take control of the state’s huge pension portfolio from private asset managers that invest heavily in communist China.

At a meeting of the State Board of Administration, Florida Chief Financial Officer Jimmy Patronis and Attorney General Ashley Moody joined Mr. DeSantis, a Republican, in a motion to “revoke all proxy voting authority that has been given to outside fund managers.”

The state officials said they need to ensure that fund managers “act solely in the financial interest of the state’s funds.”

The measure also orders a survey of the Florida Retirement System’s investments “to determine how many assets the state has in Chinese companies.”

The state took action after Consumers’ Research, a conservative watchdog group, launched a campaign accusing BlackRock, the world’s largest investment company by assets under management, of close and growing ties with Beijing.

The bond between BlackRock CEO Larry Fink

and China’s communist leaders also has drawn criticism from left-wing billionaire George Soros.

In addition to investing clients’ money in Chinese companies, BlackRock was awarded a contract to sell mutual funds in China. The venture has raked in some $1 billion, according to published reports.

“I would like the SBA to survey the investments that are currently being done,” Mr. DeSantis said in a statement. “When the Legislature comes back, they can make statutory changes to say that the Communist Party of China is not a vehicle that we want to be entangled with. I think that that would be something that would be very, very prudent.”

Figures for BlackRock’s investments in China are difficult to pinpoint, but they represent a small portion of the more than $9.6 trillion in assets that the firm manages.

BlackRock’s China A Opportunities Fund, which has returned more than 32% since its 2018 inception, has more than $47.4 million, according to its most recent report.

“BlackRock has been using their proxy votes to hamper American companies, leading to higher burdens on Americans when we can least afford it,” Consumers’ Research Executive Director Will Hild said. “They have used American investment dollars to cozy up to the Chinese Communist Party in a betrayal of our nation that puts American pension dollars at risk.”

BlackRock declined a request for comment.

Although Mr. Fink is an ardent supporter of green initiatives and BlackRock has tried to force American companies to follow an environmental agenda, China is the world’s biggest producer of greenhouse gases.

China also has been accused of numerous human rights violations, including forcing Muslimminority Uyghurs into labor camps, stifling Hong Kong’s traditional democracy, and silencing and coercing tennis star Peng Shuai over rape charges against a high government official.

National security officials have raised concerns about investments in Chinese companies that operate with the permission of the communist leadership and, in some cases, work closely with the military.

Published reports show Black-Rock has invested in at least two Chinese companies, iFlytek and Hikvision, that have been added to the U.S. “entity list” as national security and foreign policy threats.

It is not illegal to invest in such companies, although they are forbidden from trading with U.S. corporations.

Florida’s announcement is the latest in a string of state initiatives to signal that companies should focus on business and profits for shareholders rather than a political agenda.

Last month, West Virginia Treasurer Riley Moore led a coalition of 15 states that threatened to pull funds if bankers tried to stifle oil and gas companies to appease environmentalists.

Mr. Moore called the warning a “pushback against woke capitalism.”

Some top Florida officials supported Mr. DeSantis’ concern Monday.

“As Americans got our cheap goods, the Chinese government wasn’t playing by the rules when it came to intellectual property or trade,” Mr. Patronis said.

“I take my fiduciary responsibilities seriously, and I think the SBA needs to start asking harder questions when it comes to whether investing any more in China is a good idea. It seems limiting our exposure to China is not only good for our country, but it is the financially prudent thing to do for our state,” he said.

The Securities and Exchange Commission and other federal agencies have cautioned that Chinese investments can be subject to the whims of communist leaders and are outside the influence of U.S. or other regulators.

In September, the SEC warned of risks associated with variable interest entities, which are listed on U.S. stock markets but are essentially shell companies with no control over the Chinese entities.




Crafty_Dog

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Gov. Ron DeSantis
« Reply #57 on: January 03, 2022, 07:12:08 PM »

Crafty_Dog

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Gov. Ron DeSantis on Jan. 6
« Reply #58 on: January 07, 2022, 07:44:39 AM »

Crafty_Dog

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Gov. Ron DeSantis proposes special police agency to monitor elections
« Reply #59 on: January 18, 2022, 10:16:20 AM »
Sounds great to me!!!

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/01/18/florida-governor-proposes-special-police-agency-monitor-elections/?utm_campaign=wp_post_most&utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&wpisrc=nl_most&carta-url=https%3A%2F%2Fs2.washingtonpost.com%2Fcar-ln-tr%2F35ca445%2F61e6f9229d2fda14d7f965dc%2F61cdf026ae7e8a4ac205b2b3%2F11%2F72%2F61e6f9229d2fda14d7f965dc

Florida governor proposes special police agency to monitor elections
No state has such a force, which Gov. Ron DeSantis wants empowered to arrest voters and others who allegedly violate election laws
DeSantis proposes special police agency to monitor elections
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) during his State of the State address on Jan. 11 said he would establish a special “election integrity unit” to monitor elections. (The Florida Channel)
By Lori Rozsa and Beth Reinhard
Today at 6:30 a.m. EST



WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. — A plan by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis would establish a special police force to oversee state elections — the first of its kind in the nation — and while his fellow Republicans have reacted tepidly, voting rights advocates fear that it will become law and be used to intimidate voters.

The proposed Office of Election Crimes and Security would be part of the Department of State, which answers to the governor. DeSantis is asking the GOP-controlled legislature to allocate nearly $6 million to hire 52 people to “investigate, detect, apprehend, and arrest anyone for an alleged violation” of election laws. They would be stationed at unspecified “field offices throughout the state” and act on tips from “government officials or any other person.”

DeSantis highlighted his plan as legislators opened their annual 60-day session last week.



“To ensure that elections are conducted in accordance with the rule of law, I propose an election integrity unit whose sole focus will be the enforcement of Florida’s election laws,” he said during his State of the State address. “This will facilitate the faithful enforcement of election laws and will provide Floridians with the confidence that their vote will matter.”

Voting rights experts say that no state has such an agency, one dedicated to patrolling elections and empowered to arrest suspected violators. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) announced the formation of a “2021 Texas Election Integrity Unit” in October, but that office is more limited in scope, has fewer than 10 employees and isn’t under the governor’s authority.

“There’s a reason that there’s no office of this size with this kind of unlimited investigative authority in any other state in the country, and it’s because election crimes and voter fraud are just not a problem of that magnitude,” said Jonathan Diaz, a voting rights lawyer at the nonprofit Campaign Legal Center. “My number one concern is that this is going to be used as a tool to harass or intimidate civic-engagement organizations and voters.”


Florida’s congressional Democrats expressed similar worries when they asked the U.S. Justice Department to investigate “a disturbing rise in partisan efforts at voter suppression” in the state. They took aim specifically at DeSantis’s call for election police.

“Harmful proposals to create new partisan bodies to oversee our voting process are exactly the kind of action that demand oversight as we work to ensure that our voting process is unquestionably trustworthy,” they wrote Thursday in a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland.


Florida voters line up outside the Hialeah John F. Kennedy Library on Nov. 3, 2020 to cast their ballots in the general election. (Michael Robinson Chavez/The Washington Post)
Unlike many past elections, the 2020 general election in Florida had few problems. The governor touted it as “the gold standard.”

“The way Florida did it, I think, inspired confidence,” DeSantis said on Nov. 4, 2020, hours after the results showed that President Donald Trump had won the state by more than three percentage points. “I think that’s how elections should be run.”


But in the wake of Trump’s ultimate defeat, as he and his supporters spread falsehoods about election fraud nationwide and demanded audits in numerous states, many Republicans in Florida pressed DeSantis to do the same.

Though he resisted an audit, DeSantis signed a controversial bill last year curtailing some voting options that had helped to expand participation. The law — which is being challenged in court, with a trial set to begin Jan. 30 — limits the use of ballot drop boxes, adds requirements to request mail ballots, and bans groups or individuals from gathering absentee ballots on other voters’ behalf.

No legislators have signed on to sponsor DeSantis’s new proposal. House Speaker Chris Sprowls (R) said DeSantis is concerned that existing law enforcement agencies don’t have the expertise necessary to find and prosecute election crimes. Yet he hasn’t embraced the governor’s approach. “We’re going to look at it, we’ll evaluate it and see what happens,” Sprowls said last week.


As with all committees in the Capitol in Tallahassee, Republicans are in the majority on the House Public Integrity & Elections Committee. Neither the committee chairman nor vice chairman returned calls for comment. The panel has not scheduled a hearing on the DeSantis proposal.

Last month, Secretary of State Laurel Lee spoke to a meeting of the Florida Supervisors of Elections association to explain the governor’s plan. Some of the officials who run elections in each of Florida’s 67 counties were alarmed by what they heard. They fear overreach from the executive branch, especially in a year when DeSantis is running for reelection.

Broward County Supervisor of Elections Joe Scott said he’s concerned that the new unit would be “applied in a very partisan way” and certain that his heavily Democratic county would be a target.

“It seems as if this is going to focus on a lot of grass-roots organizations that are out there trying to get people registered to vote, as well as people out there doing petition drives,” Scott said. “I think this is going to lead to people being intimidated if they’re civically involved. I don’t want people to be scared away from doing those kinds of things.”


An election worker sorts vote-by-mail ballots at the Miami-Dade County Board of Elections in Doral, Fla., ahead of the 2020 general election. Months later, the legislature passed measures making it harder for residents to vote by mail. (Lynne Sladky/AP)
State Rep. Geraldine Thompson, the ranking Democrat on the House Public Integrity & Elections Committee, thinks the new agency would be a waste of money. In addition to its funding, DeSantis wants $1.1 million for eight new positions in other departments — to address what he describes as a growing caseload of election crimes. The Department of State received 262 election-fraud complaint forms in 2020 and referred 75 to law enforcement or prosecutors. About 11 million Floridians cast ballots for president that November.


“The governor and other officials in Florida said the 2020 election was the most secure and efficiently run election that we ever had,” Thompson said. “So I see absolutely no reason for this elections commission to be established, particularly at the cost that he is proposing.”

Voter fraud is rare, and critics note that state attorneys and local police are already in place to investigate alleged election crimes. The state’s 67 elections supervisors are also trained to look for fraud.

“The bottom line is there is no widespread election fraud in Florida,” said Hillsborough State Attorney Andrew Warren, a Democrat. “It’s a microscopic amount. Elections today are the most secure that they have ever been. This is not a serious policy proposal. This is a door prize for a QAnon pep rally.”

Hans von Spakovsky, an election law expert at the conservative Heritage Foundation, supports Desantis’s plan and hopes it becomes a “model” for other states. Investigating election fraud requires special training and commitment that are lacking in many law enforcement agencies, he said. The foundation’s database of election fraud cases nationwide shows only three convictions in Florida in the last three years.


Support for the governor’s proposal should be bipartisan, according to DeSantis press secretary Christina Pushaw.

“Ensuring that every legal vote counts, as Governor DeSantis strives to do, is the opposite of ‘voter suppression,’ ” Pushaw said via email. “We do not understand why any politician, Democrat or Republican, would be opposed to allocating sufficient resources to ensure our election laws are enforced.”

Cecile Scoon, a lawyer who is president of the League of Women Voters Florida, called an elections security force controlled by a governor an alarming concept.

“So to have your own elections SWAT team, that would be under the direction of the secretary of state, who is under the direction of the governor, is not a comfortable feeling,” Scoon said. “Having governmental officials like this, traveling about overlooking elections just to see if there’s something going on, is very chilling, very scary and very reminiscent of past governmental interference that was directed to Black voters.”

ccp

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Roger Stone Trump surrogate
« Reply #60 on: January 18, 2022, 11:15:12 AM »

G M

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Re: Roger Stone Trump surrogate
« Reply #61 on: January 18, 2022, 11:19:31 AM »
http://republicbrief.com/roger-stone-attacks-desantis-hes-not-honest-and-not-going-to-be-president/

"DeSantis is not honest" [unlike Donald Trump -  :roll:]

After all this, don't be surprised if DeSantis ends up on the ticket.

ccp

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Re: Gov. Ron DeSantis
« Reply #62 on: January 18, 2022, 11:39:32 AM »
"After all this, don't be surprised if DeSantis ends up on the ticket"

the only way I would be happy with that is if DeSantis is Prez and Trump VP

(I know not possible)





Crafty_Dog

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Gov. Ron DeSantis bitch slaps House of Mouse
« Reply #67 on: March 31, 2022, 09:13:22 AM »
DeSantis puts Disney in bad light in ‘don’t say gay’ fight

Hits back with China ties, California culture

BY VALERIE RICHARDSON THE WASHINGTON TIMES

The Walt Disney Co. may have placated the left by vowing to fight Gov. Ron DeSantis’ newly signed parental bill of rights, but it turns out the Florida Republican knows how to return a punch.

Disney found itself with a public relations debacle on its hands Wednesday as Mr. DeSantis took a sledgehammer to the House of Mouse, using the spotlight to skewer its record on China and framing the skirmish as a battle between Florida and California values. “For them to say that [they], as a Californiabased company, are going to work to take those California values and overturn a law that was duly enacted and, as you said, supported by a strong majority of Floridians, they don’t run this state,” the governor said during an appearance Tuesday on Fox’s “Tucker Carlson Tonight.”

“They will never run this state as long as I’m governor,” he added.

Providing a timely assist was Manhattan Institute senior fellow Christopher Rufo, who released video clips from a virtual meeting of Disney executives touting the company’s decision to eliminate “gendered greetings” and advance LGBTQ narratives in its entertainment programming.

Those in the video included Vivian Ware, Disney diversity and inclusion manager, who said the company last year eliminated its “ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls” voiceover ahead of its Magic Kingdom fireworks show and replaced it with “dreamers of all ages.”

“We don’t want to just assume that because someone might be, in our interpretation, may be presenting as female that they may not want to be called princess,” Ms. Ware said. “So let’s think differently about how do we really engage with our guests in a meaningful and inclusive way that makes it magical and memorable for everyone.”

Conservatives quickly pointed out the irony of Disney squelching terms such as “boys and girls” while tarring the Florida legislation as the “don’t say gay” bill.

“It’s amazing that Disney executives were falsely accusing Ron DeSantis of ‘Don’t Say Gay’ while they were requiring theme park employees to eliminate the words ‘ladies,’ ‘gentlemen,’ ‘boys,’ and ‘girls,’” Mr. Rufo tweeted.

Disney had no comment Wednesday on the DeSantis criticism or the video clips, which helped

fuel Wednesday’s conservative backlash over the company’s opposition to House Bill 1557.

“I think this is an American realization that Disney is not the Disney of our childhood,” former Rep. Sean Duffy, Wisconsin Republican, said on Fox’s “The Faulkner Focus.” “They’ve gone very progressive, very woke, and the fact that they want to sexualize our children and our children’s childhoods for their own political agenda is incredibly disturbing.”

Democratic strategist Brad Woodhouse blamed the uproar on the Republican “outrage machine.” He said it was calculated to stoke the base in an election year.

Mr. DeSantis is leading in the polls on his November reelection bid. The first-term governor is also seen as a top prospect for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination.

“First of all, the outrage here is not about Disney, and this whole issue is not about Disney,” Mr. Woodhouse said. “God bless the outrage machine. Nobody does it better. This is about Ron DeSantis and a Republican legislature that is dividing people and demeaning people simply for the purpose of dividing and demeaning people. It’s a political strategy.”

The bill bans classroom instruction on sexual orientation or gender identity in grades K-3 and “instruction that is not age appropriate for students,” the governor’s office said.

The measure also requires “school districts to adopt procedures for notifying parents if there is a change in services from the school regarding a child’s mental, emotional or physical health or well-being,” including changes adopted at school to the child’s name or gender identity.

“This [bill] is so uncontroversial, polling has shown even a majority of Florida Democrat voters support it,” said Terry Schilling, president of the American Principles Project. “However, woke leftists at Disney and elsewhere are so invested in their project to initiate young children into their sexual ideology that they cannot help but oppose this legislation.”

Whether the brouhaha ultimately will benefit Mr. DeSantis or Disney is subject to debate.

Mr. Schilling said that “DeSantis and Florida Republicans were incredibly smart to pick this battle, and as we are soon likely to see, it will not end well for Disney’s woke leaders and their Democrat proxies.”

The anti-Trump Lincoln Project disagreed. It tweeted that “Ron DeSantis is not only attacking LGBTQ+ communities and their families, he also thinks it’s a good idea to attack Florida’s biggest tourist attraction and the hard-working Floridians that work there.”

Shortly after Mr. DeSantis signed the bill Monday, Disney released a statement saying the legislation “should never have been passed and should never have been signed into law.”

“Our goal as a company is for this law to be repealed by the legislature or struck down in the courts, and we remain committed to supporting the national and state organizations working to achieve that,” Disney said. “We are dedicated to standing up for the rights and safety of LGBTQ+ members of the Disney family, as well as the LGBTQ+ community in Florida and across the country.”

Mr. DeSantis accused Disney of showing no interest in the bill while it moved through the Legislature, but reacting only under pressure from “the woke mob.”

Disney CEO Bob Chapek this month sent a memo to employees apologizing for not speaking out against the bill and promising to donate to LGBTQ groups, including the Human Rights Campaign. He also said he would “pause” political donations in Florida.

“Speaking to you, reading your messages, and meeting with you have helped me better understand how painful our silence was,” Mr. Chapek said in the memo reprinted March 11 in The Hollywood Reporter. “It is clear that this is not just an issue about a bill in Florida, but instead yet another challenge to basic human rights. You needed me to be a stronger ally in the fight for equal rights and I let you down. I am sorry.”

That wasn’t enough for some Disney employees, who staged a March 22 walkout against the bill in Burbank, California, and demanded in an open letter that the company cease donations to the bill’s legislative supporters.

“The recent statements by The Walt Disney Company (TWDC) leadership regarding the Florida legislature’s recent ‘Don’t Say Gay’ bill have utterly failed to match the magnitude of the threat to LGBTQIA+ safety represented by this legislation,” the letter said.

Mr. DeSantis has pointed out that the word “gay” does not appear in the bill.

“So they say it’s banning a word that literally isn’t even in the legislation,” he said. “It’s not even like they’re misrepresenting the way the word is used. It’s not even used in the bill. It’s a fake narrative. It’s a lie.”

Those weighing in on the fracas include prominent gay conservatives such as former Trump administration official Ric Grenell, columnist Tammy Bruce and Fox News pundit and radio host Guy Benson.

Mr. Grenell tweeted that Disney “never helped in any way” on the Trump administration’s campaign to decriminalize homosexuality in countries where the practice is still illegal. Ms. Bruce blasted “the narcissism of projecting our adult issues onto kids.”

Mr. Benson tweeted: “1) Is Disney opposed to the part that bars sexual/gender identity instruction for K-3 students? Or another part of the bill? 2) Has Disney put out a statement this forceful on the genocide in China, where they eagerly do business? Trying to pinpoint their ‘corporate values.’” Mr. DeSantis also rebooted the criticism over Disney’s 2020 live-action movie “Mulan,” parts of which were filmed in Xinjiang, where more than 1 million members of the mostly Muslim Uyghur minority are thought to have been held in internment camps.

“People asked me kind of about their posture on the bill, and I said, you know what? If we would have put in the bill that you were not allowed to have curriculum that discussed the oppression of the Uyghurs in China, Disney would have endorsed that in a second,” Mr. DeSantis said at a Tuesday press conference.

Disney Chief Financial Officer Christine McCarthy said in September 2020 that the film was shot mostly in New Zealand and that it was common practice in the film industry to credit the nations where the movie was shot, according to Deadline.

As far as Mr. DeSantis is concerned, however, Disney should be more concerned with its own human rights record.

“They’re fine lining their pockets from the [Chinese Communist Party] and all the atrocities that go on there,” he said. “But it’s those kindergartners in Florida that they really want to have transgenderism as part of their core curriculum in school.

DougMacG

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Re: Gov. Ron DeSantis bitch slaps House of Mouse
« Reply #68 on: March 31, 2022, 11:53:21 AM »
Strange situation all the way around, a company like Disney being so anti-children, and a Governor fighting with such a (should be) important constituent company.

State of Minnesota used to fight with 3M (MN Mining & Manufacturing Co.) over taxes and laws.  The State said screw you and 3M kept hiring and expanding... outside of MN. Disney world is not as mobile and DeSantis has plenty of new employers coming in, faster than they can find room.

DougMacG

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Re: Gov. Ron DeSantis yard sign
« Reply #69 on: April 29, 2022, 12:52:28 PM »




Crafty_Dog

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NR gets a nice DeSantis article in Pravda on the Hudson
« Reply #73 on: May 12, 2022, 07:47:07 PM »
Republicans Need a New Leader. They’re Looking to Florida.
May 12, 2022, 4:55 p.m. ET

Credit...Damon Winter/The New York Times

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By Rich Lowry

Mr. Lowry is the editor of National Review.

Two weeks ago, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida appeared with the Fox News host Laura Ingraham for a town hall that lasted the full hour of her prime-time show. That kind of airtime tends to be reserved only for Donald Trump, but Mr. DeSantis has had a meteoric rise. He’s far and away the most popular potential 2024 presidential candidate among Republicans after Mr. Trump.

Even if you would never consider voting for him, it’s important to understand the sources of his appeal and the direction of his politics, because one way or the other — whether he ever runs for president or not — Ron DeSantis is the new Republican Party.

Governor DeSantis’s combativeness on hot-button social issues reflects Mr. Trump’s influence, but he’s gone even further and used government power as an instrument in the culture war — something Mr. Trump talked about but never really did. If any of Mr. DeSantis’s Republican admirers are hoping he will chart a path back to the pre-2016 party, they’ll probably be disappointed. Instead, the governor is a leader in a new, Trump-inflected party, but without the character flaws and baggage of the former president.

Mr. DeSantis became a Republican hero for his response to Covid-19. When many states were instituting far-reaching lockdowns and mask requirements, he took a different path. Under his leadership, Florida did what it reasonably could to protect its nursing homes, while minimizing lockdowns and other restrictions because of their economic and social downsides. When I talked to the governor in May 2020 for an article about his Covid strategy, I found him — contrary to the crude image of him as a reckless ignoramus — well versed on the research and thoughtful about the lessons from other countries. The broad parameters of his strategy — recognize there’s a balance between mitigation and its social and economic costs; keep the schools open; don’t force students to wear masks — have now become widely accepted.

Thanks to his Covid response, Mr. DeSantis attained a status that is invaluable in Republican politics — that of a lightning rod. His legend grew with every attack on him, especially the ones that were inaccurate or unfair. In April 2021, the CBS program “60 Minutes” ran a flagrantly flawed and misleading report alleging corruption in the distribution of Florida’s vaccines. The news media was also much too quick to amplify claims by a former state health department employee that Florida was hiding a huge number of Covid deaths. Clips of Mr. DeSantis in confrontations with reporters spread on social media, and he repeated his mantra of defending “freedom over Faucism.”

In general, there is no controversy that Mr. DeSantis doesn’t address. In two weeks in April alone, Mr. DeSantis signed a 15-week abortion ban, revoked the special tax status of Disney for its opposition to his “Don’t Say Gay” bill, threatened legal action against Twitter if it didn’t agree to sell to Elon Musk (Florida’s retirement pension fund is an investor) and signed a bill creating a task force to investigate election fraud. Meanwhile, his department of health issued guidance pushing back against the Biden administration’s recommendations for treating youth with gender dysphoria.

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For all the talk of how Trumpy Mr. DeSantis is, though, there is much about him that recalls the party’s pre-Trump era. He was elected to Congress as a Tea Party conservative in 2012, and he is fond of boasting that Florida’s budget is roughly half the size of New York’s even though his state is more populous. He’s proud and protective of Florida’s status as a low-tax state.

He’s been a highly committed advocate of expanding charter schools and scholarship programs to help families send their children to private schools. He’s firmly anti-regulation. We haven’t heard from him in a significant way on trade or foreign policy — two of the key issues on which Trump populists have diverged from past Republican orthodoxy. He hasn’t endorsed industrial policy, a priority of a segment of the populist right.

Indeed, any movement conservative sealed in a time capsule circa 1984 and emerging today would recognize Mr. DeSantis as a more or less standard Sunbelt Republican — a fiscal conservative wooing people and businesses to his state based on a favorable economic climate who is also anti-elitist, socially conservative and eager to reform public schools.

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None of this is new. What stands out as a true departure is Mr. DeSantis’s willingness to use government power in the culture war.

Sometimes this has involved areas, like public education, where the government has every right to set the rules. One such example is the “Don’t Say Gay” bill, more properly known as the Parental Rights in Education bill, which prohibits classroom instruction on sexual orientation or gender identity in kindergarten through third grade. Another is the “Individual Freedom” bill, which, among other things, prohibits promotion of the concept that a person “must feel guilt, anguish or other forms of psychological distress because of actions, in which the individual played no part, committed in the past by other members of the same race, color, sex or national origin.”

Other times, Florida has pursued a laudable goal in a dubious manner. Its “Big Tech” bill seeks to keep social media companies from removing political candidates and other users from their platforms, but it has serious First Amendment conflicts and has been enjoined by a federal judge.

Then there’s the fight with Disney. The revocation of its special tax status is a frankly retaliatory act that also presents free-speech issues and could prove a legal and policy morass. That said, Disney got a truly extraordinary deal from the state that allowed it, in effect, to run its own city. The company never would have been granted this arrangement 55 years ago if its executives had told the state’s leaders, “And, by the way, eventually, the Walt Disney Company will adopt cutting edge left-wing causes as its own.”

The broader point of making an example of Disney is to send a message to other corporations that there could be downsides to letting themselves be pushed by progressive employees into making their institutions weapons in the culture wars, and conclude it’s best to stick to flying planes, selling soda, and so on.

How can a limited-government Tea Party Republican like Mr. DeSantis have become comfortable with this use of government? For that matter, how is it that so many Tea Party types moved so easily toward Trumpist populism?

The key, I think, is that for many people on the right, a libertarian-oriented politics was largely a way to register opposition to the mandarins who have an outsized influence on our public life. And it turns out that populism is an even more pungent way to register this opposition. Progressive domination of elite culture has now grown to include formerly neutral institutions like corporations and sports leagues. More conservatives are beginning to believe that the only countervailing institutional force is democratic political power as reflected in governor’s mansions, state legislatures and — likely beginning next year — Congress.

“The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society,” Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York once wrote. “The central liberal truth is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself.”

Given the state of play, conservatives have been learning to appreciate Moynihan’s liberal truth. If Florida’s culture-war initiatives succeed, the education establishment in the state will not mindlessly absorb the latest left-wing fad. Corporations will be warier of wading into hot-button social fights. In other words, the culture of these institutions will have changed for the better.

Even if Mr. DeSantis is willing to avail himself of this use of government power, it doesn’t mean that he’s abandoning his limited-government orientation. The libertarian Cato Institute ranks Florida the second-most free state in the country (after New Hampshire), and Mr. DeSantis has shown no inclination to change the tax, spending and regulatory policies that contribute to that status. On Covid, he has consistently emphasized the importance of individual autonomy.

Mr. DeSantis’s detractors are fond of saying that he’s worse than or more dangerous than Mr. Trump. If, by this, they mean that a President DeSantis would be more focused and disciplined in pursuing a conservative agenda than Mr. Trump was, they’re probably right. Otherwise, it is completely wrongheaded. Mr. DeSantis doesn’t have Mr. Trump’s failings. He’s sharp in his rejoinders to reporters, but never gratuitously insulting. He cares about facts and takes time to master them.

Mr. DeSantis is the hottest thing in national Republican politics right now and he is doing everything to lay the groundwork, assuming he wins re-election this year, to run for president. It’s impossible to know how that will go — he could get blocked by Mr. Trump or not live up to the hype. What’s clear is that his synthesis of the old and new, and the resonance it has had with the rank-and-file, points to the Republican future.

Rich Lowry is the editor of National Review.

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Gov. Ron DeSantis signs bill banning picket at homes
« Reply #74 on: May 17, 2022, 02:25:50 PM »
DeSantis Bans ‘Picketing and Protesting’ Outside Homes in Florida
By Katabella Roberts May 17, 2022 Updated: May 17, 2022biggersmaller Print
Individuals who protest outside private residences in the state of Florida will now face a fine or prison time under a new bill signed on Monday by Gov. Ron DeSantis.

The Republican governor signed the bill, known as HB 1571, shortly after protests erupted outside the homes of Supreme Court justices in the wake of the leaked majority draft opinion indicating that the Roe v. Wade decision would be struck down.

“Sending unruly mobs to private residences, like we have seen with the angry crowds in front of the homes of Supreme Court justices, is inappropriate,” said DeSantis in a statement. “This bill will provide protection to those living in residential communities and I am glad to sign it into law.”

Specifically, the newly-signed bill will allow law enforcement officials to issue a warning to any individual found “picketing or protesting outside of a dwelling” with “specified intent.”

Individuals who do not disperse from the residence after the warning has been issued may be arrested. The bill also makes residential picketing punishable as a second-degree misdemeanor.

Second-degree misdemeanors are punishable by up to 60 days in jail and/or six months probation and a $500 fine.

The law will take effect Oct. 1.

Florida’s new law comes just a week after the Senate last week unanimously passed a bill, known as the “Supreme Court Police Parity Act,” that would allow the Supreme Court to provide 24-hour security protection to the families of Supreme Court justices.

Lawmakers voted on the move after the 67-page opinion of the Supreme Court was published on May 2 by Politico suggesting that the justices would overturn the decision that legalized abortion across the entire United States.

The leak prompted protests to break out across the country, including at the homes of Chief Justice John Roberts, and Justices Brett Kavanaugh, Samuel Alito, and Amy Coney Barrett.

Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), one of the lawmakers who introduced the bill last week alongside Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.), said last week that the bill was necessary because both the justices and their family members had experienced threats to their physical safety following the leaked opinion.

“Threats to the physical safety of Supreme Court justices and their families are disgraceful, and attempts to intimidate and influence the independence of our judiciary cannot be tolerated,”  said Cornyn in a statement. “I’m glad the Senate quickly approved this measure to extend Supreme Court police protection to family members, and the House must take up and pass it immediately.”

The Supreme Court Police Parity Act would amend title 40 of the United States Code to grant the Supreme Court security-related authorities “equivalent to the legislative and executive branches for the immediate families of the nine justices and any other officers of the court” if the marshal determines such protection is necessary.

White House press secretary Jen Psaki said last week that the Biden administration “strongly believes in the constitutional right to protest” but called on protesters to remain peaceful, noting that such demonstrations should never include violence or threats.

============================

Pravda on the Potomac:

Why Florida’s new protest law doesn’t fit the DeSantis narrative
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Analysis by Aaron Blake
Staff writer
May 17, 2022 at 4:24 p.m. EDT

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) in February. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)

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This one was teed up for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.

Back in March, long before the conservative furor over protests at Supreme Court justices’ homes, Florida’s legislature passed a ban on protesting at residential homes with the “intent to harass or disturb.”

DeSantis (R) signed the bill Monday, drawing support from conservative critics of the Supreme Court protests and derision from some on the left who argued the move violated First Amendment rights.

And you could forgive the latter group for jumping on that narrative, since another bill DeSantis signed last year cracking down on protests that turn violent — after a summer of racial justice demonstrations — was halted by a judge who indeed said it violated the First Amendment. DeSantis also pushed to remove Disney’s special tax status after it opposed him on a bill limiting discussion of sexual orientation and gender identity in schools. Those actions by DeSantis clearly raise important and valid questions about his stance toward free speech and the politicization thereof.

But in this newest instance at least, DeSantis appears to be on the side of most Democrats in Florida’s state Senate — and of established law.

The bill passed the state Senate in March by a resounding 28-to-3 margin, earning the votes of 10 Democrats. (The earlier vote in the state House was more partisan.)

Florida is hardly alone. While most states don’t have such a law, some blue-leaning states do — including Arizona, Colorado, Illinois and Minnesota, according to legal analyst Eugene Volokh. And many municipalities have similar laws. That includes Montgomery County, Md., whose law was at issue when protesters showed up at a justice’s home this month. That law bars stationary protests at a home but allows one to march in residential areas.

Much like that law, Florida’s appears carefully tailored to meet established requirements. The text of the law itself cites perhaps the most significant precedent, 1988′s Frisby v. Schultz, while applying a similar standard and even narrowing its scope.


The text of Florida’s law states:

“It is unlawful for a person to picket or protest before or about the dwelling of any person with the intent to harass or disturb that person in his or her dwelling.”
The first part aligns with the standard set in Frisby. In that case, the Supreme Court ruled that it is constitutional to ban protests at residences as long as the ban is content-neutral — i.e. it applies to all types of protests and not specific causes. The court also stated that a ban must allow people to still demonstrate in those neighborhoods, including by marching on residential streets in ways that don’t target a specific home.

Florida’s ban is actually somewhat narrower than the one in that case. The local law in Brookfield, Wis., forbade “any person to engage in picketing before or about the residence or dwelling of any individual.” Florida’s law contains the same “before or about” language — deliberately — but it also requires that such protests be intended “to harass or disturb” to be illegal. The law is also more reserved in that it requires a law enforcement officer to warn protesters to peaceably disperse before making any arrests.


Just because a law is constitutional and exists elsewhere, of course, doesn’t mean that it can’t be objected to; indeed, complying with the Constitution is a pretty low bar.

But in addition to echoing existing laws, this particular law doesn’t go nearly as far as the “anti-riot” law DeSantis made his focal point early last year. The law he signed made “willfully participating in a violent public disturbance” a crime. (It also granted civil immunity to drivers who hit protesters with their vehicles, if they said the protests made them fear for their well-being at the time.) Civil rights and free-speech groups objected, saying that it would chill participation in protests because protesters could be held liable for violence they didn’t perpetrate. A judge ruled that the law’s vagueness “consumes vast swaths of core First Amendment speech.”

DeSantis’s move to strip Disney of its special tax status rubbed even some conservatives the wrong way. Despite DeSantis’s assurance that he wasn’t retaliating against Disney for speech he didn’t like, the timing very much pointed in that direction.


If there’s a narrative building here, it’s that DeSantis isn’t exactly erring on the side of free speech — and is even targeting speech by people he doesn’t like, in rather novel ways. DeSantis is very much in line with Republicans embracing the usefulness of big government in cracking down on Big Tech, critical race theory and businesses that enact their own coronavirus restrictions.

It’s just that the law he signed Monday on residential protests is far from the best evidence of that. But in his long-running and successful quest to build his political career on owning the libs, it’s certainly useful.
« Last Edit: May 18, 2022, 05:46:01 AM by Crafty_Dog »



Crafty_Dog

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WSJ: Desantis vs. TB Rays
« Reply #77 on: June 06, 2022, 08:44:55 PM »
DeSantis Harpoons the Tampa Bay Rays
Vetoing sports subsidies is good policy, but emulating woke cancelers is a mistake.
By The Editorial BoardFollow
June 6, 2022 6:56 pm ET


Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has picked another fight with progressive corporate America, this time the Tampa Bay Rays baseball team. When he signed the state budget last week, Mr. DeSantis zeroed out $35 million to help build a new site for the Rays’ spring training. “I don’t support giving taxpayer dollars to professional sports stadiums, period,” he said Friday.


This is a good policy that too few states emulate, and Florida taxpayers can be grateful that their Governor has a line-item veto and is willing to use it. He vetoed $3 billion in earmarks and pet legislative projects. But Mr. DeSantis also muddied his message by citing another reason to defund the Rays. “It’s also inappropriate to subsidize political activism of a private corporation,” he said.

After recent mass shootings in Buffalo, N.Y., and Uvalde, Texas, the Rays pledged to donate $50,000 to Everytown for Gun Safety, a group that wants to ban “assault weapons” and prohibit open carry. The team’s Twitter account, “in lieu of game coverage,” offered “facts about the impacts of gun violence.”

Why sports teams want to risk alienating half of their fans by taking sides in political debates is a mystery. People turn on ESPN as a break from politics, and the shrinking of apolitical spaces makes social comity harder.


As a matter of political realism, corporations that directly punch state leaders can hardly be surprised if they get socked in return. After Florida passed its mislabeled “Don’t Say Gay” law, Disney’s CEO called it a “challenge to basic human rights.” The Legislature reacted by passing a bill to phase out Disney World’s special tax district.

Richard Edelman, CEO of the giant public relations firm, recently warned executives at Davos that “we better be careful here because there’s starting to be a pushback against wokeness.” He’s right, and Mr. Edelman also offered the good advice that CEOs can take political stands in their personal capacity and donations to politicians, but that their public positions are best focused on policy issues that affect business.

But Mr. DeSantis is also in danger of abusing his power if he uses it to punish business for political speech he doesn’t like. Not wanting to subsidize professional sports is a compelling reason to veto the spending provision. Framing the veto as an act of censure is no better than the woke left demanding that corporate executives conform to their agenda. Politicians who behave like bullies invariably get a comeuppance when they overreach.

If Rays fans are put off by political lecturing from a ball club, they know how to quit buying tickets. And if Florida gets a reputation for petty retaliation against business, companies know how to go elsewhere

Crafty_Dog

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Re: Gov. Ron DeSantis
« Reply #78 on: June 23, 2022, 11:15:52 PM »
TTT

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Re: Gov. Ron DeSantis
« Reply #79 on: June 24, 2022, 04:52:28 AM »
TTT

I saw that DeSantis leads Trump in a NH first primary poll (but not nationwide, yet).

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Gov. Ron DeSantis needs to be very careful
« Reply #80 on: June 24, 2022, 08:18:17 AM »
From Matt Bracken:


PREDICTABLE MILESTONES ON AMERICA'S FINAL TRANSFORMATION INTO A BANANA REPUBLIC:

1. Trump will be indicted and/or arrested, the purpose being to render him unable to run for office again.

2. DeSantis may die in an "accident" that is highly suspicious. A plane crash is a typical method.

Our enemies are not playing bean bag. They are so worried about losing power that they are playing nuclear chicken with Russia over Kaliningrad. They would prefer nuclear war to losing power, being exposed, and potentially being imprisoned for their crimes, such as pushing the covid vaxx poison for mega profits, currently pushing the poison even down to babies.

"Taking out" potential leading rivals is a proven tactic for staying in power when the electorate is turning away from a political clique. With the corrupted DOJ firmly in their pockets, they will have nothing to fear from sham investigations.

Some history to review for perspective:

RWANDA: On the evening of 6 April 1994, the aircraft carrying Rwandan president Juvénal Habyarimana and Burundian president Cyprien Ntaryamira, both Hutu, was shot down with surface-to-air missiles as their jet prepared to land in Kigali, Rwanda. The assassination set the Rwandan genocide in motion, one of the bloodiest events of the late 20th century.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Juv%C3%A9nal_Habyarimana_and_Cyprien_Ntaryamira

LEBANON: On 14 September 1982, President Bachir Gemayel was addressing fellow Phalangists at their headquarters in Achrafieh for the last time as their leader and for the last time as commander of the Lebanese Forces. At 4:10 PM, a bomb was detonated, killing Gemayel and 26 other Phalange politicians. His assassination lead to the Sabra and Shatila Massacre. Between 762 and 3,500 civilians, mostly Palestinians and Lebanese Shiites were massacred by members of the Phalange in retaliation for the assassination of Gemayel.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bachir_Gemayel


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Re: Gov. Ron DeSantis
« Reply #82 on: June 29, 2022, 03:53:01 PM »
not nicki halley?

DougMacG

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If DeSantis challenges Trump...
« Reply #83 on: July 15, 2022, 12:17:57 PM »
If DeSantis challenges Trump...

Trump will call him names.  What names?

DeSantis will be asked what he thinks about that.  If I advised him, the answer is:
"If Trump is the nominee, I will vote for him.  Now you ask Mr. Trump, "if I am the nominee, will he vote for me?"

"Untested"?  Yes and no.  Actually he has been quite thoroughly tested, and passed with flying colors.  No one is fully tested at this level before they get there. 

Don't know his foreign policy?  Every indication is that it will be just fine, and better than the Dem alternatives.  Best foreign policy is simple, strengthen America first.  Previously suggested, name Mike Pompeo as his VP or Sec State.  If Pompeo runs against him, name him anyway. "That's who I would like as my top foreign policy adviser.  )

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Re: Gov. Ron DeSantis
« Reply #84 on: July 15, 2022, 01:16:23 PM »
I just signed up for some Pompeo thing on FB so now I regularly get missives (mostly asking for money) asking about his campaign.

I don't think he has a prayer of the nomination, let alone the presidency (though I do think he would make a truly fine president) but I do like the idea of keeping him in/near the spotlight for future consideration (e.g. Sec State)

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Re: Gov. Ron DeSantis
« Reply #85 on: July 24, 2022, 11:24:31 PM »
From my FB page


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NRO: Gov. Ron DeSantis is right on Duty to Enforce the Law
« Reply #87 on: August 04, 2022, 04:56:16 PM »
Ron DeSantis Is Right on the Executive Duty to Enforce the Law

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis pauses as he speaks on stage at the Turning Point USA’s Student Action Summit in Tampa, Fla., July 22, 2022. (Marco Bello/Reuters)
By DAN MCLAUGHLIN
August 4, 2022 2:13 PM

The Florida governor may look like he’s engaging in a power grab, but as the executive, he’s standing up for a core rule-of-law value.
The rule of law is vital to the American system of government. Our system is designed, in the words of John Adams, “to the end that it may be a government of laws and not of men.” That core value imposes a variety of different obligations on different actors in the system. Today’s big announcement by Ron DeSantis, suspending a county attorney who refused as a matter of policy to enforce Florida laws he disliked, highlights one of those obligations: the duty of the executive to enforce the laws written by the legislature.

The people choose the government and retain the power to remove its officials: That makes us a democracy. Nobody has an inherited role or a privileged status above the law: That makes us a republic. The rules are written down: That makes our system constitutional. The rule of law binds these strands together. Once the constitution and the laws are written down, there are only two choices: Challenge the laws in court as conflicting with the written constitution, or change the constitution or the laws through the democratic process. In the meantime, there are only two outcomes: Either the rules are binding as written on everyone, or the people are no longer in charge of the government.

Adams used the phrase “a government of laws and not of men” in the Massachusetts Constitution of 1780 to justify the rigorous separation of powers: Only the legislature writes laws, only the executive enforces them, and only the judiciary interprets them. John Marshall used the same phrase in Marbury v. Madison to emphasize a related but distinct point: Judges have not just the power to declare laws invalid if they violate the Constitution, but a duty to do so in order to restrain the legislature: “To what purpose are powers limited, and to what purpose is that limitation committed to writing, if these limits may, at any time, be passed by those intended to be restrained? The distinction between a government with limited and unlimited powers is abolished. . . .”

Marshall’s point is an important one: The rule of written law is a restraint on action, but it is also a command to act. If actors in the system do not carry out their assigned roles, others will be able to escape their restraints. The rule of law is always a two-way street. The two-way value is tested in controversies such as whether to prosecute Donald Trump. On the one hand, the rule of law is degraded if Trump’s status as an ex-president is grounds to never charge him with a crime; on the other hand, the rule of law is also degraded if he is charged under a novel and creatively expansive theory of the law just because of who he is. The same goes for prosecuting cops.

The rule of law matters within the executive branch, and it runs both ways there as well. Because the president and the administrative agencies are not empowered to make the laws — and neither is the typical governor, mayor, or district attorney — executive power may not be expanded into the area of lawmaking by executive orders or administrative agency rules. But it is just as much a violation of the rule of law, and just as much an assault on the democratic and constitutional nature of our system, for executive officials simply to nullify laws by a blanket refusal to enforce them.

Of course, executive officials — presidents, governors, prosecutors, cops — have always had discretion in individual cases, and even in some classes of similarly situated factual situations, in deciding when a law will not be blindly enforced to the letter where the evidence is dubious or application of the law would work some clear injustice not intended by the legislature. Indeed, laws are typically written with a baseline faith in the common sense of the authorities enforcing them. But that is quite different from declaring to the citizenry that whole categories of offenses will not be enforced.


Likewise, there are some situations in which an executive’s oath to the federal and/or state constitutions require or permit the executive to determine that a particular law is unconstitutional and decline to enforce or defend it. The scope of that power or duty, however, has been a hotly contested one, and it is subordinate to the final say of the courts. It should never be used to simply nullify a law so that the courts do not even get the opportunity to decide the law’s validity in an adversarial proceeding in which the people are represented by someone committed to defending the law they made.

Each of these components of our rule-of-law system is anathema to progressives. Under the progressive idea of supervised democracy, the power of the people to make laws is subject to supervision and review by a variety of elite checks, including elected and unelected executives deciding which laws not to enforce and which offenders to treat with mass amnesty, a “Deep State” or “experts” and bureaucrats in areas such as national security and public health deciding which presidential and gubernatorial policies they will not follow, and judges declaring some topics off-limits to democratic self-government based on an “evolving” rule nowhere written in our constitutions.

The fad for progressive district attorneys deciding that they will not enforce whole swaths of law has been one of the distinguishing features of this regime. Many of those DAs are elected officials, but they are still local officials charged not only with enforcing written laws, but often written statewide laws that are supposed to be binding on them. So it is with Hillsborough County state attorney Andrew Warren.

Warren, a Democrat, holds an elected position equivalent to a district attorney in other states, covering Tampa and St. Petersburg. He signed a public letter refusing to enforce Florida’s 15-week abortion ban or its partial-birth abortion ban. While that could arguably be defended on the theory that the 15-week law is unconstitutional under Florida law (a matter sure to be decided in the near future by the Florida Supreme Court), this was a joint statement with prosecutors across the country, and not targeted to an argument under Florida law. Instead, in the sections cited in the order issued by DeSantis, Warren joined other prosecutors in declaring himself above his own state’s laws and committed to a campaign of massive resistance to those laws:

We [the undersigned prosecutors] decline to use our offices’ resources to criminalize reproductive health decisions and commit to exercise our well-settled discretion and refrain from prosecuting those who . . . provide, or support abortions. . . . Our legislatures may decide to criminalize personal healthcare decisions, but we remain obligated to prosecute only those cases that serve the interests of justice and the people. (Emphasis added).

Warren was the only county attorney in Florida to sign the letter. This is hardly the only example; another joint letter Warren signed with many prosecutors inside and outside Florida pledged “to use our discretion and not promote the criminalization of gender-affirming healthcare or transgender people.” DeSantis cited additional policies such as “presumptive non-enforcement for certain criminal violations, including trespassing at a business location, disorderly conduct, disorderly intoxication, and prostitution” and “against prosecuting crimes where the initial encounter between law enforcement and the defendant results from a non-criminal violation in connection with riding a bicycle or a pedestrian violation.”

As DeSantis emphasized at his press conference, “Our government is a government of laws, not a government of men. . . . We are not going to allow this pathogen of ignoring the law get a foothold here in the state of Florida. We are going to make sure our laws are enforced and that no individual prosecutor puts themselves above the law.” The governor continued: “To take the position that you have veto power over the laws of this state is untenable.” DeSantis argued that a prosecutor may not use his discretion “to effectively nullify what the legislature has done.” He had Warren escorted out of his office.

As a matter of core democratic rule-of-law principles, DeSantis is absolutely right on this. This is not the first time that DeSantis has used this power: He suspended Broward County sheriff Scott Israel after Parkland, Palm Beach supervisor of elections Susan Bucher for the failure of Broward and Palm Beach counties to meet ballot-counting deadlines in 2018, and the superintendent of Okaloosa County Schools over a grand-jury report of abuse of special-needs kids in her district. This is a more confrontational approach than taken by Rick Scott, who simply removed capital cases out of the hands of a county attorney who refused to use the death penalty.

Whether the Florida courts back DeSantis’s authority to suspend Warren under Florida law remains to be seen, but Warren will have an uphill battle. Article IV, Section 7(a) of the Florida Constitution explicitly empowers this sort of action:

By executive order stating the grounds and filed with the custodian of state records, the governor may suspend from office…any county officer, for malfeasance, misfeasance, neglect of duty, drunkenness, incompetence, permanent inability to perform official duties, or commission of a felony, and may fill the office by appointment for the period of suspension.

Moreover, the power to review DeSantis’s decision rests primarily with Florida’s Republican-controlled senate, which is likely to back him up, rather than with the courts. Section 7(b) of the Florida Constitution empowers the Florida Senate to “reinstate the suspended official [in a] special session by its president or by a majority of its membership.” As the Florida Supreme Court reiterated in 2019 when it upheld DeSantis’s suspension of Israel, the state’s longstanding rule is that judicial review is limited to deciding whether the facts recited by the governor amount to a legally sufficient case for suspension. So, if Warren wants to argue that he is not actually guilty of neglect of duty, he has to present his case to the Florida Senate, not to the courts.

Can Warren convince the courts that the refusal to enforce whole categories of law is not what “neglect of duty” means under Florida law? That is likewise dubious. In Israel’s case, the Florida Supreme Court read “duty” broadly to encompass not just non-discretionary duties commanded by statute, but also such matters as Israel’s failure to provide proper training and protocols for mass-shooting situations. In State ex rel. Hardee v. Allen (1937), cited by DeSantis in his order, the Florida Supreme Court upheld the governor’s removal of Tampa’s prosecutor on the basis of an order alleging that gambling was widespread in the county and citing the near-total absence of gambling prosecutions. The court concluded that “to knowingly permit gambling and prefer no charges therefor was a neglect of duty,” and would not consider the question in further depth: “The character, sufficiency, weight, and all things pertaining to the evidence were questions for the Senate, with which the Court has no concern.”

Once again, DeSantis has picked a battle where his powers of office appear to be firmly arrayed behind him, his chosen fight intersects between conservative cultural causes and a broader law-and-order value, and he is speaking simultaneously to state and local voters concerned about irresponsible progressive district attorneys and national voters looking for someone to tame the administrative state. In that sense, this is politically shrewd. It is also a welcome stand for democratic, republican, constitutional government under a rule of written law.

G M

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Re: NRO: Gov. Ron DeSantis is right on Duty to Enforce the Law
« Reply #88 on: August 04, 2022, 08:20:00 PM »
Trump: Mean tweets

DeSantis: Actual wins.


Ron DeSantis Is Right on the Executive Duty to Enforce the Law

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis pauses as he speaks on stage at the Turning Point USA’s Student Action Summit in Tampa, Fla., July 22, 2022. (Marco Bello/Reuters)
By DAN MCLAUGHLIN
August 4, 2022 2:13 PM

The Florida governor may look like he’s engaging in a power grab, but as the executive, he’s standing up for a core rule-of-law value.
The rule of law is vital to the American system of government. Our system is designed, in the words of John Adams, “to the end that it may be a government of laws and not of men.” That core value imposes a variety of different obligations on different actors in the system. Today’s big announcement by Ron DeSantis, suspending a county attorney who refused as a matter of policy to enforce Florida laws he disliked, highlights one of those obligations: the duty of the executive to enforce the laws written by the legislature.

The people choose the government and retain the power to remove its officials: That makes us a democracy. Nobody has an inherited role or a privileged status above the law: That makes us a republic. The rules are written down: That makes our system constitutional. The rule of law binds these strands together. Once the constitution and the laws are written down, there are only two choices: Challenge the laws in court as conflicting with the written constitution, or change the constitution or the laws through the democratic process. In the meantime, there are only two outcomes: Either the rules are binding as written on everyone, or the people are no longer in charge of the government.

Adams used the phrase “a government of laws and not of men” in the Massachusetts Constitution of 1780 to justify the rigorous separation of powers: Only the legislature writes laws, only the executive enforces them, and only the judiciary interprets them. John Marshall used the same phrase in Marbury v. Madison to emphasize a related but distinct point: Judges have not just the power to declare laws invalid if they violate the Constitution, but a duty to do so in order to restrain the legislature: “To what purpose are powers limited, and to what purpose is that limitation committed to writing, if these limits may, at any time, be passed by those intended to be restrained? The distinction between a government with limited and unlimited powers is abolished. . . .”

Marshall’s point is an important one: The rule of written law is a restraint on action, but it is also a command to act. If actors in the system do not carry out their assigned roles, others will be able to escape their restraints. The rule of law is always a two-way street. The two-way value is tested in controversies such as whether to prosecute Donald Trump. On the one hand, the rule of law is degraded if Trump’s status as an ex-president is grounds to never charge him with a crime; on the other hand, the rule of law is also degraded if he is charged under a novel and creatively expansive theory of the law just because of who he is. The same goes for prosecuting cops.

The rule of law matters within the executive branch, and it runs both ways there as well. Because the president and the administrative agencies are not empowered to make the laws — and neither is the typical governor, mayor, or district attorney — executive power may not be expanded into the area of lawmaking by executive orders or administrative agency rules. But it is just as much a violation of the rule of law, and just as much an assault on the democratic and constitutional nature of our system, for executive officials simply to nullify laws by a blanket refusal to enforce them.

Of course, executive officials — presidents, governors, prosecutors, cops — have always had discretion in individual cases, and even in some classes of similarly situated factual situations, in deciding when a law will not be blindly enforced to the letter where the evidence is dubious or application of the law would work some clear injustice not intended by the legislature. Indeed, laws are typically written with a baseline faith in the common sense of the authorities enforcing them. But that is quite different from declaring to the citizenry that whole categories of offenses will not be enforced.


Likewise, there are some situations in which an executive’s oath to the federal and/or state constitutions require or permit the executive to determine that a particular law is unconstitutional and decline to enforce or defend it. The scope of that power or duty, however, has been a hotly contested one, and it is subordinate to the final say of the courts. It should never be used to simply nullify a law so that the courts do not even get the opportunity to decide the law’s validity in an adversarial proceeding in which the people are represented by someone committed to defending the law they made.

Each of these components of our rule-of-law system is anathema to progressives. Under the progressive idea of supervised democracy, the power of the people to make laws is subject to supervision and review by a variety of elite checks, including elected and unelected executives deciding which laws not to enforce and which offenders to treat with mass amnesty, a “Deep State” or “experts” and bureaucrats in areas such as national security and public health deciding which presidential and gubernatorial policies they will not follow, and judges declaring some topics off-limits to democratic self-government based on an “evolving” rule nowhere written in our constitutions.

The fad for progressive district attorneys deciding that they will not enforce whole swaths of law has been one of the distinguishing features of this regime. Many of those DAs are elected officials, but they are still local officials charged not only with enforcing written laws, but often written statewide laws that are supposed to be binding on them. So it is with Hillsborough County state attorney Andrew Warren.

Warren, a Democrat, holds an elected position equivalent to a district attorney in other states, covering Tampa and St. Petersburg. He signed a public letter refusing to enforce Florida’s 15-week abortion ban or its partial-birth abortion ban. While that could arguably be defended on the theory that the 15-week law is unconstitutional under Florida law (a matter sure to be decided in the near future by the Florida Supreme Court), this was a joint statement with prosecutors across the country, and not targeted to an argument under Florida law. Instead, in the sections cited in the order issued by DeSantis, Warren joined other prosecutors in declaring himself above his own state’s laws and committed to a campaign of massive resistance to those laws:

We [the undersigned prosecutors] decline to use our offices’ resources to criminalize reproductive health decisions and commit to exercise our well-settled discretion and refrain from prosecuting those who . . . provide, or support abortions. . . . Our legislatures may decide to criminalize personal healthcare decisions, but we remain obligated to prosecute only those cases that serve the interests of justice and the people. (Emphasis added).

Warren was the only county attorney in Florida to sign the letter. This is hardly the only example; another joint letter Warren signed with many prosecutors inside and outside Florida pledged “to use our discretion and not promote the criminalization of gender-affirming healthcare or transgender people.” DeSantis cited additional policies such as “presumptive non-enforcement for certain criminal violations, including trespassing at a business location, disorderly conduct, disorderly intoxication, and prostitution” and “against prosecuting crimes where the initial encounter between law enforcement and the defendant results from a non-criminal violation in connection with riding a bicycle or a pedestrian violation.”

As DeSantis emphasized at his press conference, “Our government is a government of laws, not a government of men. . . . We are not going to allow this pathogen of ignoring the law get a foothold here in the state of Florida. We are going to make sure our laws are enforced and that no individual prosecutor puts themselves above the law.” The governor continued: “To take the position that you have veto power over the laws of this state is untenable.” DeSantis argued that a prosecutor may not use his discretion “to effectively nullify what the legislature has done.” He had Warren escorted out of his office.

As a matter of core democratic rule-of-law principles, DeSantis is absolutely right on this. This is not the first time that DeSantis has used this power: He suspended Broward County sheriff Scott Israel after Parkland, Palm Beach supervisor of elections Susan Bucher for the failure of Broward and Palm Beach counties to meet ballot-counting deadlines in 2018, and the superintendent of Okaloosa County Schools over a grand-jury report of abuse of special-needs kids in her district. This is a more confrontational approach than taken by Rick Scott, who simply removed capital cases out of the hands of a county attorney who refused to use the death penalty.

Whether the Florida courts back DeSantis’s authority to suspend Warren under Florida law remains to be seen, but Warren will have an uphill battle. Article IV, Section 7(a) of the Florida Constitution explicitly empowers this sort of action:

By executive order stating the grounds and filed with the custodian of state records, the governor may suspend from office…any county officer, for malfeasance, misfeasance, neglect of duty, drunkenness, incompetence, permanent inability to perform official duties, or commission of a felony, and may fill the office by appointment for the period of suspension.

Moreover, the power to review DeSantis’s decision rests primarily with Florida’s Republican-controlled senate, which is likely to back him up, rather than with the courts. Section 7(b) of the Florida Constitution empowers the Florida Senate to “reinstate the suspended official [in a] special session by its president or by a majority of its membership.” As the Florida Supreme Court reiterated in 2019 when it upheld DeSantis’s suspension of Israel, the state’s longstanding rule is that judicial review is limited to deciding whether the facts recited by the governor amount to a legally sufficient case for suspension. So, if Warren wants to argue that he is not actually guilty of neglect of duty, he has to present his case to the Florida Senate, not to the courts.

Can Warren convince the courts that the refusal to enforce whole categories of law is not what “neglect of duty” means under Florida law? That is likewise dubious. In Israel’s case, the Florida Supreme Court read “duty” broadly to encompass not just non-discretionary duties commanded by statute, but also such matters as Israel’s failure to provide proper training and protocols for mass-shooting situations. In State ex rel. Hardee v. Allen (1937), cited by DeSantis in his order, the Florida Supreme Court upheld the governor’s removal of Tampa’s prosecutor on the basis of an order alleging that gambling was widespread in the county and citing the near-total absence of gambling prosecutions. The court concluded that “to knowingly permit gambling and prefer no charges therefor was a neglect of duty,” and would not consider the question in further depth: “The character, sufficiency, weight, and all things pertaining to the evidence were questions for the Senate, with which the Court has no concern.”

Once again, DeSantis has picked a battle where his powers of office appear to be firmly arrayed behind him, his chosen fight intersects between conservative cultural causes and a broader law-and-order value, and he is speaking simultaneously to state and local voters concerned about irresponsible progressive district attorneys and national voters looking for someone to tame the administrative state. In that sense, this is politically shrewd. It is also a welcome stand for democratic, republican, constitutional government under a rule of written law.

Crafty_Dog

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Re: Gov. Ron DeSantis
« Reply #89 on: August 05, 2022, 03:12:16 PM »
"Trump: Mean tweets

"DeSantis: Actual wins."

Which is a big reason why if I had to choose between the two today, I would choose DeSantis.

That said, we have much to learn about DeS's views on geopolitics.

G M

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Re: Gov. Ron DeSantis
« Reply #90 on: August 05, 2022, 08:38:34 PM »
"Trump: Mean tweets

"DeSantis: Actual wins."

Which is a big reason why if I had to choose between the two today, I would choose DeSantis.

That said, we have much to learn about DeS's views on geopolitics.

In Trump's defense, the Deep State was waging war on him before he was even sworn in. He was only nominally president before the coup.

DeSantis is much more of a threat to the Deep State, which is why he is much more at risk for the Dealey Plaza option from the DS.

DougMacG

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Re: Gov. Ron DeSantis
« Reply #91 on: August 05, 2022, 08:52:11 PM »
"Trump: Mean tweets

"DeSantis: Actual wins."

Which is a big reason why if I had to choose between the two today, I would choose DeSantis.

That said, we have much to learn about DeS's views on geopolitics.

"Commonsense DeSantis."

ccp

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Re: Gov. Ron DeSantis
« Reply #92 on: August 06, 2022, 06:16:37 AM »
"DeSantis is much more of a threat to the Deep State, which is why he is much more at risk for the Dealey Plaza option from the DS"

I hope Gov Ron has really good loyal security !

Interesting that Gov of California (governor Loathsome) is going after the Gov of Florida (Gov Ron) at the start of his own  '24 presidential run.
.

to please the Democrat mega donors and start the buzz about him in the left wing media.


ccp

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Florida prosecutor typical Democrat lawyer to fight DeSantis
« Reply #93 on: August 08, 2022, 08:38:19 AM »
https://www.yahoo.com/news/florida-prosecutor-vows-fight-gov-172639296.html

of course
and now he will guest on every MSM talk show and we will have to see every leftist legal analyst bore us with their take on this for many months.....

always to make a point that DeSantis is a terrible unjust fascist undemocratic tyrant......


Crafty_Dog

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Crafty_Dog

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NRO
« Reply #95 on: August 23, 2022, 01:18:15 PM »
The #Resistance Playbook Fails Democrats in Florida

On the menu today: Those outside Florida may shrug at today’s Democratic gubernatorial primary, but the expected victory of Charlie Crist over Nikki Fried is likely to offer a key lesson to those willing to pay attention. The #Resistance playbook that worked for Democrats in 2018 and 2020 — furiously demonizing Donald Trump as a threat to all that is good — isn’t working against incumbent governor Ron DeSantis. Never mind Floridians as a whole; that approach can’t even close the deal among Florida’s Democrats. In other news, it’s publication day.

The Dems’ Plan to Beat DeSantis Flames Out

Today, Florida holds its primaries, along with New York and Oklahoma. Besides the surprisingly personal demolition derby in Manhattan discussed yesterday, perhaps the most intriguing primary will be in Florida’s Democratic gubernatorial primary, where former governor and current representative Charlie Crist and state agriculture commissioner Nikki Fried are competing for the right to lose to Ron DeSantis.

Florida Democrats will scream that that sentence is incorrect, and that the general election hasn’t been resolved yet. But in polling, DeSantis consistently leads Crist and Fried, and neither one is particularly close; in the RealClearPolitics average, Crist is trailing by 6.2 percentage points, and Fried is trailing by 9.6 percentage points.

There are good reasons to think that the governor’s race ended before it started. Four years ago, the Democrats had near-ideal political winds, with a broad national backlash to President Trump, and yet DeSantis still hung on to win by four-tenths of a percentage point over Andrew Gillum who, it turns out, was nowhere near ready for prime-time. DeSantis outperformed his final polling average by about four percentage points in 2018. The incumbent has more than $130 million to spend. The Democratic Governors Association is deprioritizing the state.

So why does today’s Florida primary matter? Because Fried entered the governor’s race attempting to run the “#Resistance” playbook against Ron DeSantis the way most Democrats ran it against Donald Trump in 2018 and 2020. (Trump fans may not want to acknowledge this, but the attacks largely worked, as Democrats gained control of the House, the Senate, the presidency, and a lot of governor’s mansions in those cycles.) Both as state agriculture commissioner and as a gubernatorial candidate, Fried channeled the progressive id, denouncing DeSantis as heartless, an authoritarian dictator, and a threat to the rights of women and minorities, accusing him of launching a “war on education” and “courting violent, white-supremacist insurrectionists.”

And . . . it appears that this approach is getting her nowhere. Never mind not giving Fried the lead against DeSantis. The angry #Resistance tone isn’t even getting her any traction against Crist, who’s not exactly a whirling dervish of raw political charisma.

The most recent poll has Crist ahead of Fried by nearly 30 percentage points; while one or two surveys point to a closer race, most have him leading handily. If Crist wins by the expected margin, it will be a case of a young progressive touted as the state party’s “new hope” crashing and burning when put before the electorate in the big stage — and falling flat when up against one of the most tired and well-worn retreads in the state. And perhaps the most interesting aspect of her defeat will be how Democratic interest groups turned their noses up at her.

Emily’s List endorsed Crist, even though he used to be pro-life. The state teachers’ unions are endorsing Crist, as are the state AFL-CIO, the state’s largest gay-rights group, and the state Sierra Club and Florida Conservation Voters. A few days ago, the Progressive Club of the Islands rescinded its endorsement of Fried and endorsed Crist, concluding that Fried had been too cozy with big industry during her term as agriculture commissioner.

She must be one of the very few Jewish political candidates to ever earn a rebuke from the Anti-Defamation League for comparing DeSantis to Hitler: “While public officials may have disagreements over policies, comparisons to the Holocaust and Nazism are inappropriate, offensive, and trivialize this unique tragedy in human history.”

Fried pitched herself as as a young rising star, the next great progressive hope. Yet she hasn’t actually won over progressive interest groups, which raises the question of where her actual base of support is.

At the beginning of the year, our Charlie Cooke contended that she was a wildly overrated candidate — in fact, he said she was:

The most inadequate, embarrassing, and downright befuddling political candidate the great state of Florida has seen in a long while. . . . In the last month alone, Fried has compared sitting governor Ron DeSantis to Adolf Hitler and a Communist dictator; she has implied that the northern part of the state is an extended trailer park, of the sort that will be easily swayed by suggestive selfies; and she has rewritten the story of the 2018 gubernatorial election to make herself its hero. Were he to have proffered Fried some professional advice, Walter Mitty himself might have urged her to calm down.

In the past eight months, Fried hasn’t done much to prove Charlie wrong.

If you think the media-hype-to-performance ratio of young progressive candidates is all out of whack, Nikki Fried is about to become your Exhibit A. And while it’s unlikely that many will heed the lesson of her loss, she’s vivid counterevidence to Democrats’ favorite explanation that they lose because they’re too nice and just aren’t tough or aggressive enough. Fried’s attacks on DeSantis have been more than nasty enough; judging from the reaction of Democratic interest groups, none of them have much faith that her I’m-running-against-Florida’s-Hitler approach is going to work. They took a long look at her and concluded, “Nah, we’ll go with the guy who lost his last two statewide campaigns.”

As for the likely Democratic nominee, Crist is an odd duck. A long time ago, Crist called Ronald Reagan his role model. He not-so-subtly auditioned to be John McCain’s running mate in 2008. Then Crist shifted to run as an independent once Marco Rubio was running a successful primary challenge in the 2010 Senate race, and then after Crist lost that race, he switched to the Democratic Party. (Along the way, he taped some truly cringe-inducing commercials for a personal-injury-law firm: “Its website includes auto accidents, cruise ship injuries and dog bites.”)

Eight years ago, I wrote about how Crist had nearly completed a political transformation, imagining a scenario in which the Charlie Crist of 2010 traveled forward in time to campaign against the gubernatorial bid of the Charlie Crist of 2014. I ended the piece, “Amid flashes of light and intense wind, a second time portal opened, and the Charlie Crist of 2018 appeared, denouncing Crist 2014 for being ‘too centrist’ and ‘insufficiently progressive.’” Looking at the once-unthinkably far-left agenda Crist has today, I was off by four years. Apparently, Crist’s lone unbreakable principle is his firm belief that he should be governor.

Today’s Florida is not the almost-evenly divided swing state of 2000 legends; the purple state has turned redder and redder, and Democratic statewide wins are growing increasingly few and far between. Democrats literally haven’t won a governor’s race in Florida since the last century, in 1994. They haven’t won a Senate race since 2012. (You would think Republicans from coast to coast would want to study why that’s the case and try to see what lessons they could apply to their own states.)

As recently as 2017, Florida had 4.8 million registered Democrats, outnumbering the 4.5 million registered Republicans. As of last month, Florida now has 4.9 million registered Democrats and almost 5.2 million registered Republicans. That big shift toward Republicans in the Latino vote? That’s happening in Florida.

What particularly stings Florida Democrats is that, not that long ago, they thought the state’s shifting demographics were about the lead them to permanent victory conditions. People forget that in 2012, Barack Obama almost evenly split the Cuban-American vote in the state, 47 percent to Mitt Romney’s 50 percent. Obama won the state of Florida in both 2008 and 2012, and not getting walloped among the state’s Cuban-American community was a key factor in those wins. Many Florida Democrats convinced themselves that Cuban Americans were starting to vote like more Democratic-leaning groups of Latino Americans.

As Charlie Cooke summarized:

Through its insistence upon perpetual masking, its preference for neologisms such as “Latinx,” its relentless attempts to push radicalism on children, and its indifference to the South American communists whom many Floridians have fled, the contemporary Democratic Party may finally have done the impossible: For now, at least, it may have made Florida a safely red state.

Crafty_Dog

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Re: Gov. Ron DeSantis
« Reply #96 on: September 05, 2022, 11:14:11 AM »


ccp

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Re: Gov. Ron DeSantis
« Reply #98 on: September 08, 2022, 04:45:04 PM »
if Trump

asks DeSantis to run as VP

I would suggest he says NO

just wait till '28 if needed .

does not look at this time he could run against Trump
though long way off.

Crafty_Dog

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Re: Gov. Ron DeSantis
« Reply #99 on: September 09, 2022, 02:01:13 AM »
First choice:

DeSantis.

Second choice:  DeSantis runs as Trump's VP.