DeSantis Hates Local Democracy
If DeSantis Gets the GOP Nomination, his crushing of local democratic institutions in Florida should headline opposition attacks on his record
Yesterday, Ryan Grim at The Intercept had a wild story about Florida’s sprawling retirement complex, The Villages, where attempts by local government leaders to tax the corporation which owns the development company behind The Villages led to massive retaliation against those leading the fight - including being imprisoned and convicted of trumped up charges - and an overturning of the local tax.
From a national perspective, the critical part of the story is the role of Governor Ron DeSantis and state legislators in driving this retaliation at the behest of his corporate donors, the Morse family, who own The Villages. Unbelievably, the local state legislator was on the the payroll of The Villages and pushed through the state legislature to roll back the fee hike on the company, which DeSantis signed into law in June 2021.
A Republican State Attorney, Bill Gladson, pursued a trumped-up perjury charge related to the state’s open meetings law (read Grim’s complicated story on this) against two of the local county commissioners who had supported the fee hike on The Villages - and DeSantis immediately stepped in with an executive order removing them from the commission. One of the commissioners, a 72-year old retiree, was convicted and put in jail to await sentencing for over two months, all part of a retaliation campaign that helped smash any local opposition to The Villages political machine.
This story of the destruction of local opposition to the statewide DeSantis political machine is playing out issue by issue, county by county, across Florida.
A local government supports Covid safety protocols? DeSantis strips them of state money.
A local prosecutor pursues humane sentencing? DeSantis remove him from office.
Local officials support gun control laws? They are threatened with personal liability in lawsuits for doing so.
Support gay rights or racial diversity in schools and DeSantis brings the hammer down on local elected leaders.
If DeSantis is nominated for President, his war on local democracy and contempt for any political institution he doesn’t personally control should be front and center in every attack on him, since it ties together all the issues for which he has become notorious.
DeSantis’ War on Local Covid Protocols
Early on in the pandemic, Florida did okay better than many other states, largely because local governments had some very tight safety protocols. Miami-Dade had one of the most aggressive mask enforcement programs in the country, citing hundreds of individuals and businesses and collecting about $300,000 in fines- until DeSantis shut them down. DeSantis would make his initial national reputation among MAGA Republicans because he smashed local Covid safety protections across the state. The result has been that Florida leads the nation in Covid deaths per capita, particularly among seniors, since vaccines were introduced.
By the fall 2020, DeSantis was dropping most state Covid restrictions and by May 2021, he banned all local mask mandates or other Covid restrictions. When some local governments defied DeSantis and maintained mask mandates in their schools, DeSantis moved in October 2021 to strip those counties of state money:
The move by the state signals that there’s no conclusion in the fight between Gov. Ron DeSantis and local school districts that have attempted to implement mask requirements. At one point during the summer, the conflict has pitted the governor against 13 school districts — including five that were in GOP-leaning counties — as well as the Biden administration, which had promised to financially support school districts that faced financial penalties for enacting mask mandates.
Currently, only a handful of school districts, including Alachua and Broward counties, are attempting to require masks in schools. Other counties reversed course after facing penalties from the state and seeing Covid-19 caseloads decline.
DeSantis Empowered the Gun Lobby and Fracking Industries to Defy Local Regulations
DeSantis’s response to the Stoneman Douglas High School shootings has been to double down on supporting the gun lobby, including further restricting local government’s ability to regulate the industry.
A Florida law passed in 2011 has restricted such regulations but a local court had enjoined the law as violating the state constitution. But DeSantis expanded those limits in a law passed in 2021 - and the Florida Supreme Court dominated now by DeSantis appointees reversed the lower court and has upheld those limits on local government, including a provision that allows local officials passing gun regulations to be personally sued by the gun lobby and removed from office by the governor.
On energy policy, DeSantis in 2021 signed the most restrictive law in the nation limiting the ability of local governments to control the citing of energy facilities in their jurisdictions. As the organization, Food and Water Watch wrote:
Part of a nationwide push by the oil and gas industry to preempt local government initiatives to move off fossil fuels, Florida’s bills are the most stringent to pass in any of the fourteen states with similar energy preemption legislation. While the Florida legislature has been slow to act on climate change, local governments have been on the frontlines of the crisis, forging boldly ahead with policies to move off destructive fossil fuels. With these bills now enshrined in Florida law, their toolbox for such policies will be highly limited.
DeSantis also signed a law blocking the ability of local governments to require gas stations to add electric vehicle charging stations.
DeSantis’ War on Local School Boards
Beyond Covid, DeSantis has been cementing his MAGA reputation in his war on public schools - and all of those policies involve gutting the ability of local school boards to control local curriculums and policies.
The “Don’t Say Gay” law signed by DeSantis has set off a scramble of lawsuits as local school boards were forced to implement its restrictions:
A group of students, parents and teachers in Florida have refiled a lawsuit against state and county officials over the enforcement of a new education law that limits how topics related to sexual orientation and gender identity can be talked about in schools.
Among other examples, the complaint cites a September Miami-Dade school board vote to reject a proposal to recognize October as LGBTQ History Month and incorporate lessons about two landmark LGBTQ Supreme Court cases into the existing curriculum for high school seniors on the nation’s civil rights history.
At least four of the nine school board members at the Sept. 7 meeting said recognizing LGBTQ History Month — which the school district celebrated just a year prior — would violate the “Don’t Say Gay” law.
DeSantis signing a bill banning so-called “critical race theory” has added to the censorship battles shutting down diversity initiatives and censoring school libraries across the state. The most recent battle was DeSantis banning the introduction of the College Board’s new African American AP class curriculum:
The administration of Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida is blocking a new Advanced Placement course for high school students on African American studies…DeSantis spokesman Bryan Griffin said in a statement to CNN that the course “leaves large, ambiguous gaps that can be filled with additional ideological material, which we will not allow.”
A new Orwellian-named “Teachers’ Bill of Rights” has been proposed in the legislature to ban school districts from allowing teachers to have union dues deducted from their paychecks and would prohibit school officials from meeting union representatives on school property to negotiate contracts.
All of this is part of DeSantis’ broader campaign to gut public education and the power of elected school boards and transfer power over public schools to private corporations and religious institutions through diverting funds to vouchers- a plan moving forward quickly in the Florida state legislature?
A proposal that would massively expand eligibility for school vouchers began moving forward Thursday in the Florida House, with the Republican sponsor touting it as a way to provide “customized” education and Democrats questioning its lack of income requirements.
The proposal would extend eligibility for vouchers to families of any student who is a “resident of this state and is eligible to enroll in kindergarten through grade 12 in a public school in this state.”
Such universal voucher systems have been the goal of school privatization advocates for decades and DeSantis is leading the charge in what may be the largest state to do so.
Violating Local Power is Authoritarian and DeSantis Needs to Be Called Out on It
Last August, DeSantis removed Andrew Warren, a twice-elected Democratic state Attorney In Hillsborough County, after Warren pledging not to indict people who seek or provide abortions or to go after doctors who provide gender-affirming care to transgender people.
Just last month, a Federal judge described the firing as a violation of the First Amendment and the Florida constitution - but ruled he didn’t have jurisdiction to act on the case because of the 11th Amendment.
But the case highlights that DeSantis wants total control with no checks on his power, not by local governments, not by prosecutors and not by local school boards.
Trump is a rhetorical fascist, but his lack of attention to detail ultimately blunted the danger of his time as President.
DeSantis is a different story. He is laser-focused on accumulating power and destroying local institutions that might challenge that power. Progressives need to highlight this power-hungry assault on local governments as a unifying theme tying together all his actions.
Whatever people think about each individual policy, the accumulation of such power by one individual is a dangerous precedent. And in the hands of a President, would be an overwhelming threat to our nation’s liberty and democracy.
Dear Friend: Your well-written piece properly attacks DeSantis' legal assault on federalism at both the federal and state level. The latter, of course, varies among state constitutions. On so many levels, this rejects the concept of community, the concept of public health, and represents how libertarians have assumed power in the Republican Party and exalt their new savior - the unfettered rights of individual - as the supreme legal principle.
My only objection is your insistence, especially in the penultimate paragraph, to imply progressives alone must resist this. There are numerous citizens who recognize that modern federalism is more a tenet of conservative politics. More importantly, there are objections, such as those I note, among many others, that arise from a communitarian constitutionalism that exists as a meld of what most, and about which you write in these last paragraphs, categorize as "liberal" or "conservative" and "progressive" or "right wing."
To the extent that your piece largely avoids writing to reinforce the beliefs of its audience, I applaud your writing.