The Florida Republican Governor is trying to do a Donald Trump….
He is doing things without regard to anything else but ‘his’ way….
Trump has been doing that for decades….
It is beginning to come back at him….
AFTER he has been President…
DeSantis does NOT have that card in his pocket….
And?
A Hurricane just dropped in his lap….
The piece below focuses on the Governor’s removal of a county state attorney (DA) because he disagreed with DeSantis on abortion enforcement and transgender policy and political issues in general….
The issue could be?
Does an indepenedenatly elected District Attorney’s have to follow the ‘Political’ whims of their Governor?
Does the Governor ‘Rule’ the whole state’s political and governmental process?
Will this case (Now in Federal Court) pull down a man a notch who is aspiring to follow Donald Trump to the Presidency?….
“I had my transition folks give me a list of all the powers of the governor — the constitutional powers, statutory powers, customary powers. What can I do on my own? What did I need the legislature for?” he said earlier this year in a speech in Tallahassee at a Boys State convention. “What would the courts have to check?” he continued. “You’ve got to be cognizant of where all these pressure points are.” He wanted to know what he could do. He also, and relatedly, wanted to advance his own political aims. “It is the governor’s desire to fundraise and maintain a high political profile at all times — inside and outside of Florida,” a top adviser wrote in a memo to his chief of staff not even three weeks into his term, according to reporting by the Tampa Bay Times.
At least initially, though, the manner with which DeSantis chose to advance those aims in retrospect was almost shockingly … moderate? Looking back, he doesn’t even sound like the same guy, evincing an attitude of almost live-and-let-live.
It caught even a lot of Democrats by surprise. “I agreed with some of the things that he did,” Warren told me now, listing DeSantis’ pardon of the so-called Groveland Four in a longstanding case of racial injustice, his prioritization of hundreds of millions of dollars of funding for Everglades restoration and his effort to boost teacher pay in Florida’s public schools. DeSantis teamed with Morgan, the attorney and Democratic donor, to help enable the state’s legalization of medical marijuana. “Who am I to judge?” the new governor said. “I want people to be able to have their suffering relieved.” He went so far as to veto a bill in the legislature that wanted to nix local bans of plastic straws.
“The governor said, ‘Look, if you don’t want a straw ban in place, then elect county commissioners or city councilmen who aren’t going to pass a straw ban. This isn’t something the state should be doing,’” Warren told me….
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“Contrast that,” he said, pivoting and somewhat perplexed, “with the governor who has said, ‘We’re going to dictate to localities about how they handle Covid.’”
The delineation of a pre-Covid and post-Covid DeSantis is a tad too tidy — he’s received continued plaudits from environmentalists, for instance, and the pay raises for teachers haven’t stopped —but the shift in vibes and approach since Covid and his resulting (depending on one’s perspective) celebrity or notoriety are hard to ignore. Provocations like the STOP W.O.K.E. Act, the “Parental Rights in Education” bill that critics took to calling “Don’t Say Gay”, the outrage- and headline-generating, Florida taxpayer-paid migrant flight from Texas to the liberal Northeast haven of Martha’s Vineyard — they’re of a piece with his new, more muscular, more sneering, pandemic-spurred stance. Starting in earnest in April 2020, all of a month into Covid, DeSantis was contrarian and combative in using the weight and the clout of the state — lifting lockdowns, resisting school closures, eliminating mandates of masks and vaccines. Covid surges came and went, and people got sick, and some of them died. He was labeled “DeathSantis” by the left, and he was rewarded by the right, but parents across the political spectrum were at the very least quietly and grudgingly glad that in Florida their kids didn’t have to go to school on a screen. “We were right,” DeSantis has taken to saying, “and they wrong.”…
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But DeSantis didn’t just keep kids in school. He turned Covid into his name-making crusade. Specifically in Hillsborough County a pro-Trump Pentecostal pastor violated stay-at-home orders by continuing to hold services at his Tampa megachurch. Deputies arrested him. Warren’s office started to prosecute him. And then DeSantis quickly eased the rules for churches. Warren went on CNN to call the decision “spineless” and “weak.”
DeSantis clearly saw political opportunity. “Like Pavlov’s dogs,” Stipanovich said. “The bell rings, he gets fed — some positive feedback in terms of his popularity or press in the right-wing media silo, and one thing leads to another — ding, ding, ding — until that’s all he does.”
In response in part to the riots in the wake of the murder of George Floyd, DeSantis, for example, signed an “anti-rioting” bill — “an unapologetic stand for the rule of law” following “civil unrest throughout the United States over the last two years,” in his and his office’s words. Warren, who was reelected in 2020 by more votes just in Hillsborough County than DeSantis had won by in the whole state in 2018, was appalled. “It tears a couple corners off the Constitution,” he said in a statement, adding that the “misguided” legislation “directly undermines First Amendment freedoms by criminalizing peaceful protests.”
In June 2021, Warren, with more than 70 other prosecutors around the country, signed the joint statement from Fair and Just Prosecution about gender-affirming care. “As elected prosecutors and law enforcement leaders, we condemn the ongoing efforts to criminalize transgender people,” the statement began.
Then this past summer, after the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision, he was one of even more prosecutors — serving in New York, California and Massachusetts, but also Ohio, Mississippi and Texas — to sign another joint statement from the organization “promoting a justice system grounded in fairness, equity, compassion and fiscal responsibility.” Some of the key language: “… we 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 seek, provide or support abortions,” it said. “Criminalizing and prosecuting individuals who seek or provide abortion care makes a mockery of justice; prosecutors should not be part of that,” it concluded….
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He noticed on his phone a strange email. Suspension. He tried to make sense of what it seemed to be saying.
“I walked out of the grand jury,” he said, “I started walking up to my office, and I ended up meeting with my chief of staff, and we were in there for maybe two minutes.” Larry Keefe, DeSantis’ “public safety czar,” and an armed major from the Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office showed up at Warren’s door.
“Larry introduced himself and handed me the order of suspension and said, ‘You need to leave the building.’ I asked if I could read it. He said, ‘No.’ I said, “Well, I haven’t had time to read it.’ He said, basically, ‘I don’t care. You need to leave,’” Warren told me now in his living room. “They told me to grab my stuff and leave — and, look, I have tremendous respect for law enforcement. I know not to sit there and argue with him at that moment. That wasn’t the time to have the fight about the legality of this. So, when the major said, ‘Andrew, you need to go,’ I went, ‘OK.’ I grabbed my things. And he walked me out.”…
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“There’s so much more at stake than my job. This is about making sure that elections have meaning — that we don’t have situations where the governor, from either party, can without justification just remove an elected official and replace that person with whoever he wants,” Warren told me. “If the voters decide that they don’t want me to be the state attorney anymore, I can live with that,” he said. “But I just refuse to accept that the governor can just on a whim suspend an elected official and remove someone and replace them with whoever he wants. That’s not how our democracy works.”