The highest priority for Florida Democrats in 2022 must be to end the political career of Ron DeSantis, and Charlie Crist can do it.

As governor, DeSantis rules Florida with an iron hand. He dictates what teachers teach, creates barriers to voting, uses raw power to punish critics and marginalizes women, Blacks and LGBTQ people. He has divided Floridians as never before — and he’s just getting warmed up.

But eight years ago, when Crist’s transformation was fresher in the public mind, he came within 1 point of defeating Scott.

Florida voters, especially those with no party affiliation, must rethink their priorities as never before. Outraged over lax gun laws and repeal of abortion rights, they must channel their anger into an overwhelming turnout.

Crist is Democrats’ best hope to prevent four more years of authoritarianism from DeSantis. In the Democratic primary for governor, the Sun Sentinel recommends Charlie Crist.

Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt announced Thursday that his office filed a lawsuit against the city of St. Louis just hours after Democratic Mayor Tishaura Jones signed an ordinance that would put $1 million in funding to help women get abortions out of state.

Schmitt, a Republican who is running for U.S. Senate, called the city ordinance a clear violation of Missouri law and vowed to stop it in a statement. He painted the ordinance as an “illegal move to spend Missourians’ hard-earned tax dollars on out-of-state abortions.”

During a press conference before signing the bill, Jones predicted Schmitt’s lawsuit and painted it as political theater to prop up his Senate campaign.

Thousands of low-income Florida families are expected to receive relief checks to help offset inflation costs.

Gov. Ron DeSantis' administration on Thursday announced he's reallocating some COVID-19 relief funds and sending $450 a child directly to struggling families in the state.

"This one-time payment assists families who are being affected by rising inflation and preparing to send their children back-to-school," Laura Walthall, a spokesperson for the Florida Department of Children and Families, said in a statement to Insider.

To fund the checks, the governor has set aside $35.5 million from the $1 billion the state received from the American Rescue Plan Act, according to an announcement from Casey DeSantis, Florida's first lady.

On Thursday evening, the Supreme Court handed down a brief, 5-4 decision that effectively places Drew Tipton, a Trump-appointed federal trial judge in Texas, in charge of many of Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) decisions about which immigrants to target.

The decision was largely along party lines, except that Justice Amy Coney Barrett joined the Court’s three Democratic appointees.

At issue in this case is a perfectly standard decision Mayorkas made last September. Federal law provides that the secretary of homeland security “shall be responsible” for “establishing national immigration enforcement policies and priorities.” Pursuant to this authority, Mayorkas issued a memo to ICE’s acting director, informing him that the agency should prioritize enforcement efforts against undocumented or otherwise removable immigrants who “pose a threat to national security, public safety, and border security and thus threaten America’s well-being.”

Then-secretaries of homeland security issued similar memos setting enforcement priorities in 2000, 2005, 2010, 2011, 2014, and 2017.

Not long after Mayorkas handed down his memo, however, the Republican attorneys general of Texas and Louisiana went to Tipton, a Trump judge with a history of handing down legally dubious decisions halting Biden administration immigration policies, asking Tipton to invalidate Mayorkas’s memo. Tipton obliged, and an especially conservative panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit allowed Tipton’s order to remain in effect.

DOJ asked the Supreme Court to stay Tipton’s decision, temporarily restoring an elected administration’s control over federal law enforcement while this case proceeds. But the Court just refused. And it did so without explanation.

In 2009, a violent mob stormed the presidential palace in Madagascar, a deeply impoverished red-earthed island off the coast of East Africa. They had been incited to violence by opportunistic politicians and media personalities, successfully triggering a coup. A few years later, I traveled to the island, to meet the new government's ringleaders, the same men who had unleashed the mob.

As we sipped our coffees and I asked them questions, one of the generals I was interviewing interrupted me.
“How can you Americans lecture us on democracy?” he asked. “Sometimes, the president who ends up in your White House isn’t even the person who got the most votes.”

“Our election system isn’t perfect,” I replied then. “But, with all due respect, our politicians don’t incite violent mobs to take over the government when they haven’t won an election.”

For decades, the United States has proclaimed itself a “shining city upon a hill,” a beacon of democracy that can lead broken nations out of their despotic darkness. That overconfidence has been instilled into its citizens, leading me a decade ago to the mistaken, naive belief that countries such as Madagascar have something to learn from the U.S. rather than also having wisdom to teach us.

During the Donald Trump presidency, the news covered a relentless barrage of “unprecedented” attacks on the norms and institutions of American democracy. But they weren’t unprecedented. Similar authoritarian attacks had happened plenty of times before. They were only unprecedented to us.

The basic problem is that one of the two major parties in the U.S.—the Trumpified Republican Party—has become authoritarian to its core.

Excerpt of the Dissenting Opinion

I am constrained to dissent in light of what I can only conclude is binding precedent from the Florida Supreme Court and this Court.

In the specific context of abortion regulation, the Florida Supreme Court has held that even “minimal” loss of the constitutional right of privacy is per-se irreparable injury. Gainesville Woman Care, LLC v. State, 210 So. 3d 1243, 1263 (Fla. 2017) (quoting Elrod v. Burns, 427 U.S. 347, 373 (1976) (“[L]oss of First Amendment freedoms, for even minimal periods of time, unquestionably constitutes irreparable injury.”)). We applied this Florida Supreme Court holding in Green v. Alachua County, 323 So. 3d 246 (Fla. 1st DCA 2021), holding that the typical four-part test for temporary injunctive relief “collapses” into the single question of whether the challenged law implicates the right of privacy. Id. at 250 (“We read the supreme court’s jurisprudence on the right to privacy to require that we make a single, threshold, de novo inquiry when considering a temporary injunction appeal— Does the challenged law implicate an individual’s right of privacy?”). We are therefore required to presume irreparable harm, and because we held in Green that is the sole question for injunctive relief in the right-to-privacy context, we must grant Appellees’ motion to vacate.

Precedent also bars us from relying on Appellants’ supposed lack of standing to assert the personal right of privacy that individual patients could assert.

Leah Litman
@LeahLitman

#SCOTUS refuses to allow the Biden admin to carry out its immigration enforcement priorities — and schedules the case challenging them to be heard in December. (The admin can’t carry out its priorities until the Court decides the case, assuming the court rules for the admin ….)

President Biden
@POTUS
United States government official


Folks, I'm doing great. Thanks for your concern. Just called Senator Casey, Congressman Cartwright, and Mayor Cognetti (and my Scranton cousins!) to send my regrets for missing our event today.

Keeping busy!

Michael J. Stern
@MichaelJStern1

Love Pete.

Acyn
@Acyn

Jones: The last time I called for the Senate to abolish the filibuster to pass an assault weapons ban, Tucker Carlson attacked me on his stupid show, so obviously I’m going to do it again