Republican Assault on Democracy and March Towards Fascism

[LFC]

Republicans are using judge shopping more and more to drive their extremist, fascist agenda through. It's the same tactic that Trump used by managing to get Judge "Loose" Cannon.

You would think, based on the flurry of litigation unfolding there, that a lot of drama is going down in Amarillo, Texas.

Of the couple dozen lawsuits Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) has filed against the Biden administration, over a third have been funneled through the relatively small city, despite its distance from the state capital.

But it’s got one thing going for it: Trump appointee Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, who has already amenably batted down Biden administration policies on immigration, access to contraception and LBGTQ protections. Helpfully for Paxton and other right-wing litigants, Kacsmaryk gets 100 percent of the criminal and civil cases filed in the Amarillo division of the Northern District of Texas.

Kacsmaryk has come under nationwide scrutiny while he mulls a case shopped to him to revoke the Food and Drug Administration’s 20-year-old approval of mifepristone, a drug prescribed to induce abortion.

And Texas works out particularly well for judge shoppers — they can get a case into Kacsmaryk’s hands in Amarillo, or maybe into Reed O’Connor’s in Wichita Falls or Drew Tipton’s in Victoria — resting easy in the knowledge that the state is controlled by the ultra-conservative Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. That leaves as liberals’ greatest hope for intervention…the Supreme Court.

This judge-shopping is a new flavor of an older, and bipartisan, practice. Opponents of Trump administration policies often sued in states governed by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, then very liberal. Blue states have also chosen to file in generally friendly district courts — say, San Francisco — but which have an assortment of judges to be randomly assigned.

But the surgical specificity of targeting divisions of district courts overseen by one or two judges is newer. And it’s essentially a win-win proposition. Even if the district judge of choice is overturned at a higher level, he has the power to issue a nationwide injunction, blocking the administration policy not just for the parties on the lawsuit, but for the entire country.

Supporters of the Biden administration and many legal experts have railed against the dynamic, and at least one right-wing Supreme Court judge isn’t thrilled that a single lower court judge can put the brakes on any administration policy that comes before him.

“Talk about ways in which courts can interfere with the processes of government,” Justice Neil Gorsuch said during recent oral arguments on the Biden administration’s student debt plan. “Two individuals in one state who don’t like the program seek and obtain universal relief, barring it for anybody anywhere.”

The Justice Department too has been complaining about this gamesmanship more and more, accusing Paxton of judge shopping through court filings three times this year alone.

[jackd]

But it's doubtful Gorsuch would support a limitation on jurisdiction to stop the practice. In the example of Judge Cannon and Trump's case, it seemed obvious that she really didn't have jurisdiction since the case arose out of a grand jury in D.C. The Court oould also restrict nationwide injunctions in various ways but I doubt it will.

[LFC]

A good fascist knows which bus to jump on and when. Ron DeSatanist is a stellar fascist.

[pnwguy]

Mar 13, 2023 14:06:55 GMT LFC said:

A good fascist knows which bus to jump on and when. Ron DeSatanist is a stellar fascist.

No, they just didn't have enough Jews.  "The only kind of people I want counting my money are short guys that wear yarmulkes every day", says the career criminal former future dictator.

[LFC]

Local Idaho fascists decided to take over governance of the county community college as they went off on it performing liberal indoctrination at the behest of the "deep state" administration. The dumb-f***ery went downhill from there as the MAGAt trustees proceeded to f*** everything up, just as expected. Welcome to fascism where the purity of right-wing "thought" is all that matters.

COEUR D’ALENE, Idaho — The February meeting of the North Idaho College board of trustees was, by recent standards, civilized.

There were no shoving matches or speeches from far-right podcasters. Nobody pulled the fire alarm. The parade of community members who, under the wary eye of campus security officers, took turns at the microphone mostly kept their voices below shouting volume, until an hour or so before midnight, when a woman cried “Shame on you!” and stormed out of the room.

Mostly, people seemed stunned that it had actually come to this.

For most of the past two years, the college’s governing board has been a volatile experiment in turning grievances into governance. Trustees backed by the county Republican Party hold a majority on the board. They have denounced liberal “indoctrination” by the college faculty and vowed to bring the school administration’s “deep state” to heel and “Make N.I.C. Great Again.”

So what does the outcome of Republican governance look like? Just like the shitshow you'd expect.

The injection of such sweeping political aims into the routine administration of a community college that had 4,600 students enrolled last year, one better known locally for its technical training programs than the politics of its faculty, has devolved into a full-blown crisis. The school has faced lawsuits from two of the five presidents it has had since the start of the previous school year. A district court judge ordered one of those presidents reinstated on Friday in a ruling that castigated the trustees for “steering N.I.C. toward an iceberg.” The college has lost professors and staff and had its debt downgraded by Moody’s, which cited the school's “significant governance and management dysfunction.”

The troubles culminated last month in a letter from the regional higher education commission, which warned that the 90-year-old college could be stripped of its accreditation if changes were not made in a matter of weeks — an effective threat of closure and a potential catastrophe for Coeur d’Alene, a town of 56,000 in the Idaho Panhandle. The college is the sixth-largest employer in Kootenai County and a source of skilled labor for much of the local economy.

What happened? The Republicans went full metal snowflake and shoved angry idiots into the elections.

The clash over the college began in 2020 when, after the killing of George Floyd by police in Minneapolis, the school’s diversity council issued a statement expressing support for social justice demonstrations, including Black Lives Matter protests. The statement caught the attention of the Kootenai County Republican Central Committee.

That year, the committee began vetting and endorsing candidates for county board positions in what are technically nonpartisan elections. In the Coeur d’Alene Press, a committee precinctwoman accused the school of supporting a “radical, racist and Marxist organization” and “guilting white male students,” and urged county residents to vote for two candidates endorsed by the committee “to balance the N.I.C. Board” in the November election.

They are, of course, the victims because being Republican means never taking responsibility for your massive f***-ups.

In the matter of the college’s imperiled accreditation, he said, “We’re a convenient scapegoat.”

The committee’s college trustee candidates both won. They formed an informal majority on the five-member board with a like-minded incumbent trustee, Todd Banducci, who had clashed on occasion with other trustees and the school’s administrators and staff.

In an email to a conservative student, Mr. Banducci wrote that he was “battling the N.I.C. ‘deep state’ on an almost daily basis,” and complained that “the liberal progressives are quite deeply entrenched.”

[LFC]

Ron DeSatanist knows that the entire point is to pass nebulous laws with potentially big consequences, especially if prosecution scores political points, to instill fear. Then lie about it all. Classic Republican fascism.

Florida educators and advocates are up in arms after Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) called news that books are being banned in Florida schools a “hoax.”

In remarks last week intended to spin the narrative in his favor, DeSantis accused the “mainstream media, unions and leftist activists” of propagating a “nasty hoax” about classroom libraries being left empty due to a law he passed last year seeking to address the non-issue of “pornography” in schools.

“It’s a hoax in service of trying to pollute and sexualize our children,” he said. “A lot of what’s been going on is an attempt to create a political narrative.”

For those who’ve dealt with the effects on the ground, DeSantis is the one spreading falsehoods.

“It’s complete gaslighting,” Marie Masferrer, a Hillsborough County Media Specialist who’s been campaigning against the law on the ground over the past year, told TPM. “The other thing that’s happening is teachers and librarians are censoring their own library themselves because they’re afraid. Fear is the point.”

Don Falls, a Manatee County social studies teacher who’s spoken out against the censorship, said that the government can still ban books even without explicitly saying so. “If you use your position of power to intimidate and threaten someone with the potential loss of employment, civil litigation and criminal charges,” he told TPM, “you successfully ban books without actually banning them.”

DeSantis’ latest attacks gaslighting centers on HB 1467, a law passed last year that requires school districts to review reading material available to students to weed out “certain materials”—i.e. what local right-wing activists consider pornographic content, which is often just reading materials that touch on LGBTQ issues. In Florida classrooms, the law has manifested in school districts removing all books from their libraries until they’ve been approved by a certified media specialist.

A training document from the state Department of Education for media specialists acquired by TPM stated that library books must be “free from pornography and materials harmful to minors” under a 2022 Florida statute—which threatens a third-degree felony.

More than a million books have been removed from classroom libraries across the state for dubious reasoning, and countless reports of empty bookshelves have flooded the local and state headlines. One substitute teacher was also reportedly fired for sharing a video of the bare bookshelves.

This, DeSantis claimed, is all just a hoax. “In Florida, pornographic and inappropriate materials that have been snuck into our classrooms and libraries to sexualize our students violate our state education standards.”

[goldenvalley]

Will DeSantis ever show what books he means?  I seem to recall the issue of elementary school math books being disallowed and when pressed to show his work, he came up with 3 word problems said to be woke.

[LFC]

Mar 14, 2023 18:26:20 GMT goldenvalley said:

Will DeSantis ever show what books he means?  I seem to recall the issue of elementary school math books being disallowed and when pressed to show his work, he came up with 3 word problems said to be woke.

Absolutely not! He may pick out one or two but the entire point is to refuse to define those books clearly and then attack some poor innocent person with a state prosecution to intimidate everybody into extreme compliance. This is the very DNA of Republican cultural regulation. I can't stress this enough. And they have a SCOTUS majority that eats this shit up.

[goldenvalley]

I think this fits here in the context of Tucker's use of the video obtained courtesy of McCarthy.  Today is the Ides of March.

"Gaius Julius Caesar, popular Roman leader and author, dies at the age of 55 surrounded by his friends."

[LFC]

Greg Abbott is trying not to be out fascisted by Ron DeSatanist. Texass is taking over the Houston schools even though just one school is not improving out of 280. This is the deep state. Republican governance will politicize and control anything they feel is not working toward supporting their team. Here's just one part but read it all, including the summary of the poor performance of states taking over school districts.

Following a 2015 law, HB 1842, the state of Texas was granted authority to take over a school district if a single school in that district fails to meet state education standards for five or more years. The bill was passed by the Republican controlled state legislature with Democratic support. However, Democratic state lawmakers representing Houston argue that the law was a mistake and urged for it to be revised.

Although the state has given the Houston Independent School District a B rating, it plans to take over the Houston schools because one school, Wheatley High School, has not made sufficient progress since 2017. According to state law, the state can take over a school district or close a school if it fails to meet standards for five years.

The Houston Independent School District has 280 schools. The district serves over 200,000 students. It employs roughly 12,000 teachers. Wheatley High School serves roughly 800 students and has roughly 50 teachers.

So why would a state take over a school district that has earned a B rating from the state? And why base the takeover on the performance of one school that represents fewer than 1% of the district’s student and teaching population?

In order to understand the logic of the planned state takeover of the Houston schools, it pays to understand the important role that schools have played in the social, political and economic development of communities of color. Historically, communities of color have relied on school level politics as an entry point to broader political participation. School-level politics may involve issues like ending school segregation, demanding more resources for schools, increasing the numbers of teachers and administrators of color, and participating in school board elections.

The process of gaining political power at the local level – and eventually state level – often begins at the schools, particularly the school board. For instance, before Blacks and Latinos elect members of their communities to the city councils, the mayor’s office and the state legislatures, they often elect members to the school board first.

[LFC]

Florida Fascism is now a lock because DeSatanist has been able to pack the state supreme court to a staggering degree.

[Bact PhD]

Mar 21, 2023 15:36:19 GMT LFC said:

Florida Fascism is now a lock because DeSatanist has been able to pack the state supreme court to a staggering degree.

Except this change is fairly close to an even Con-Con swap-out; the major stacking occurred a couple years ago (from Sarasota Herald-Tribune/Florida Today; paywalled):

The resignation sets the stage for a nomination process that will lead to DeSantis appointing a replacement. While DeSantis will appoint a conservative justice, the choice likely will not result in a dramatic change on the court, as Polston has been reliably conservative on most issues.

[snip]

The appointment will give DeSantis a chance to continue exerting his influence on the seven-member court. The Republican governor has appointed four of the current justices — Muniz, John Couriel, Jamie Grosshans and Renatha Francis.

[snip]

Until 2019, Polston and Canady often were part of a conservative minority on the court. But longtime Justices Barbara Pariente, R. Fred Lewis and Peggy Quince — who had been part of a more-liberal majority — hit a mandatory retirement age in 2019, allowing DeSantis to replace them and create a solid conservative majority.

[jackd]

Florida used to be a swing state. DeSantis won by about 20 points. What happened?

[indy]

Probably not the entire story, but the 65+ age group has been growing pretty quickly in Florida, up nearly 50% in the last ten or twelve years I think. It also seems the state attracts a certain kind of older retiree as well but that's just my impression.

[Bact PhD]

Mar 21, 2023 22:17:50 GMT jackd said:

Florida used to be a swing state. DeSantis won by about 20 points. What happened?

(1) The “classic” transplants of the WWII generation, who came down the I-95 corridor and settled in Miami-Dade & Broward counties, have pretty much died off.
(2) The folks who populate Miami-Dade & Broward nowadays are (a) filthy rich and will vote straight GOP, (b ) Cuban immigrants, to whom anything even remotely resembling socialism is absolute anathema (they also tend to be very socially conservative), (c) Immigrants from other parts of Latin America, who also tend to become very socially conservative, (d) Everyone else, who are outnumbered by (a) - (c).
(3) The newer transplants, more likely to be from the Midwest (think retired auto workers), are settling in places like The Villages, which is also where many discontented people from South Florida have also wound up (likely the same ones who, before heading to Sumter County, sported the bumper sticker “Will the Last One Out Please Bring the [US] Flag?”). This trend accelerated during COVID, as the policies put in place by the Supreme Emperor—it attracted those from the Northeast and elsewhere who were unhappy with policies in their home states. In short, Flori-DUH became a MAGAt magnet.

It’s also worth noting that our state Legislature has had more than its fair share of ultra-reactionaries, many from north of the I-4 corridor, for some time. In the Supreme Emperor, they have a man after their own heart (so to speak).

[indy]

Stumbled across a poll conducted by Emerson that shows Trump basically tied with Desantis in Florida for the nomination. Whatever is in the water there in Florida sure seems to have a real hard-to-kill affinity for Trump.

www.forbes.com/sites/alisondurkee/2023/03/17/trump-beats-desantis-among-florida-voters-in-poll-while-ramping-up-attacks

[LFC]

DeSatanist wants his own militia. I can hardly wait to hear the stories of abuse and civil rights violations that comes out of this crowd. I really do NOT expect an ethical, professional organization out of the volunteers they'll be dragging in.

When Gov. Ron DeSantis first proposed reviving the long-dormant Florida State Guard, he wanted 200 volunteers and a modest $5 million budget.

Then it grew to 400 members and $10 million.

Now it’s 1,500 members and a nearly $100 million budget — with police powers, helicopters, boats and, under one lawmaker’s request, cellphone-hacking technology.

The proposed budget for the Florida State Guard, released by a House committee Tuesday, offers the most detailed realization of DeSantis’ vision for the State Guard, a World War II-era force brought back last year to supplement the state’s overworked Florida National Guard.

DeSantis told lawmakers he wanted $98 million for the program but didn’t offer many details. Republican leaders in the House proposed more than $89 million in their budget, including six boats and tow vehicles, $49.5 million for planes and helicopters, $22.7 million to store those vehicles and $10 million for a new headquarters.

They also want another $750,000 to contract with the Israeli company Cellebrite to create a “Digital Forensic Center of Excellence” that would help the State Guard target human trafficking and drug and child exploitation crimes, including on farms. Cellebrite is often hired by police departments because of its ability to break into iPhones.

None of the funding has been included so far in the Florida Senate’s proposed budget. Nor have senators filed DeSantis’ bill expanding the size and scope of the State Guard. Both could be part of bargaining between the chambers as they work to craft an identical budget for the state during the 60-day legislative session, which is scheduled to end in May.

The House bill, HB 1285, modeled on DeSantis’ proposed legislation, would create a specialized law enforcement unit within the State Guard, with the ability to bear arms and make arrests. Its scope would also be expanded, from only being activated during emergencies to being activated to “protect and defend the people of Florida from threats to public safety.”

Nearly half the states have similar volunteer units, which typically assist the national guard in responding to emergencies and natural disasters. Only the governor can activate these state units and the volunteer members can usually quit anytime.

Few, if any, state guards appear to have the powers that Florida is considering. The Texas State Guard, for example, has been deployed to address record numbers of migrants showing up at the U.S.-Mexico border, but it does not have a law enforcement unit and its members do not carry weapons and can’t make arrests, according to a spokesperson. Nor does it have helicopters, airplanes or cellphone-hacking technology. (It does have small watercraft.)

[LFC]

Oooooh, Mickey! I suspect Disney will tie them up in legal knots for years. Wait until the barrage of deposition and discovery requests. I'm sure Disney's attorneys will demand all documents from all legislators involved in writing their revenge bill. DeSatanist must be blowing a gasket.

Gov. Ron DeSantis’ handpicked board overseeing Disney World’s government services is gearing up for a potential legal battle over a 30-year development agreement they say effectively renders them powerless to manage the entertainment giant’s future growth in Central Florida.

Ahead of an expected state takeover, the Walt Disney Co. quietly pushed through the pact and restrictive covenants that would tie the hands of future board members for decades, according to a legal presentation by the district’s lawyers on Wednesday.

The Central Florida Tourism Oversight District’s new Board of Supervisors voted to bring in outside legal firepower to examine the agreement, including a conservative Washington, D.C., law firm that has defended several of DeSantis’ culture war priorities.

“We’re going to have to deal with it and correct it,” board member Brian Aungst Jr. said. “It’s a subversion of the will of the voters and the Legislature and the governor. It completely circumvents the authority of this board to govern.”

Disney defended its actions.

“All agreements signed between Disney and the district were appropriate and were discussed and approved in open, noticed public forums in compliance with Florida’s Government in the Sunshine law,” an unsigned company statement read.

Taryn Fenske, a DeSantis spokeswoman, called the move “last-ditch efforts” to transfer “rights and authorities” from the district to Disney.

“An initial review suggests these agreements may have significant legal infirmities that would render the contracts void as a matter of law,” Fenske said in a prepared statement. “We are pleased the new governor-appointed board retained multiple financial and legal firms to conduct audits and investigate Disney’s past behavior.”

The previous board, which was known as the Reedy Creek Improvement District and controlled by Disney, approved the agreement on Feb. 8, the day before the Florida House voted to put the governor in charge.

Board members held a public meeting that day but spent little time discussing the document before unanimously approving it in a brief meeting.

DeSantis replaced those Disney-allied board members with five Republicans on Feb. 27, who discovered the binding agreement the previous board approved.

Gotta' love it. And clearly one of their attorneys had a sense of humor.

The new DeSantis-aligned board expressed dismay over the previous board’s actions.

“This essentially makes Disney the government,” board member Ron Peri said. “This board loses, for practical purposes, the majority of its ability to do anything beyond maintain the roads and maintain basic infrastructure.”

Among other things, a “declaration of restrictive covenants” spells out that the district is barred from using the Disney name without the corporation’s approval or “fanciful characters such as Mickey Mouse.”

That declaration is valid until “21 years after the death of the last survivor of the descendants of King Charles III, king of England,” according to the document.

[goldenvalley]

Love it.  Disney has oodles of money to pay oodles of lawyers.  DeSantis and his right wing toadies lack that kind of fire power.  

[LFC]

And since "corporations are people too, my friend", as affirmed by the Roberts Court, they can spend all they wish on campaign donations as part of their free speech.

[LFC]

I wonder if Romney will get the GOP nomination in 2024. I wonder if he'll even run for reelection.

Delegates to Utah’s Emery County Republican Party Convention are planning to censure Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT) for providing “aid and comfort” — the language the Constitution uses to define treason — to Democrats.

The censure resolution — currently scheduled for Thursday evening — accuses Romney of several acts the delegates believe to to be anti-Republican – the main one being that the senator voted to impeach former President Donald Trump in both 2019 and 2021.

They claim Romney gave “aid and comfort to the Democratic party” by voting to remove Trump during the first impeachment trial when he was accused of pressuring Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to announce an investigation into Joe Biden in exchange for a White House meeting.

They also accuse him of “abusing his power” and supporting “a false liberal narrative” when he voted to convict Trump a second time after he was accused of inciting an insurrection that led to the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.

Six Republican senators, besides Romney, also voted with the Democrats during that trial — making Trump’s second impeachment the most bipartisan impeachment vote in U.S. history.

In addition to being disgruntled by his stance on Trump’s impeachment trials, they also accuse Romney of helping the Democratic Party “elect an incompetent, radical democrat who has done irreparable damage to the United States,” the resolution says.

Jesse Sloan — one of three sponsors of the censure resolution — claims his disagreements with Romney are not personal, according to the Salt Lake Tribune.

[goldenvalley]

Mar 31, 2023 16:25:14 GMT LFC said:

I wonder if Romney will get the GOP nomination in 2024. I wonder if he'll even run for reelection.

Delegates to Utah’s Emery County Republican Party Convention are planning to censure Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT) for providing “aid and comfort” — the language the Constitution uses to define treason — to Democrats.

The censure resolution — currently scheduled for Thursday evening — accuses Romney of several acts the delegates believe to to be anti-Republican – the main one being that the senator voted to impeach former President Donald Trump in both 2019 and 2021.

They claim Romney gave “aid and comfort to the Democratic party” by voting to remove Trump during the first impeachment trial when he was accused of pressuring Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to announce an investigation into Joe Biden in exchange for a White House meeting.

They also accuse him of “abusing his power” and supporting “a false liberal narrative” when he voted to convict Trump a second time after he was accused of inciting an insurrection that led to the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.

Six Republican senators, besides Romney, also voted with the Democrats during that trial — making Trump’s second impeachment the most bipartisan impeachment vote in U.S. history.

In addition to being disgruntled by his stance on Trump’s impeachment trials, they also accuse Romney of helping the Democratic Party “elect an incompetent, radical democrat who has done irreparable damage to the United States,” the resolution says.

Jesse Sloan — one of three sponsors of the censure resolution — claims his disagreements with Romney are not personal, according to the Salt Lake Tribune.

Yeah well Romney's sneering comments about how Democrats are not job creators and so have no right to question Howard Schultz on his union busting just reinforces my opinion of him.  He's a jerk.

[LFC]

Mar 31, 2023 16:36:40 GMT goldenvalley said:

Mar 31, 2023 16:25:14 GMT LFC said:

I wonder if Romney will get the GOP nomination in 2024. I wonder if he'll even run for reelection.

Yeah well Romney's sneering comments about how Democrats are not job creators and so have no right to question Howard Schultz on his union busting just reinforces my opinion of him.  He's a jerk.

For me it was the casual lies he told during 2018, even making baldfaced denials about things reporters had on video. There's something seriously wrong with him. He has the face and tone of respectability but his lying and attempts to rewrite history seemed to go beyond playing politics and into a serious mental defect that is sort of a light version of what Trump suffers from.

[LFC]

Disney played DeStalinist and his fascist legislators by the book and completely out in the open. The lazy fascists were just too lazy to pay attention until it was too late.

Yesterday we noted the interesting and hilarious fact that Disney appears to have outmaneuvered and outwitted Ron DeSantis’s effort to strip the company of its quasi-governmental powers over the huge parcel of land that makes up Disney World as payback for the company’s support of gay rights. When we heard the story yesterday it may have sounded like the company just pulled off some last-minute switcheroo when for a minute the folks in Tallahassee took their eye off the ball. But that’s not quite right. It was an effort that took place in plain sight over almost a year.

The fun got started all the way back on April 19, 2022, two days after the state legislature passed the bill to dissolve Disney’s special governing district. On that date Disney notified Orange County, the county in which the 39-square-mile parcel of land is situated, that it had signed two new agreements with the the Reedy Creek Improvement District. Those are the two key agreements which secure Disney’s rights probably well into the 22nd century.

The agreements were announced publicly at a meeting of the Reedy Creek board on Jan. 25 and then on Feb. 8 the board officially ratified the agreements.

Public acts like this have to be done in public. If you’ve ever been involved in local town government you know this. And Florida has particularly robust public notice laws. So this was all done in plain sight. Obviously local governing board meetings don’t get carried live on Fox and CNN. But this has been a big effort by the DeSantis administration. And well … they’re the state government. So “who follows local government board meetings!” really isn’t an excuse that cuts it for them. They just weren’t paying attention. Didn’t sweat the details.

So what's to stop them from passing some new law? It starts getting real tricky, real fast and the result could potentially piss their major donors off, bigly.

Republicans are supposedly really big into property rights and contracts. This is a lawful contract Disney entered into with local government. Coming along and just undoing that is a major “takings” issue that goes against all sorts of right-wing doctrine. But, Josh, you say, Republicans are hypocrites! So why does this matter? Well, yeah, probably so. But here’s where you get into the more practical issue which is more one that will play out in the state courts rather than in the state legislature. The state government can go to court and try to get this undone. The state law experts interviewed in this Miami Herald article say Disney has by far the stronger case. But the deeper problem is that the kinds of state legal precedents you’d set to undo this would have the effect of weakening the security of a lot of property and contractual rights, especially in real estate. And you know who cares a ton about property and contractual rights in real estate? Right, rich people. Actually, a lot of people. But especially rich folks heavily invested in real estate. So I’m pretty skeptical.

If you want to go that route, as the Herald article makes clear, you’re also probably looking at years of litigation. And that probably means none of this is really going to happen. Because we have to remember, this was really all just a DeSantis political stunt, put together as part of his possible run for President. It’s quite unlikely that even Ron DeSantis will give a crap about this in a year or two, let alone some other future governor who may not agree with the original decision and if they did agree will certainly have better things to do with their time than creating bad legal precedent by litigating the long tail of DeSantis’s strutting nonsense from all the way back in 2021.

Pretty clear: Disney 1, Meatball Ron 0.

[goldenvalley]

Mar 31, 2023 20:06:56 GMT LFC said:

Disney played DeStalinist and his fascist legislators by the book and completely out in the open. The lazy fascists were just too lazy to pay attention until it was too late.

Yeah well I think DeSantis doesn't care.  He got $$ and points for taking on evil Disney and he will continue to get them when Disney litigates this and wins.  The evil court system did it to DeSantis.  That's the way it works for Trump, that will be the way it works for DeSantis too.  

People don't realize the sweetheart deals corporations get when states want to lure the corp to move a facility into the state.  Disney revolutionized Central Florida when it opened. BactPhD probably knows more about this than I do, but my grandparents snowbirded (in the Midwestern farmer way) beginning in the mid 60's on the Gulf Coast.  We used to visit for Christmas and yeah there was traffic from families like ours visiting grandparents.  But I remember after Disney World opened I 75 became a parking lot filled with people going to Orlando.  Seems like it's continued since then.