With so many candidates for this title, it’s hard to make a decision. I’m hoping to inform readers today with insight into two influential figures who haven’t been president..
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is expected to announce a campaign for the Republican presidential nomination in the immediate future, according to the Associated Press..
I honestly expected him to wait a week or so longer, since April 19 (Oklahoma City Bombing) and 20 (Hitler’s Birthday) are important milestones for the hardest of the hard core MAGA-types.
He’s sinking in the polls, as former President Trump is sucking all the air out of the politi-sphere with an incredible ploy for sympathy as various legal matters are finally catching up with him. (Some people say it’s the best pity party they’ve ever seen.)
The word on DeSantis’ campaign is that he’s going to focus on the nuts and bolts of running a government (into the ground), and will stay away from trading insults with Trump.
Let’s face it, though; actual governance and policy can be kind of boring, especially if they can’t be described on a bumper sticker. So Florida’s Governor is hoping to wow primary voters with actions and promises that stimulate the worst instincts in people.
In response to the imaginary problem of Joe Biden’s open borders, he’s pushing a truly brutal immigration bill through the GOP supermajorities in that state’s legislature. Not only would it be a crime to be in Florida without documentation, any entity or person found in the presence or offering medical care to a brown person (You don’t think they’re going after all the state’s Russian emigres, do ya?) would face criminal charges.
From the New York Times:
The bills would expose people to felony charges for sheltering, hiring and transporting immigrants who are in the country without legal permission; require hospitals to ask patients their immigration status and report to the state; invalidate out-of-state driver’s licenses issued to immigrants in the country without legal permission; prevent them from being admitted to the bar in Florida; and direct the Florida Department of Law Enforcement to provide assistance to federal authorities in enforcing the nation’s immigration laws...
…But critics warn the proposed new legislation, by targeting some long-established residents of the state, will sow fear, promote racial profiling and harm Florida’s economy, and some Republican business leaders have come out against it.
Florida has seen a wave of people from Haiti and Cuba, many of whom are seeking asylum, in recent months. DeSantis is sounding the alarm about what he says are increasing crime, impacting jobs and wages for workers, and burdening the state’s education systems.
These warnings get mixed up with mumbling about Fentanyl smuggling, despite the fact that apprehensions with the drug are largely American citizens coming through regular ports of entry.
More than 20% of Florida residents are immigrants, and there are 722,000 American citizens in the state living in households with one or more immigrants in the country without legal permission. Violators could face up to 15 years in prison.
DeSantis is gonna have to build some mighty big prison camps to hold all these would-be felons.
But wait! There’s more, as they say on TV.
Other areas DeSantis is working on to establish his credibility in MAGA-land include legislation that would sharply curb press freedom in Florida.
…Legislation being considered in Tallahassee seeks to challenge the longstanding Supreme Court precedent known as New York Times v. Sullivan — which protects publishers of all sorts from defamation suits unless an error is found to be willful or the result of reckless disregard for the truth. The legislation would also eliminate several protections for journalists in Florida, narrow the definition of a public figure, and establish the presumption that any statement from an anonymous source, including whistle-blowers, is automatically deemed false.
After DeSantis’s attempts to limit Disney’s version of fun to exclude “otherized” groups were thwarted by some astute legal maneuvering, he’s hell-bent on getting even. The governor has requested an investigation and is threatening to use the state’s control on infrastructure to interfere with maintenance of roads in the area.
And you can’t be a good dictator as long as there is any public oversight, so the Florida Legislature is moving to shield Gov. Ron DeSantis’s travel records from the public, by changing the state’s public information laws.
***
Federal judge Matthew Kacsmaryk has risen from the Amarillo Dollar Store discount bin for judge shopping to icon status with his ruling on medications used in abortion procedures.
While this situation may take a while to get sorted on in the upper tier of courts, its vast potential for chaos is beginning to dawn on people. One simple ruling could bring down vast portions of the federal bureaucracy.
From The Atlantic:
The Texas ruling “is not just a bid to block access to abortion pills,” the legal scholar Mary Ziegler explained in an article yesterday. “It is an open invitation to anti-abortion-rights groups to use the Comstock Act—a law passed 150 years ago and rarely enforced in the past century—to seek a nationwide federal ban on all abortions.”
The federal Comstock Act of 1873 is an anti-vice law that prohibited the mailing of “every article or thing designed, adapted, or intended for producing abortion,” as well as anything “advertised or described in a manner calculated to lead another to use or apply it for producing abortion.” The FDA has long followed a consensus interpretation of the Comstock Act, allowing the mailing of abortion drugs when the seller doesn’t intend for them to be used unlawfully. But reinterpreting this act would essentially ban even lawful abortion procedures. As Ziegler puts it:
No abortion method exists in the United States that does not use something “designed, adapted, or intended for abortion” and sent through the mail or via another carrier. Abortion clinics do not make their own drugs or devices; they order these items from pharmaceutical-distribution companies and medical-equipment suppliers. Taken to its logical conclusion, Kacsmaryk’s ruling means that all abortions already violate criminal law.
Even big pharma is upset with the implications of the ruling. A scorching condemnation via a letter was signed by more than 400 leaders of some of the drug and biotech industry’s most prominent investment firms and companies.
Despite none of those companies making mifepristone, the first pill in the two-drug medication abortion regimen, they’ve realized this ruling could challenge the foundation of the regulatory system for all medicines in the United States.
Do you know who really likes this ruling? It’s the snake oil (herbal supplements) industry, which has long fought the federal bureaucracy over claims made about the efficacy and quality control of their products.
Paul Krugman nailed the connection between these makers and the far right:
Put it this way: There are big financial rewards to extremism, because extreme politics sells patent medicine, and patent medicine is highly profitable. (In 2014 Alex Jones’s operations were bringing in more than $20 million a year in revenue, mainly from supplement sales.) Do these financial rewards induce pundits to be more extreme? It would be surprising if they didn’t — as conservative economists say, incentives matter.
I know there are other candidates for nastiest Republican, and I’ll get around to profiling some of their actions in future newsletters.
***
News You Might Have Missed
Manhattan prosecutor Alvin Bragg’s office took time out to respond to Congressman Jim Jordan’s blathering about holding hearings in New York to contrast the effort made in prosecuting Dear Leader with NYC’s “soaring” crime rate.
The Wall Street Journal think’s ProPublica’s reporting on Supreme Court Justice Thomas’ unreported gifts from a Texas billionaire used “wealthist” descriptive language.
I wonder if Gov. DeSantis will be the first to inform the American public that “adjectives are woke.”
Grim Truth: The Gun Wars Are Lost Via the New Republic. “But even if you take this scenario a further order of magnitude into fantasy, there is still the reality that there are 400 million unregistered guns in this country, and 20 million of them are AR-15s. That’s more guns than are possessed by the Defense Department, Department of Homeland Security, and police departments combined. That’s more than all the guns manufactured by the U.S. in World War II.”
What Do Pornography, Ginni Thomas, & Thomas Jefferson Have In Common? Thom Hartmann Via Daily Kos gives a historical account on how we ended up with a right wing Supreme Court. Be prepared to be surprised. Also: How to get Justice Thomas to retire quickly.
***
Lead image via Anonymous Operations, which claims to have accessed Judge Thomas’ PornHub account.
***
You can follow me at:
Post News—→DougPorter@wordsdeedsblogger
Tribel ——> DougP Porter@dougporter506
Mastodon ——> DougPorter506@mastodon.social
Spoutible —>@dougporter506
Facebook —----> https://www.facebook.com/WordsAndDeedsBlog
Email me at: WritetoDougPorter@Gmail.com