A federal judge has blocked yet another Florida law from taking effect — one that attempted to imprison anyone who donated more than $3,000 toward getting a constitutional amendment on the ballot.
Florida legislators and Gov. Ron DeSantis want to continue collecting contributions of $50,000 and even $5 million a pop to finance their own political ambitions.
But under their law, if you donated $3,001 to a group that was trying to legalize medical marijuana or push for smaller class sizes, you could be sentenced to a year in prison.
The law was blatantly hypocritical — passed by money-grubbing politicians who gorge on special interest cash and yet claim to be offended when citizens groups seek similar donations.
But their law was more than just hypocritical. It was also unconstitutional — as declared by a conservative federal judge appointed to his post by Donald Trump and who used to work for Pam Bondi.
The ruling wasn’t a surprise. The Legislature’s own staffers warned lawmakers of its constitutional problems.
The ruling was “not even a remotely close call,” said Micah Kubic, executive director of the ACLU of Florida, one of the groups that challenged the law. “It was brazenly, wantonly unconstitutional. The Legislature passed this knowing full well what the law and the First Amendment demand.”
If this all sounds familiar, it is. Less than two weeks ago, I wrote about another judge blocking another clearly unconstitutional law approved by Florida Republicans that attempted to tell social media companies they couldn’t control posts on their own privately funded platforms.
In fact, this latest story was so similar — a federal judge blocking a law that everyone knew was unconstitutional — that I considered not writing about it again.
But then I decided: No. As long as Florida politicians keep trying to trample your constitutional rights, ignoring the document they took oaths to uphold and wasting your tax dollars on losing legal battles, you deserve to know about it.
And these guys are indeed wasting money galore — at rates of up to $675 an hour for high-priced, Washington lawyers they’re paying to wage losing battles.
Yes, $675 — more than most Central Floridians earn in a week. While spokespeople for Attorney General Ashley Moody, DeSantis and Secretary of State Laurel Lee all declined to provide details about legal costs, documents obtained by Florida’s First Amendment Foundation revealed that DeSantis staffers agreed to pay four lawyers at a D.C. firm as much as $675 an hour to fight the losing legal battle over the social-media law.
The lawyers were authorized to bill taxpayers in 6-minute increments at a rate of up to $11.25 a minute. A contract suggests the state has authorized spending up to $280,000 (so far) on just the social media litigation.
Keep in mind: Those four outside attorneys are in addition to the armada of full-time, state-paid attorneys also working on this case. Twelve state lawyers were cited on just one of the legal filings.
The contract claimed the state’s in-house lawyers lacked “necessary legal experience” to handle the issue themselves … though I’m not sure how much experience you need to get your tail whupped in court. Especially when the outcome was so obvious.
In his order blocking the donation cap, Judge Allen Winsor did little more than rattle off a litany of legal precedents explaining why this law was obviously improper and “wholly foreign to the First Amendment.”
I actually wish that wasn’t the case. I believe money is one of the most corrupting influences in politics, that our Founding Fathers never intended to equate million-dollar checks from corporate interests with an individual’s right to free speech and that the U.S. Supreme Court got it wrong when ruling as much in the Citizens United case. Heck, I might even cheer any serious effort to challenge that premise. But Florida politicians aren’t serious people. And they have no objections to corporate cash or massive donations. They roll around in it like pigs in slop.
House Speaker Chris Sprowls has a committee that has taken in more than $6 million in recent years, with corporate interests making down payments of $25,000, $50,000, $75,000 and more in the hopes that Sprowls will do their bidding.
DeSantis has relied on out-of-state billionaires to fund his political aspirations, with his committee taking checks ranging from $100,000 to as much as $5 million from tycoons from casinos, hedge funds and beer empires.
DeSantis and Sprowls apparently think all that is fine. But if you were to cut a check for more than $3,000 to a grassroots petition effort to raise the minimum wage or improve Florida’s pre-kindergarten program, they want you arrested.
Their hypocrisy is as galling as it is obvious.
Only one principled Republican, Sen. Jeff Brandes of St. Petersburg, objected to both laws that judges recently blocked, saying everyone knew they violated basic American principles. GOP leaders retaliated last week by removing Brandes from his position chairing the Senate Judiciary committee.
These people not only don’t care about the U.S. Constitution, they punish the people who stick up for it.
These politicians who pass these unconstitutional laws are the ones who should pay — literally. Out of their own pockets. They should pay the legal bills for defending this garbage — especially when their own staff warns them beforehand.
Because right now, these guys are dragging the Constitution through the mud — and sticking you with the dirty bills.
