Ron DeSantis is running for president but doesn't believe in democracy

With his two prosecutor suspensions, DeSantis has nullified the votes of more than 15% of Floridians. Also: The latest on Clarence Thomas's rich men.

Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is staying in the presidential race because he thinks he’s the best bet for the Republican Party if Donald Trump can’t be the nominee. He can’t defeat Trump because he’s a truly awful candidate with no charisma or no real purpose for his candidacy, but he has decided he might be enough people’s second choice that he should stay in the race.

He would be little more than an irrelevant footnote if not for the fact that he’s also the sitting governor of the nation’s third largest state. With that comes power. And with that power has come DeSantis’s desire to increase and take advantage of that power to secure even more power.

DeSantis is implementing the imperial presidency, writ small.

He has a pliant legislative and judicial branch — all three bodies have supermajority Republican representation — that implement and uphold his policies, respectively. Within the executive branch, he has made quasi-professional entities like the state’s medical and education boards little more than rubber stamps for his anti-LGBTQ policies.

And, to the extent locally elected officials have voters who want a different path, DeSantis is bulldozing them.

Ron DeSantis, simply put, does not think that local voters’ choices need to be respected — and can be outright ignored — if their votes result in the election of officeholders whose policy preferences differ from those of Ron DeSantis.

On Wednesday, DeSantis made that clear by, for a second time, ignoring the will of the voters and suspending an elected prosecutor from office because he disagrees with their policy choices.

DeSantis suspended Monique Worrell, the elected prosecutor for Orange and Osceola counties, which includes Orlando. Although the stated justification is “both neglect of duty and incompetence,” under Article IV, Section 7 of the Florida Constitution, there are no specific claims established in the Worrell suspension order. It is all about DeSantis claiming Worrell has implemented prosecution or non-prosecution “practices or policies” that are not the practices or policies DeSantis prefers.

The governor previously suspended Andrew Warren, the elected prosecutor for Hillsborough County, which includes Tampa, using the same constitutional provision.

Both Worrell and Warren were elected to their state attorney post on campaigns that highlighted their concerns with harms caused by overly punitive criminal legal policies. Both are Democrats. Both are reformers.

Ron DeSantis didn’t like that, because he is a Republican would-be authoritarian who wants, if anything, a more harsh criminal legal system. So, over time, and as laid out in Warren’s lawsuit against DeSantis (and reporting that went along with that), DeSantis’s team in the governor’s office developed a plan to get rid of locally elected prosecutors they don’t like.

Worrell told NBC’s WESH 2 that she plans to fight the suspension and run for re-election to the post.

Any lawsuit fighting the suspension will be an uphill battle, however, given Warren’s experience, earlier cases in the state, and the fact that all seven Florida Supreme Court justices were appointed by Republican governors — five of them by DeSantis himself.

In Warren’s litigation, U.S. District Judge Robert Hinkle concluded in Warren’s federal case that DeSantis violated both the Florida and U.S. constitutions but that he lacked the authority to order reinstatement. (Warren appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit and arguments were held in May, but there has been no decision issued yet.) Florida’s Supreme Court, meanwhile, tossed Warren’s state case on a technicality — holding that he waited too long to bring his state-court challenge (because the federal-court case was pending). So, in theory, Worrell could more timely bring a challenge.

But, Worrell would not be operating on a clean slate. An earlier case that the Florida Supreme Court decided suggests it could be a challenging court for Worrell to take her claim. That case involved the prior Orange and Osceola counties prosecutor, then-State Attorney Aramis Ayala, unsuccessfully challenging then-Gov. Rick Scott’s decision to take homicide cases away from Ayala for her refusal to bring the cases as capital offenses. While there are important legal differences, the state court’s handling of Ayala’s claim is almost certainly why Warren went to federal court in the first place.

In short — though Worrell’s case would be different from Ayala’s case and different, even, from Warren’s case — the track record on anyone stopping Republican Florida governors from going further and further down this path of behavior has not been successful thus far.

Monique Worrell (Source: Facebook)

More broadly, as Worrell told NBC’s WESH 2, “It's only in dictatorships that you say to people who are elected in the same manner that you are elected, ‘You do what I say, or I’m going to remove you.’ That's not democratic. That’s very undemocratic. He is a dictator, but he’s a weak dictator.”

In both suspensions, DeSantis replaced the Democratic elected official with Republican members of the conservative legal group, the Federalist Society, who he had previously appointed to judgeships. Warren was replaced by Susan Lopez, who has filed to run for election to the post in 2024. DeSantis named Andrew Bain as the acting state attorney for Worrell’s office.

Between the two suspensions, DeSantis has rendered 3.3 million Floridians without their elected choice of prosecutor.

That means that more than 15% of the people of the state of Florida have had one of their elections nullified unilaterally by the governor.

This is not democracy.

Ron DeSantis does not believe in democracy and, because of that and about a thousand other reasons, cannot be allowed to gain more power. He should have no power, as he is a man who has proven time and again that he cannot be trusted with power.

This post was updated, expanded, and clarified after initial publication to include more information about the possibility of litigation in this situation and history of litigation in similar circumstances, with the final update at 8:30 p.m.

Clarence Thomas likes rich men

Billionaires preferred, but millionaires will do.

I mean, who can argue with that?

Pro Publica is back, with another story about how — as I wrote back in April — Thomas thinks rules are for losers.

This report highlights everything that Pro Publica has been able to find out about “Thomas’ leisure activities,” which the report states “have been underwritten by benefactors who share the ideology that drives his jurisprudence.”

So, what are we looking at here?

At least 38 destination vacations, including a previously unreported voyage on a yacht around the Bahamas; 26 private jet flights, plus an additional eight by helicopter; a dozen VIP passes to professional and college sporting events, typically perched in the skybox; two stays at luxury resorts in Florida and Jamaica; and one standing invitation to an uber-exclusive golf club overlooking the Atlantic coast.

Well then.

In addition to Harlan Crow, Thursday’s report highlights three other men, one billionaire (H. Wayne Huizenga) and two millionaires (David Sokol and Paul “Tony” Novelly), who have been funders of Thomas’s vacations. The succinctness with which Pro Publica can describe how improper all of this is if you step back and think about it for a second is as depressing as it is shocking:

Each of these men — Novelly, Huizenga, Sokol and Crow — appears to have first met Thomas after he ascended to the Supreme Court. With the exception of Crow, their names are nowhere in Thomas’ financial disclosures, where justices are required by law to publicly report most gifts.

Read the full report.