This POS seriously has no sense of shame.
But then again, how many Republicans do anymore?
Very few.
Apparently it's that lack of shame that keeps their Trumptard base happy and grovelling for more.
Birds of a feather flock together.
But then again, how many Republicans do anymore?
Very few.
Apparently it's that lack of shame that keeps their Trumptard base happy and grovelling for more.
Birds of a feather flock together.
DeSantis spends millions on legal bills at $725 an hour. And he just lost again
By Scott Maxwell
Orlando Sentinel
Jun 21, 2022 at 4:35 pm
Last week, the Orlando Sentinel reported that Gov. Ron DeSantis has racked up more than $5 million in legal bills, paying lawyers as much as $725 an hour — often to lose cases that everyone knew he was going to lose in the first place.
It took the Sentinel weeks to get copies of all the legal bills.
Yet before we could even publish that story, a federal judge handed DeSantis yet another big legal loss — this time telling the governor he wasn’t allowed to selectively outlaw political donations. (More on the specifics of that case in a moment.)
DeSantis’ P.R. team likes to claim he’s having all these legal problems because socialist lefties are raising bogus objections.
Yet the judge who handed DeSantis his latest loss was appointed to his position by Donald Trump. Before that, the judge was an appointee of Rick Scott. Before that, he worked for Pam Bondi.
Basically, federal judge Allen Winsor — a member of the Federalist Society — couldn’t be more conservative if he was the test-tube baby of Ronald Reagan and Phyllis Schlafly.
DeSantis and GOP legislators aren’t losing in court because of whiny liberals. They’re losing because they keep trying to run roughshod over the United States and Florida constitutions.
And because they have a gullible base that doesn’t seem to mind politicians trampling their rights and wasting their tax dollars as long as these politicians also scream about “woke” corporations and transgender teens.
This latest legal loss was actually a sequel to an earlier loss.
In 2021, DeSantis and GOP legislators tried to make it illegal to donate more than $3,000 to any citizen-led effort to get a new amendment on the ballot. You know, for things like smaller class sizes and medical marijuana.
Now, these same politicians wanted to continue collecting massive checks for their own political committees — at up to $5 million a pop. But they wanted the right to arrest and jail you for donating $3,001 to an amendment drive for something like open primaries or a new tax break for seniors.
Their bill was obviously hypocritical. But it was also unconstitutional. Judge Winsor called it “wholly foreign to the First Amendment.”
But DeSantis and GOP legislators didn’t care. After Winsor rejected their 2021 attack on citizen amendments, they passed another attack this year — this time with a tweak that targeted donations from out-of-state residents.
Again, DeSantis and his legislative buddies wanted to keep cashing their own out-of-state checks. DeSantis’ single biggest donor is a hedge fund billionaire from Chicago. They just wanted to prevent citizen-led amendment drives from doing the same.
So last week, Winsor again blocked the law from taking effect.
All told, Florida spent $108,776 paying outside lawyers as much as $425 an hour just to defend these two garbage laws, according to numbers revealed Tuesday by state elections officials.
The local sponsor of this year’s unconstitutional bill was Sen. Jason Brodeur. Local Republicans who voted for Brodeur’s bill included Thad Altman, Dennis Baxley, Scott Plakon, Rene Plasencia, Anthony Sabatini, David Smith, Kelli Stargel, Josie Tomkow and Keith Truenow.
All these guys had already been told by a conservative judge that their scheme was unconstitutional. But they voted for it anyway, knowing taxpayers would pick up the tab.
These people aren’t fiscal conservatives any more than Jabba the Hutt is a WeightWatchers model.
One brave Senate Republican, Jeff Brandes, tried last year to stop his peers from threatening to imprison citizens who donate to amendment drives. But Brandes was vastly outnumbered. And that was just the latest legal loss.
DeSantis and Republican legislators also watched the courts overturn their unconstitutional attempt to grant the Seminole tribe a statewide monopoly on sports betting. And their attempt to stop Twitter and Facebook from controlling their own privately funded platforms.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis bristled in response to questions from journalists and legal experts about the unconstitutional flaws in his "Big tech" crackdown. But a federal judge didn't care about the governor's feelings. He ruled the law clearly unconstitutional. Taxpayers are paying lawyers as much as $675-an-hour to defend bad laws - and repeatedly lose.
And in one of DeSantis’ earliest and most humiliating court losses, his own appointees to the Supreme Court told him he couldn’t appoint a justice who lacked the 10 years legal experience required by the state constitution.
DeSantis forced his own conservative-stocked court to basically say: Dude, we’re obviously on your team. But you’re so clearly wrong on this, we can’t help you out. We can’t just act like 9 is equal to 10.
Yet DeSantis staffers claim all their problems are because of liberal activists. And that he’s simply trying to protect everyone’s “freedom.”
To be fair, DeSantis hasn’t lost all his court battles. He has notched high-profile victories on issues like mask mandates, election laws and cruise-ship regulations. I’ll even go a step further and say he has fended off some frivolous legal challenges. Every governor faces legal challenges and eventually has to head to court.
The difference between most governors and DeSantis is that this Harvard law school grad keeps signing laws he knows are unconstitutional.
Up next will probably be the part of his so-called “Stop Woke” act that attempts to tell businesses what kind of diversity training they can hold. DeSantis wants to ban discussions that make his supporters uncomfortable.
Honest conservatives know this snowflake-protection act — government trying to regulate speech at private companies in an attempt to prevent hurt feelings — is neither conservative nor constitutional.
The problem is that there seems to be a shortage of honest conservatives left in Tallahassee. Or at the voting booth holding them accountable.
https://www.orlandosentinel.com/opi...0220621-cy2n6jjiyjaazaglgpbzh2ohv4-story.html
