Gov. Ron DeSantis Goes Full Tilt

Gov. Ron DeSantis has signed new sweeping anti-migrant and anti-LGBTQ laws in Florida. Photo courtesy of ABC News

Over the past few days, as he prepares to announce his challenge to Donald Trump for the GOP presidential nomination, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida staked out three positions that further underscore the danger he presents to our liberal democracy.

First, he signed a draconian new law targeting migrants, who are among his favorite political punching bags. Second, he waded further into backing vigilante justice by fundraising on behalf of a man charged with manslaughter in NYC for the killing of a Black subway rider. Finally, he signed another new law green lighting discrimination against LGBTQ+ patients by medical professionals.

Let’s review each of these laws and see how they fit into the larger national picture.

An anti-migrant Florida

As a cornerstone of his political campaign, DeSantis has taken up the migrant issue in cynical and intentionally harmful ways. Last week, he signed a sweeping anti-migrant bill into law, SB 1718, which requires any businesses with over 25 staffers to use the federal E-Verify system, which determines whether people can legally work in the U.S. It further invalidates all driver’s licenses issued out-of-state to anyone working in the country without legal documentation, forces hospitals that accept Medicaid to ask a citizenship question, and further funds the controversial flight program DeSantis has used to fly migrants to Martha’s Vineyard to score political points.

The bill signing was timed to coincide with the expiration of Title 42, a pandemic-era rule that granted the Trump and later the Biden administrations broad powers to deport persons who entered the country illegally to ostensibly limit the spread of Covid-19. DeSantis believed, incorrectly, that the sunsetting of Title 42 would see a surge of migrants that he could then capitalize upon to attack Biden. However, the much-anticipated surge failed to materialize as the White House imposed stricter asylum rules and made technical improvements to the asylum process.

Critics argue that DeSantis’s moves incite hatred and discrimination against migrants in Florida. These migrants, however, perform much of the harder, manual labor in the state, including construction, agriculture and shipping. Progressives in Congress, such as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), warned that limiting migrant labor in a time of a labor shortage will backfire on DeSantis.

“Anti-immigrant policies reap what they sow,” the congresswoman wrote on Twitter. “DeSantis’ Florida is about to find that out. The US has such deep needs right now, particularly in labor. Yet policymakers (of ALL stripes) take our immigrant communities for granted. No más. Time to stop biting the hands that feed.”

There are some 800,000 undocumented migrants in the state of Florida, but many are considering leaving due to the crackdowns. Anecdotal reports across Spanish language social media show Latino truck drivers calling for boycotts and refusing to take shipments into Florida, and images of empty fields and construction sites as migrants do not show up to work, in part out of anger and frustration, but also in fear of the new E-Verify law that could result in their deportation.

“Many workers are leaving, thinking they’re going to be deported, so they’re going to other states,” said one employee interviewed on television by a CBS affiliate in Miami. “Everyone is really uneasy…we just want to work to help our families.”

A dangerous nod to vigilante justice

New York City is far from Tallahassee, but DeSantis is now playing to a national audience, so he waded into the legal case of Daniel Penny, a white man charged with manslaughter for choking Jordan Neely, a Black subway rider and NYC street performer, to death. The case has drawn the interest of GOP politicians eager to exploit its racial overtones and show that they stand with Penny, who claims he was restraining a man who had been exhibiting mental problems. 

Penny held Neely in a chokehold for around 15 minutes before Neely died. The medical examiner has ruled the matter a homicide caused by compression of the neck from the chokehold. Penny through his lawyers has claimed self-defense, though there is no evidence that Neely attacked Penny or anyone else on the subway that day. A video showing the incident showed a witness warning Penny to let Neely go or he could kill him. “You gonna kill him now…I’m tellin’ you,” the witness said in the video.

The matter will go before a court and likely, eventually, a jury. But rather than let the case move forward in the court system, DeSantis weighed in on Sunday, tweeting, “We stand with Good Samaritans like Daniel Penny” and urging his followers to show that “America’s got his back.” He linked to Penny’s defense fund on GiveSendGo, the same Christian platform that helped raise funds for Kyle Rittenhouse, who shot and killed protestors during the Black Lives Matter protest in Kenosha, Wisconsin, in 2020 but was acquitted by a jury. That fund, set up by Penny’s lawyers, has now raised nearly $2 million.

DeSantis managed to throw in an antisemitic trope while he was at it, tweeting, “We must defeat the Soros-Funded DAs, stop the Left’s pro-criminal agenda, and take back the streets for law abiding citizens.”

Legalizing discrimination in Florida healthcare

Late last week, DeSantis also signed SB 1580, titled the “Protections of Medical Conscience Act” which his critics have dubbed the “License to Discriminate in Healthcare” law. It allows healthcare providers—including doctors, nurses, ambulance drivers, lab workers, nursing home workers and hospital administrators—along with insurers and payment providers to deny patients care on the basis of their own religious, moral or ethical beliefs. 

The law effectively weaponizes faith-based objections to LGBTQ+ identities and communities into tools that limit the rights of others, including their right to critical medical care. Further, as the ACLU pointed out, any employees who refuse to provide such services are protected by the law against any adverse actions for that refusal, in effect enshrining the right to discriminate without consequence. 

This bill comes on the heels of a sweeping anti-LGBTQ education law, known widely as “Don’t Say Gay or Trans,” which generally prohibits classroom discussion of LGBTQ+ issues or identities. While initially promoted as a way to protect young children from hearing about gay lives, it has now been expanded from the third grade all the way to the twelfth. It also follows a rule to deny age-appropriate, gender affirming care to the state’s transgender youth.

SB 1580 is likely to be challenged in court, but its ultimate fate is unclear. The current extremist Supreme Court majority has been moving in favor of expanding so-called “religious liberties,” even if that winds up permitting discriminatory practices against groups such as the LGBTQ+ community. 

There is a common thread binding these moves

DeSantis’s actions share a similar and rather terrifying philosophy: that the state, with all its power and resources, should side with an intolerant majority against already marginalized and vulnerable minorities. He is intentionally elevating citizens above migrants, white vigilantes above minority victims, and religious zealots above LGBTQs.

These actions turn liberal democracy on its head. In any democratic system, there is always the danger that the majority will use its power to remove safeguards against demagoguery in order to drive out the “unwanteds” and restrict the rights of any who remain. Liberal democracies enact constitutional protections precisely to prevent such abuses and the cancer of fascism from metastasizing.

DeSantis is destroying those safeguards bit by bit, signaling that the state will side only with the already-powerful to help them bash further upon the politically weak. That is a hallmark of an illiberal regime and sets us on the road to strong-man rule.

We should be under no illusions here. DeSantis is doing this to create convenient targets and scapegoats for his own political ambitions. If elected president, he would seek to do the same on a national scale, with incalculable costs to our democratic freedoms and American pluralism.

DeSantis may lose the Republican primary to Trump. But his ideas will persist and be taken up by others unless they are also rejected by the voters, exacting a high political price.