We Lost the Battle for the Republican Party’s Soul Long Ago

[Shirley]

Ron DeFascist, of the "limited government", "let business be business", "don't pick winners and losers", "free market", republican party.

[Shirley]

Reason to believe Ron DeFascist, a graduate of Yale and Harvard Law school, slept thru his Con Law class?

MY NEWSPAPER SUED FLORIDA FOR THE SAME FIRST-AMENDMENT ABUSES DESANTIS IS COMMITTING NOW

In the late 1980s, the fortunes of Nick Navarro, the sheriff of Broward County, Florida, were on the rise. Elected in 1984 and on his way to nearly tripling his agency’s budget, he was also demonstrating a flair for dealing with the media—“P. T. Barnum with a Cuban accent,” said one South Florida defense lawyer. Navarro and his office starred in the inaugural season of Cops, the pioneering Fox reality-TV series, and made national news by clashing with the rap star Luther Campbell—including having him arrested—for sexually explicit lyrics on albums by Campbell’s 2 Live Crew.

Navarro’s relations with the media weren’t universally cordial, however, and spawned a constitutional challenge that may now have profound implications for another publicity-loving Florida politician, Governor Ron DeSantis: It exposes one of DeSantis’s most recent high-profile gambits as a brazen violation of the First Amendment.

On November 17, 1988, a Fort Lauderdale daily, The Broward Review, ran a front-page article that Sheriff Navarro found especially vexing. It was headlined “Navarro Failed to Act on Corruption Warnings,” with the subhead “Broward Sheriff didn’t pursue reports that a Bahamian cocaine trafficker was bribing his deputies.”

The story was the latest in a series the Review had run criticizing the Broward sheriff’s office, the county’s largest law-enforcement agency, and Navarro was fed up. The morning it appeared, he ordered a halt to the 20-year business relationship between the sheriff’s office and the Review, which, along with covering local business and law, had been the chief publishing venue for required public notices of sheriff’s sales and forfeitures. This revenue amounted to thousands of dollars each year—not a fortune, but enough to matter to a small daily.

I was the editor in chief of the Review (later renamed the Broward Daily Business Review) and its sister papers in Miami and West Palm Beach, which were owned by American Lawyer Media, the legal publisher created and run by the journalist and entrepreneur Steven Brill. When I told Brill what Navarro had done, he conferred with his friend Floyd Abrams—the First Amendment litigator who had represented The New York Times in the Pentagon Papers case—and we did the traditional American thing: We sued.

We won in 1990, after a two-day trial in the U.S. District Court in Miami. We were upheld unanimously on appeal to the Eleventh Circuit in Atlanta. Navarro’s appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court was rebuffed.

We won because what Navarro did was plainly illegal. He had used the power of his public office to punish my newspaper for exercising its First Amendment rights.

The parallels between Navarro’s actions and those of the current governor are unmistakable. DeSantis has spearheaded the successful move to withdraw something of value from the Walt Disney Company—its 50-year control of the special taxing district that essentially governs a 25,000-acre Central Florida spread including Disney World—in reprisal for Disney’s vocal criticism of Florida’s Parental Rights in Education Act, assailed as homophobic. With DeSantis, as with Navarro, public authorities withheld a public benefit as punishment for exercising a core constitutional right, and yesterday Disney finally sued.

Even in 1988, the law in this area was neither subtle nor oblique. Brill told me he got the idea of suing the sheriff from his recollections of a class in constitutional law taught by Thomas I. Emerson, a legendary First Amendment scholar at Yale, and Abrams was able to rely on fresh precedent: a 1986 case out of Mississippi—upheld by the Fifth Circuit—that was almost precisely on point. There, the federal court ordered a local governing board to restore public-notice advertising it had yanked from a local newspaper in retaliation for the paper’s criticism of its performance.

The principle wasn’t new even then. In a 1972 U.S. Supreme Court case brought by a fired community-college teacher, Associate Justice Potter Stewart wrote the majority opinion: “For at least a quarter-century, this Court has made clear that even though a person has no ‘right’ to a valuable governmental benefit and even though the government may deny him the benefit for any number of reasons, there are some reasons upon which the government may not rely. It may not deny a benefit to a person on a basis that infringes his constitutionally protected interests—especially, his interest in freedom of speech.”

[...]

[Shirley]

Today In, Self-Owns!

[Shirley]

Nice to see Domestic Terrorism Has Consequences:

Two participants in the November 2020 Trump Train attack on a Biden/Harris campaign bus have taken a plea deal and apologized.

[japhy]

I had sorta forgotten about the trump train asshats. We saw them regularly on Hwy 50 between Pueblo and Canon City in 2020. We always seemed to pass them going in the opposite direction. My favorite was the time one of them built some sort of wooden base that was in the bed of their truck with two huge trump flags anchored to it. When we passed, they were picking up the remains of their high school shop project from the highway and traffic was backed up in both westbound lanes for miles behind them.

When calculating factor of safety against overturning always go for 2.0 for higher and use a wind force of 25 psf as a minimum.

[KUTradition]

wow

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/rcna81983

and

https://montanafreepress.org/2023/04/26 ... ans-bills/

not to mention the treatment of Zooey Zephyr

[jfish26]

Pubs’ hyper-intense attention to others’ crotches (and what may or may not lie underneath their clothes, and the clothes themselves) is really, ah, something.

[KUTradition]

just heard someone say “news from Tennessee must not make it to Helena”

[KUTradition]

meanwhile, in Idaho it’s now illegal to leave the state for an abortion

talk about control…

[MICHHAWK]

idaho is idaho's problem.

[KUTradition]

senility must suck

[ousdahl]

meanwhile, in Idaho it’s now illegal to leave the state for an abortion

talk about control…

Without reading into it yet, what’s, like, the constitutionality of that?

Interstate commerce clause or something.

[ousdahl]

also

[Sparko]

Gorsh!

[jfish26]

meanwhile, in Idaho it’s now illegal to leave the state for an abortion

talk about control…

Without reading into it yet, what’s, like, the constitutionality of that?

Interstate commerce clause or something.

Mostly the privileges and immunities clause.

[Shirley]

meanwhile, in Idaho it’s now illegal to leave the state for an abortion

talk about control…

Without reading into it yet, what’s, like, the constitutionality of that?

Interstate commerce clause or something.

It's yet another feature of the republican cult's "limited government".

(What do I win?)

[ousdahl]

Gorsh!

I lol’d

[jfish26]

You’ve gotta pretty much not have a soul to phrase this message this way.

[japhy]

You’ve gotta pretty much not have a soul to phrase this message this way.

Some would posit that Abbott's god decided to test his mettle by making him spend the majority of his miserable life in a wheelchair, dead from the waste down. If true, he does not seem to be handling it gracefully.

[KUTradition]

200+ officers involved in the manhunt

glad they don’t have anything better to do