The National Review can’t get enough of Republican Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, and it’s easy to see why: DeSantis drooler in chief Rich Lowry’s review of DeSantis’ bad boy with a Harvard sheen swagger bears the following subhead: “A glimpse at what Trumpism without Trump can look like.”
Okay, to some of us that can sound a little like “Hitlerism without Hitler”, or “fascism with a human face”, which I’m not sure is much of an improvement, but it’s clear why semi-Trumpers like Rich are warm for Ronnie’s form—talks like Trump, walks like Romney! It’s almost too good to be true! Gushes Rich
What feels new, though, is the zest for combat on cultural issues, as well as a willingness to bring to bear public power to the fight where possible (government has every right to control what is and isn’t taught in government schools).
There’s also a complete intolerance for playing along with false media narratives.
And, finally, there’s zero hesitation to stand up to corporations siding with the Left in policy disputes. It seemed several years ago in the debates over religious-freedom restoration acts at the state level that corporations held the whip hand over state officials. Not anymore. Not after Republicans have learned that the appropriate response to such pressure is, “No. Hell, no. And, by the way, f*** you.”
Yeah, fuck you guys! Fuck you! Fuck you! And while we’re at it, let’s repeal the inheritance tax too!
Writing in Politico, Rich offers a more thoughtful take Liberals Should Welcome Ron DeSantis’ Rise explaining Ronnie’s virtues and explaining away (or ignoring) his “peccadillos”. For example, Rich says that DeSantis “signed a bill making it harder for felons to vote — they have to pay outstanding fines and fees first — despite the passage of a voter initiative in 2018 restoring felon voting rights. Given that serious criminals haven’t been able to vote in Florida since it’s been a state, the bill, whatever its merits, isn’t a radical departure.” In other words, since Florida has always denied “serious criminals” the right to vote, it’s okay to continue to deny them the right to vote, even though the voters voted to change that. Which could also be used as a defense for continuing segregation. Furthermore, that “serious criminals” bit is a just a bit of Lowryesque bullshit: Florida added an amendment to its constitution barring all convicted felons (not just “serious criminals”, whatever that means) from voting in 1868, following the Civil War, an amendment explicitly directed at decreasing the number of black voters. Lowry knows this, but, clearly, he doesn’t want you to know it.
Lowry also says “Finally, he signed into law an election bill broadly similar in outline to a Texas election bill that has had no discernible effect on overall turnout in the Texas primaries.” Broadly similar, huh? Here’s what one notable publication— the National Review—had to say about that harmless Texas law.
The Texas legislation creates more opportunities to challenge whether signatures on ballots and registrations match. While signature verification is a safeguard, it is also one that is prone to subjectivity and delay.
States should not lower the bar for challenging [election] outcomes, and they should not empower elected officials such as state legislatures to overturn election results. The Texas bill allows a court to overturn an election without proof that illegal votes actually changed the outcome. It instead provides, “If the number of votes illegally cast in the election is equal to or greater than the number of votes necessary to change the outcome of an election, the court may declare the election void without attempting to determine how individual voters voted.” That standard (already part of Texas law) is likely to spawn more mischief than it will solve; the legislature should consider tightening it instead.
[L]egislatures should refrain from overcriminalization. While the integrity of the ballot is a serious issue that in some cases must be dealt with by the criminal process, many of the new election laws [being proposed by Republican legislatures] are too expansive in creating batteries of new felonies that could be misdemeanors, and misdemeanors that could be civil offenses.
By pretending that the only possible flaw in the flood of Republican legislation at the state level “fixing” non-existent problems in state election law is the possible reduction in turnout, which has not been shown to occur in practice, Lowry joins other “respectable Republicans” like Ross Douthat, Ramesh Ponnuru, and Yuval Levin in lying about the utter corruption at the heart of the Republican Party today. As Tim Miller points out in the Bulwark, DeSantis went on Fox news to urge viewers to “donate to Trump’s preposterous Stop the Steal legal fund and telling residents of Pennsylvania and Michigan to ‘call your state representatives and your state senators. Under Article II of the Constitution, presidential electors are done by the legislators and the schemes they create . . .I would exhaust every option.’” Note that DeSantis is explicitly following the constitutional “theory” that state legislatures have plenary power to select presidential electors and can ignore election results at their discretion—discretion that is claimed to be unreviewable by any court.
While DeSantis denounced the “violence” of January 6—for almost a whole week— he has followed the, well, National Review line of moaning and whining about the House committee’s investigation, claiming that the committee is “beating a dead horse” (his words) despite an endless series of ever more revolting revelations about the level of cynicism and corruption in the Trump White House.
Republicans have just about given up the idea of ever winning a majority, or even a plurality, of the vote in a presidential election. They have decided that the Founders deliberately rigged the Constitution to ensure that the small states would be advantaged, and the large ones disadvantaged, in both the Senate and the presidency in order to prevent the “tyranny of the majority”. As this extensive new article in the New York Times makes clear, they have decided that any device they can concoct to thwart the will of the majority is ipso facto constitutional. And the current Democratic Party shows all the coordination of a two-headed turtle with arthritis as it struggles to meet the challenge. It is sadly easy to believe that the only obstacle to Ron DeSantis in the White House is Donald Trump’s ego.
