Thanks to DeSantis’ fascist policies, civil-rights lawyers have their hands full in Florida | Opinion

A civil-rights fight looms in Florida courts — and not a minute too soon.

Hurrah to the civil-rights lawyers who filed a lawsuit in federal court in Orlando this week to challenge a newly enacted law that runs roughshod over people’s right to protest.

They’re needed here before it’s too late, and Confederate-friendly Floriduh finds a way to secede from the Union.

Already, Florida lawmakers have assaulted and trampled the U.S. Constitution during this legislative session like the state hasn’t seen since Jim Crow days. Every bill, every strategy was already cooked, party-ready, at the behest of the state’s maximum leader, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.

When he quacks like a fascist, the GOP choir, from Miami to Tallahassee, applauds him with fervor.

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Anti-protest law

DeSantis is, after all, channeling his political mentor, Donald Trump, and following his bombastic, destructive script to reelection next year, and onward, to the White House in 2024, perhaps.

If, in the process, DeSantis and his enablers turn the Constitution into a pliable document, chipped away by legislating at the state level in order to win elections, then so be it.

If, in the process, DeSantis quacks like a racist, that’s just the price of doing business with the base.

That’s why, surrounded by more than a dozen white men and women in deep-red Polk County as Americans waited for the Derek Chauvin verdict, a proud-as-a-peacock DeSantis signed his so-called “anti-riot” bill.

That’s why, in the aftermath of the verdict, DeSantis told Fox News’ Laura Ingraham — with a straight face — that Chauvin’s conviction may have happened because, “The jury is scared of what a mob may do.”

Same DeSantis who last year when the nation saw the George Floyd video, which prompted the protests he’s now trying to outlaw, said: “George Floyd’s murder was appalling.”

Same DeSantis who then says to Ingraham, another bona fide bigot, that there’s no systemic racism in this country when he and the Legislature are targeting minorities.

Without an ounce of sensitivity, DeSantis assaults the rights of Floridians to protest, presiding over a major crackdown on free speech, delivered by the acquiescent, overwhelmingly Republican Legislature via the HB 1 bill — their No. 1 priority after more than a year of a pandemic.

Coming in a close second: voter suppression.

Voter suppression

At first boasting that Florida had the most well-run elections in the country when he delivered the state to Trump in 2020, DeSantis ordered another assault, this one on voting by mail.

And Republican lawmakers proceed to require people to re-register to receive mail-in ballots after just one election cycle; curtail ballot boxes; and change signature-matching laws.

As of this writing, the election bills had been watered down by the Senate, which did away, at the request of election officials and voting-rights groups, with the massive undertaking of requiring the updating of signatures. The remaining bill, still controversial, needs a full Senate vote and reconciliation with the House bill to make it to the governor’s desk.

All of these efforts are transparent, multilayered assaults on Floridians’ rights.

Who’s going to go to a protest knowing that if a few protesters get violent or more rowdy than police feel like tolerating — and you get caught in the melee — you’ll be carted off to jail, charged with a felony and held without bail like a murderer?

What low-income minority resident who works — and they’re the ones holding down essential jobs tied to a schedule — is going to risk losing a job to stand in hours-long lines when they find themselves without a mail-in ballot?

The governor is trashing the sacred right to vote, making it harder, not easier for U.S. citizens to participate in democracy. And, with the anti-protest measure, he deals a big blow not only to the protesters, but to the hard work some police departments in South Florida are doing to build trust in our communities.

Sen. Shevrin Jones, who represents parts of northern Miami-Dade and southern Broward, best summed up the intention — and the injustice — of the anti-protest bill on the Senate Floor.

“You don’t want us on the streets. You don’t want us to kneel at games. ... Our response to injustice is to protest, but your response is to criminalize it when the recourse for us is to turn to the streets to make our voices heard in this unjust system.”

In his quest for absolute power, the Ivy League-educated governor, a lawyer, forgets the law of the land isn’t that of his scribes in the Legislature, but the document signed on Sept. 17, 1787.

Bring on the civil-rights lawyers.

Florida needs them to show the governor who’s boss.