Abortion on the ballot in Florida -- where's Trump?

The decision of the Florida Supreme Court to allow a vote on a citizen initiative inserting a right to abortion in the state constitution raises many interesting possibilities.

According to Ballotpedia:

The initiative would provide a constitutional right to abortion before fetal viability (estimated to be around 24 weeks) or when necessary to protect the patient's health, as determined by the patient's healthcare provider.

Everywhere, even in red states like Ohio and Kansas, such "right to abortion" measures have won popular majorities when offered to the electorate. We, the majority, really don't want the Supreme Court telling legislatures they can mess with our bodies! 

The Florida measure faces a slightly more difficult hurdle than these other reproductive rights efforts. Instead of a mere majority, state rules mean that the pro-choice side needs 60 percent to win. Polls show this as tough, but possible. 

So now Florida politicians and Floridians are going to have to figure out how to navigate a campaign in which abortion rights are center stage.

Democrats and the Biden campaign are teasing that this measure puts the state in play for Democrats. Seems improbable; the state Florida Dem party is a mess, Republicans have a 800,000 person registration advantage, failed GOP presidential aspirant Ron DeSantis won the place by 20 points in 2022. But Democrats can and should have a great time demanding that Republican candidates state a clear position on the abortion measure. It divides their base. Even Republican voters will be giving the measure a small majority according to polls, while Dems and Indies do the rest; the anti-abortion side will be rabid.  

And then there's Florida resident Donald Trump. Where does he stand? Anywhere he can escape the question, apparently. According to Aaron Blake in the Washington Post:

The presumptive GOP presidential nominee has responded to this development with all the political certainty of a college freshman running for class president. And his hemming and hawing — even after effectively locking up the Republican nomination — speaks volumes about how much this sudden liability of an issue looms over the GOP’s 2024 hopes.

Trump’s campaign initially put out a statement Monday saying merely, “President Trump supports preserving life but has also made clear that he supports states’ rights, because he supports the voters’ right to make decisions for themselves.”

It’s great to support the democratic process — something that isn’t always a given with Trump — but that statement basically says nothing about his own view on the issue at hand. And when asked for more specificity Tuesday about Florida’s six-week ban, Trump played a familiar card: I’ll tell you later.

“We’ll be making a statement next week on abortion,” Trump said.

Translation: I really don’t want to talk about this, and I need to figure out my position.

... Of course, it’s no secret what’s really going on here. Trump fears this issue; he has repeatedly suggested that Republicans lose elections by going too extreme on it. .. .Trump clearly doesn’t want that to happen to him. But it’s not as if he can spend the next seven months punting on this issue. And the fact that he still doesn’t have a good, ready-made answer a month after wrapping up the GOP nomination suggests that perhaps there just isn’t one.

We need to continue to demand that the media ask Trump where he stands. 

And, if we can, to help Floridians Protecting Freedom win their campaign.  

• • •

Florida was the venue for one of my best 2020 election experiences. That pandemic year, I locked myself down at home working on the UniteHERE national phone bank. Early on, we took a few shifts calling sympathetic Floridians who someone thought might need help with how to navigate voting procedures. (Like most red states, Florida makes voting a confusing jumbles of procedural rules.)

One young woman I reached answered her phone while partying after work with her buddies in a bar. (I don't know why she answered her; people just do sometimes.) She wasn't much interested in talking about voting mechanics -- but then decided she'd test me.

"If I put my phone on speaker, will you call out to all the people in the bar?" she asked.

"Sure," says I.

So she yelled she had someone with a message. 

I hollered at the top of my lungs: "Fuck Donald Trump!" Great cheers ensued. 

I hope they all figured out how to vote ...

• • •

Sure hope the Florida campaign wins. If the new constitutional provision fails, that sharp-eyed observer of all legal perversions, Slate's Mark Joseph Stern warns that the Florida Supreme Court might decide to declare the fetal personhood of all embryos, banning not only all abortions, but also IVF and other pregnancy medical treatments. Scary times.

My generation is often part of the problem

Paul Krugman [gift article] comes up with some data that surprised me. He explains that Miami, if anything, has less affordable housing costs than New York City. As in New York City and here in San Francisco, the high cost reflects inadequate supply. Folks with money bid up the price of what exists in a location they find desirable.

He also shares a good deal additional about the Florida economy that I'd not been aware of, at least front of mind.

Retirees have been moving to Florida for the warm winters for a long time, ever since Groucho Marx told potential buyers: “You can get any kind of a home you want. You can even get stucco. Oh, how you can get stucco!” But there are a lot more potential retired migrants now than in the past: between 2010 and 2020 the overall U.S. population grew only 7.4 percent, but the population 65 and older grew 38.6 percent. And since retirees spend money on local services, the influx of seniors creates jobs for younger adults as well.

... the influx of retirees does help explain why Florida’s population is still growing fast even though its biggest metropolitan area has become increasingly unaffordable.

Ron DeSantis better not attack Medicare. 

But also, the growing distortion of the state's age profile might, unhappily, explain why the ambitious governor thinks the way to go is to attack "woke."  His voters are the semi-affluent, white, retirees, not the Black and brown, younger, working class in the state. As the age profile of the state tilts more and more toward older Boomers, maybe it's fine to hobble education for young Floridians? 

This sort of thing doesn't end well.

Travel advisory

 

I'd been wondering when it would come to this. 

ORLANDO, Fla. (AP) — The NAACP over the weekend issued a travel advisory for Florida, joining two other civil rights groups in warning potential tourists that recent laws and policies championed by Gov. Ron DeSantis and Florida lawmakers are “openly hostile toward African Americans, people of color and LGBTQ+ individuals.”

The NAACP, long an advocate for Black Americans, joined the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), a Latino civil rights organization, and Equality Florida, a gay rights advocacy group, in issuing travel advisories for the Sunshine State, where tourism is one of the state’s largest job sectors.

The warning approved Saturday by the NAACP’s board of directors tells tourists that, before traveling to Florida, they should understand the state of Florida “devalues and marginalizes the contributions of, and the challenges faced by African Americans and other communities of color.”

Once again, we are living in a States of Disunion. Sad -- and angry for my Florida friends.

So much more interesting than the crooked Orange Man

Now here's an arrest to applaud!

Chairwoman of Florida Dems Nikki Fried and Sen. Lauren Book being arrested tonight with a group of protesters who were advocating for abortion access outside city hall. Tallahassee, Florida tonight. Photo by me. pic.twitter.com/1PEl4ftikI

— Erich (@erichm) April 4, 2023

By way of Jessica Valenti.

Cruelty is repellent

Alejandra Molina, writing for Religion News Service, reports an intriguing development: In Florida, Latino evangelicals mobilize against DeSantis’ crackdown on immigrants.

(RNS) — After Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis ordered state regulators to deny licenses or renewals to those sheltering unaccompanied migrant children, more than 200 faith leaders and evangelical pastors of Spanish-speaking churches made their way to downtown Tallahassee last year in February to protest the governor for preventing them from doing the “work that God has called us do.”

Many of those shelters were housed in local Latino evangelical churches, according to the faith leaders who also demonstrated against a law that now forbids state and local governments from contracting with transportation companies that knowingly bring undocumented immigrants.

Now, as DeSantis prepares for a possible 2024 presidential bid and as he’s unveiled an immigration package that seeks to impose stiffer penalties for Floridians who “knowingly transport, conceal, or harbor” unauthorized immigrants, some Latino evangelical leaders say they’re willing to break the law if it’s enacted and are mobilizing their flocks — this time in larger numbers — to “fight against DeSantis.”

Much is made of DeSantis' success in winning Florida's Latino voters from the Democrats in his recent re-election. And the churches whose leaders have been riled by his anti-immigrant policies are very conservative -- happy enough with DeSantis' anti-LGBTQ initiatives and encouragement of a broad abortion ban. But there is such a thing as going too far ...

The Rev. Samuel Rodriguez, who serves as president of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference, said “there is angst in the Latino evangelical community” over DeSantis’ immigration proposal.

“Every Latino pastor in the state of Florida, every Latino pastor who pastors a Spanish-speaking ministry, if I were a betting man, we have undocumented individuals in each of these churches, bar none,” he said. ”So are you saying that the same Latino pastors that are pro-life, pro-religious liberty, biblical justice, no to socialism and communism and yes to parental rights —  that this leadership, that we are criminals?”

The pastor lauded DeSantis’ “outreach to the Hispanic evangelical community,” but said he is concerned about the third degree felony penalties for harboring someone who is undocumented as well as hospitals collecting immigration information. This doesn’t mean that Latino evangelicals favor President Joe Biden’s handling of immigration issues, he added.

One reason these doubts about DeSantis may be unlikely to have much immediate electoral impact in Florida is that even these pastors' church members who are citizens and could vote, very likely don't vote. Latinos notoriously participate at low rates. If they are also new citizens and thus newly eligible, it often takes people many years in their new country to get into the election habit.

But performative cruelty to the Spanish-speaking migrants can be felt as viscerally morally offensive. DeSantis is attacking deep communal values that are strongly held. The community gets by through communal care; they expect their politicians to have the same values.

In California thirty years ago, a majority of the Spanish-speaking community was turned for life against Republicans by Governor Pete Wilson's cruel anti-immigrant measures. A generation of Latino political leaders grew up determined to participate fully in the governance of the state. They became some of recent decades most notable politicians (for better and less good) -- Kevin de León, Xavier Becerra, Alex Padilla ...

In Philip Bump's new book The Aftermath, he quotes Lisa García Bedolla, a UC Berkeley political scientist, about the generally stand-offish posture of many (most?) potential Latino voters toward elections and the Democratic party:

“There’s growing independent identification in the United States, and especially among the immigrant-origin communities, so Asian Americans and Latinos are much more likely to be independent,” García Bedolla told me. “In a weird way, you know, the support for the Democratic Party is more, well, they [Republicans] hate us. So I guess we have to go over here.”

This dynamic seems to be what DeSantis is setting up. Florida is not California, but cruelty is cruelty and repellent everywhere. Inflicting moral injury has not ended well for Republicans.