Florida’s leaders are swapping class for crass
Commentary by Florida Phoenix columnist Diane Roberts, veteran journalist and graduate of Florida State University and Oxford University in England
This article is from the Florida Phoenix, a nonprofit newsroom that is part of States Newsroom.
By Diane Roberts
Younger readers may be unaware there was a time when politicians followed the rules, almost as if they cared about good government.
Certainly there were liars, fraudsters, and zealots, your Sen. Joe McCarthys, your Sen. Styles Bridges, and, of course, the great-granddaddy of corruption and sleaze, Richard Nixon, but most lawmakers actually seemed to believe in, you know, the law.
Seems almost quaint.
Take a look, if you can stomach it, at Florida’s sitting attorney general, one James Uthmeier Esq.
A federal judge has held him in contempt for violating a court order halting SB 4C — last session’s bill allowing the state to arrest anyone who might kinda sorta look “illegal.”
Brown folks rounded up by handcuff-happy cops included at least one American citizen.
Uthmeier took to X, proclaiming, “If being held in contempt is what it costs to defend the rule of law and stand firmly behind President Trump’s agenda on illegal immigration, so be it.”
Older readers will detect an echo of former Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris, who did her damnedest to stall ballot recounts in the great Gore-Bush imbroglio of 2000, and who would grandly quote the Biblical Queen Esther, “If I perish, I perish.”
The AG appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit, half of whom were appointed by Trump. They told him (in judicial language) to get lost.
Scofflaw history
Uthmeier’s lucky U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams didn’t fine him or throw his arrogant backside in jail.
Still, it’s early days: Hope Florida, the nonprofit founded by the state’s ambitious First Lady, is under investigation by North Florida State’s Attorney Jack Campbell. Uthmeier is up to his eyeballs in this one.
State Rep. Alex Andrade (R-Pensacola) has accused Uthmeier of criminal fraud and money laundering.
Seems Hope Florida got a $10 million “donation” of taxpayer money, of which a good chunk went to a PAC controlled by Uthmeier.
You can’t use that money for political purposes; nevertheless, that’s just what Uthmeier’s PAC did, spending it on ads to defeat last year’s recreational marijuana amendment.
DeSantis hadn’t yet elevated Uthmeier, then his chief of staff, to the AG job, but still: The guy was an officer of the court, a member of the Florida Bar.
You’d think he’d get it.
Then again, Florida under DeSantis is not known for adherence to the rule of law.
Remember in 2022 when the governor tricked a bunch of Venezuelan asylum seekers onto a plane and flew them to Martha’s Vineyard? Legally dubious? Ethically ugly? Yes and yes.
De Santis is also the guy who suspended one state attorney for saying he wouldn’t pursue abortion cases and another because, he claimed, she wouldn’t enforce state law.
“State attorneys have a duty to prosecute crimes as defined in Florida law,” he said. “Not to pick and choose which laws to enforce based on his personal agenda,” adding that those outlaw prosecutors were “basically saying that they didn’t want to enforce statutes that the Legislature had done.”
Yet when James Uthmeier said he wouldn’t enforce a statute passed by the Legislature, namely, Florida’s 2018 law forbidding anyone under 21 to buy a long gun, the governor shrugged.
He said that law is unconstitutional anyway and that Uthmeier’s stance was a “good-faith position.”
What’s the difference? The two state attorneys he suspended are Democrats.
Besides, as Floridians all know, the sacred right to pack heat matters more than actual human beings like the two people killed by a white supremacist Trumper on the FSU campus in April.
Unfortunately for us, DeSantis and his enablers aren’t particularly troubled by a bit of violence, as long as it’s perpetrated by the right people.
While he initially criticized the Jan. 6 riot, calling it “unacceptable,” he soon fell in line with MAGA-speak, denying there was an “insurrection” of any kind and defending Trump’s role in what was clearly an attempted coup.
So what if a few Capitol police got roughed up? They were on the wrong side.
In Florida, we like cops to be on the right side, making sure Marxists, environmentalists, feminists, BLM radicals, LGBTQ-types, and other outside agitators get what’s coming to them.
And, according to the governor, citizens can play cop, too.
In advance of the No Kings protests on June 14, DeSantis decreed that any patriotic, God-fearing, Trump-voting motorist who felt threatened or even just mildly inconvenienced by those freaks marching in one of the 70-odd demonstrations across Florida had his permission to give ’em a little automotive nudge.
“If you drive off and you hit one of these people, that’s their fault for impinging on you,” he said. “You don’t have to sit there and just be a sitting duck and let the mob grab you out of your car and drag you through the streets.”
DeSantis clearly cut con law class the day they discussed freedom of assembly.
Something in the water?
You begin to wonder if there’s something about Florida that encourages a complete disregard not just of decent behavior but of the rule of law.
Maybe it’s some kind of mosquito-borne illness? Maybe the toxic algae choking our waters emits a foul miasma that clouds the brain’s moral center?
Maybe it’s a fish problem, you know, rotting from the head down?
In any case, scofflaws flock to Florida like rats to a burger joint dumpster.
We’ve a long history of criminality: Al Capone hung out in Miami Beach, and Charles Ponzi sold worthless swampland to rubes dreaming of a life in “paradise.”
It’s no surprise the current occupant of the White House, a casino-bankrupting grifter with 34 felony convictions, chose Palm Beach County as his home.
For a brief period in history — way back there, from the 1960s to the 1990s — Florida was known as a good-government state, with leaders such as Reuben Askew, Bob Graham, and Lawton Chiles, who promoted education, conservation, and transparency.
Again, quaint.
In the past couple of decades, however, we’ve elected such prize porkers as a governor whose company perpetrated a huge Medicare and Medicaid fraud and an attorney general who saw nothing untoward in taking a $25,000 campaign contribution from Donald Trump then dropping an investigation into his shady “university.”
Rick Scott is now a U.S. senator; Pam Bondi is now the attorney general of the United States.
Bondi’s busy demonstrating how much she learned in Florida, doing her damnedest to destroy the separation of powers enumerated in the Constitution.
She’s suing every single federal judge in the state of Maryland for having the brass-faced gall to issue orders insisting on due process for people the Trump regime wants to deport.
Doing their job, in other words.
Lawyers or lawless?
Meanwhile, back down here in the sunniest state with the shadiest government, DeSantis and Uthmeier are back with a brand new bad idea: “Alligator Alcatraz,” a huge ICE detention camp in the Everglades.
The state seized the land from Miami-Dade County to park a 5,000-bed facility bang in the middle of the state’s greatest environmental treasure.
Who cares if it’s legal? It sure ain’t moral.
Despite the state’s claims that the place won’t hurt the surrounding wetland ecosystem (apparently 5,000 people in housing pods won’t create any run-off and all the trucks and buses transporting people and supplies will not make a mark upon the land), it’s an assault on a vulnerable and irreplaceable place.
Remember that the next time you hear DeSantis’ bleating how he wants to “save” the Everglades.
DeSantis, Bondi, and Uthmeier may call themselves lawyers, but they are lawless.