The Daily Parker

Politics, Weather, Photography, and the Dog

How Disney beat DeSantis

I mentioned Thursday that the Disney Corp. appears to have beaten Florida Governor Ron DeSantis' (R) plan to penalize them for taking a pro-queer stance. Our side are laughing out loud at how incompetent the DeSantis Administration had to be to let this happen, given it took Disney 10 months of public hearings to neuter the incoming board. But as Josh Marshall points, DeSantis never cared about the win; he only cared about the spectacle:

Florida has particularly robust public notice laws. So this was all done in plain sight. Obviously local governing board meetings don’t get carried live on Fox and CNN. But this has been a big effort by the DeSantis administration. And well … they’re the state government. So “who follows local government board meetings!” really isn’t an excuse that cuts it for them. They just weren’t paying attention. Didn’t sweat the details.

There’s at least a pale analog here to conservative governance in general. When you don’t really care about governing or actually despise government you tend not to sweat the details and inner workings of how it functions. I would think this might be a bit of an exception. But maybe not.

The state government can go to court and try to get this undone. The state law experts interviewed in this Miami Herald article say Disney has by far the stronger case. But the deeper problem is that the kinds of state legal precedents you’d set to undo this would have the effect of weakening the security of a lot of property and contractual rights, especially in real estate. And you know who cares a ton about property and contractual rights in real estate? Right, rich people.

It’s quite unlikely that even Ron DeSantis will give a crap about [litigating this] in a year or two, let alone some other future governor who may not agree with the original decision and if they did agree will certainly have better things to do with their time than creating bad legal precedent by litigating the long tail of DeSantis’s strutting nonsense from all the way back in 2021.

The Republican Party has become a farcical doppelgänger of itself. They have no policies of their own except to take power so they can rob people blind. It's all performance art and deep corruption. I look forward to the day when most voters understand that, so we can get a proper opposition party and get on with the business of governing.

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