These Scandals Should Be Career-Ending
Dive deep into the swamp with me
Welcome to the big Sunday edition of Progressives Everywhere!
I used to say that Andrew Cuomo’s ego, vindictiveness, and casual regard for ethics made him a Democratic version of Donald Trump, but new NYC Mayor Adams, with his brashness, embrace of billionaires, open nepotism and corruption, and stunning off-the-cuff statements, is making an early case for the title himself.
While being called the Democratic version of Donald Trump is a dubious distinction, Republican politicians have been going all out to emulate the doofus former president and position themselves as his heir apparent. In this week’s edition of the newsletter, we’ll shine a spotlight on the most noxious contestant in that race to the far right, whose Trumpian disregard for human life and web of corruption have created a multitude of interlocking disasters.
But first, thank you to our latest crowd-funding donors: Suzanne, Deidre, Peter, and Erin!
Florida is in total shambles right now. Yes, even more so than usual.
Covid-19 is once again laying waste to the state, corruption is flourishing, and the truth is emerging. And at the center of it all is Ron DeSantis, the state’s governor and an aspiring Republican candidate for president.
In prioritizing his ambitions, he has embraced dark money special interests and pioneered the right-wing’s nihilistic pandemic politics. DeSantis has spent much of the past two years working to exacerbate the virus and quash civil rights instead of protecting his constituents. And the consequences of his viciousness may be finally catching up to him.
His Republican Party is enmeshed in several legal and ethical scandals. Some of the state’s most powerful corporate interests and lobbyists have been caught in a blatantly illegal electioneering scheme. And Florida’s public health system is on the verge of breaking.
The national media’s collective decision to now cover Covid as largely a political issue, along with the ongoing legitimization of mendacious villains as legitimate political actors, has shielded DeSantis from the national scrutiny that his reign of terror very much justifies. In an effort to fill that void, today we’re taking a look at a few ways that DeSantis and the state government are failing Floridians right now, each of which should be national stories.
The Big Lie and Real Electoral Fraud
Basking in the glory of Donald Trump’s solid victory and the state GOP’s dominating performance down-ballot, DeSantis immediately declared the 2020 election a political and administrative triumph, free of fraud, third-party interference, or other administrative problems that plagued the 2018 election. Celebrating his own victory, however, didn’t comport with the tone of the rest of the Republican Party, which quickly adopted the sore loser denial and deranged conspiracy theories being pushed by Donald Trump and his cultists.
He made a deft pivot. DeSantis maintained that Florida’s election was all clean, but warned that voter fraud presented a very real threat going forward. Having already disenfranchised 700,000 eligible voters before the election, DeSantis happily joined other Republicans in weaponizing Big Lie conspiracy theories to pass unabashedly racist voter suppression laws under the guise of “election security” — live on Fox News.
Ironically, it turned out that Florida’s election hadn’t been entirely without fraud or subversion. In the 2020 election, three Democratic state lawmakers lost tight re-election races to Republicans in large part due to the presence of three “ghost” candidates that did little campaigning but were backed with massive outlays by a mysterious political action committee called Grow United.
Voters were bombarded with ads and flyers touting the supposed strong progressive credentials of the spoiler candidates, at least one of whom had been bribed into playing the patsy by a former Republican lawmaker named Frank Artiles. That candidate, an auto parts salesman named Alex Rodriguez, siphoned off 6,000 votes in a race that the Democratic incumbent, state Sen. Jose Javier Rodriguez, lost by just 32 votes.
Alex Rodriguez pled guilty to fraud charges in August, admitting to accepting over $44,000 for his part in the scheme. Artiles also recruited at least one of the other ghost candidates, as well.
Sen. Jose Javier Rodriguez was known for his environmental activism — he wore rain boots to the Capitol in 2018 in an effort to draw attention to rising sea levels and flooding in his South Florida district — and was a vocal proponent of clean energy. So it made sense that he was one of the three Democrats targeted by Grow United, which has deep financial and political ties to Florida Power & Light.
According to an investigation just released by the Orlando Sentinel, FPL helped finance the founding of Grow United and sent millions of dollars to the consultants that run the organization. Grow United’s consultants also communicated with FPL lobbyists about the three elections in which it was supporting the ghost spoiler candidates; in one text message, FPL’s Vice President of State Government Affairs wrote “We are going to charge full speed ahead in all those seats,” which is one of the most unambiguous admissions of guilt that I have ever seen.
Meanwhile, DeSantis, seeking to lead the way in Big Lie boosterism and further burnish his strongman credentials, proposed in November the creation of a special law enforcement agency dedicated to investigating alleged election fraud. Late last month, in the proposed budget he presented to lawmakers, DeSantis earmarked nearly $6 million to staff up his private conspiracy Gestapo, which would include 20 law enforcement officials.
Given his clear disdain for voter fraud, one might think that DeSantis would be all over the ghost candidate scheme and seek to make an example out of cheaters. Election laws are lax in Florida, but in October, the state’s Election Commission still recommended a $20,000 fine and censure for Alex Rodriguez. Yet three months later, DeSantis has yet to act or even comment on the recommendation. It’s a far cry from the live signing ceremony for the voter suppression bill, which he handed to Fox News to carry as an exclusive event.
So why hasn't DeSantis said a word about the Florida Election Commission’s recommendations or any other aspect of the ghost candidate scandal? Acknowledging the crime would invite further questions and scrutiny of the morass of dark money and favor-trading corruption in Florida politics, especially his own deep relationship with Florida Power & Light.
Dirty Money, Dirty Energy
Back in 2018, DeSantis, then a member of Congress, was running neck-and-neck with former Tallahassee mayor Andrew Gillum in the Florida gubernatorial race. In the final few weeks of the campaign, right-wing dark money groups unleashed a torrent of negative, misleading, and often racist advertisements against Gillum, who is Black. One of the more shady campaigns was funded in part by Florida Power & Light, the single biggest political donor in the entire state.
Florida’s very lax laws around campaign donations and PACs make it impossible to know how much money FPL really sank into pushing DeSantis and other Republicans over the finish line in 2018 and 2020. Given the multitude of favors that DeSantis and the GOP-controlled legislature have done for the company, it’s likely to have been a very hefty sum.
“DeSantis accepts hundreds of thousands of dollars from political committees connected with Associated Industries of Florida, an organization funded by FPL,” State Rep. Anna Eskamani, who has been a leading critic of FPL, told me. “Not only does he engage in dark money politics but he signs every bill FPL has sent to his desk, too.”
Eskamani and several other lawmakers have requested that FPL undergo an audit to make sure that taxpayer money did not go toward the ghost candidates. DeSantis’s relationship with the company suggests that will not happen.
In April, DeSantis signed legislation that banned local governments from forbidding utility companies from using dirty fuel sources to generate electricity. It was a clear giveaway to FPL, which relies on natural gas to deliver energy across a state being ravaged by climate change. With the market cornered and municipalities at their mercy, FPL then proposed a massive rate hike. In October, the Public Service Commission, a body overseen by DeSantis, authorized the $1.5 billion rate increase on Floridians over the next five years.
On January 1st, the average Florida family’s monthly energy bill shot up by $20, a terrific burden in a state ranked 49th in the state for income equality. And if DeSantis gets his way, those families won’t be allowed to try to mitigate those cost increases by installing rooftop solar panels and selling energy back to FPL— the legislature, which starts up again on Monday, is expected to pass a ban on residential rooftop solar panels in the Sunshine State.
FPL is obviously behind that legislation, though it resents being called out in public. Last week, the company launched a website attacking the Miami Herald and its Tallahassee bureau chief for having the temerity to report on its involvement in the proposed home solar panel restrictions.
Don’t expect DeSantis to stand up for the state’s largest newspaper or the First Amendment — he’s busy preparing to silence teachers with a bill that would allow people to sue educators for teaching kids about racism. His proposal is based on the Texas anti-abortion law, so you can thank the Supreme Court for providing him the assist on that one.
Too bad DeSantis doesn’t have anything more pressing to address…
The Rolling Covid Disaster
Florida is now regularly shattering its single-day record for new positive Covid tests, a surge that began in December and shows no signs of slowing down. Instead of tackling the outbreak through proactive preventative measures, the DeSantis administration is instead attacking reality itself.
"If you have no symptoms, please don’t get tested,” Dr. Joseph Ladapo, Florida’s new surgeon general, said at a news conference on Tuesday. “We need to unwind this … planning and living one’s life around testing.
“It’s really time for people to be living, to make the decisions they want regarding vaccination, to enjoy the fact that many people have natural immunity,” added Lapodo, who was handpicked by DeSantis for his vaccine skepticism and embrace of right-wing medical scams.
Lapodo’s new guidance advises that people who were exposed to Covid but show no symptoms should simply not get tested. They are instructed to instead go about their daily lives, potentially exposing as many people as they please in a state that in November banned mask and vaccine mandates at DeSantis’s behest.
The guidance further advises anyone experiencing mild Covid symptoms to get tested if they feel like doing so, but not to really sweat it unless they’re old, pregnant, or dealing with a weakened immune system.
Public health officials immediately blasted Lapodo’s new guidance as reckless and likely to exacerbate the pandemic — one professor of infectious diseases at Florida International University called it a “recipe for disaster” — but in a way, it was really just codifying the DeSantis administration’s unofficial sabotage of any effective testing regime.
Just a few days after issuing that guidance, news broke that the DeSantis administration was so dedicated to discouraging Florida residents from getting tested for Covid that it let nearly one million unused tests in state custody expire over the holidays. When the information emerged, DeSantis tried to slither out of culpability by insisting that the tests expired due to lack of demand, an excuse that rang laughably hollow after an entire month of massive traffic jams and hours-long lines at testing facilities across the state.
The entire country has been hit hard by the omicron variant, but Florida’s surge in new cases and interminable wait times for rapid tests put the state in a dubious class of its own. This is no accident, but instead a direct result of the live and let die approach DeSantis has forced on the state’s 21.5 million residents since the pandemic began.
DeSantis opened the state back up in April 2020, inviting a Covid wave that crushed the state that summer, when it suffered the most pandemic-related deaths in the nation. The numbers were probably even worse than publicly known, given the fact that he cooked the books, fired the whistleblower who tried to expose the truth, and pressured scientists into deleting other Covid-related data from essential studies.
Though he has done his best to sabotage vaccine distribution and discourage people from getting the jab, case numbers in his senior-heavy state subsided enough by this spring that DeSantis closed down all the state-run testing facilities.
Then, this past fall, DeSantis, who made a show of his support of police violence after the George Floyd protests, began mixing the two most potent issues in reactionary politics to create an even more toxic brew. As red-pilled cops began quitting or getting dismissed from police departments due to the emergence of vaccine mandates in blue states, DeSantis made speech after speech inviting those unvaccinated lunatics to Florida, even offering them large bonuses to relocate.
DeSantis set up ideal conditions for a new variant to rip through Florida, making the state a perfect breeding ground for the hyper-contagious omicron variant. When the virus spiked as predicted, DeSantis refused all entreaties to reopen the testing centers, a stonewalling that Lapodo continued once DeSantis disappeared from the public eye in mid-December.
Yep, the governor straight vanished just as his state was once again being engulfed by a deadly viral plague. Where’d he go? His office posted a few screenshots of his public schedule, which were all filled with private meetings, and later said told Fox News that he’d been accompanying his wife as she received treatment for breast cancer on the day that several Democrats criticized him for going MIA.
Still, lawmakers and political observers alike were stumped and suspicious — even if he had been unavailable on that particular day, they wondered, what was stopping DeSantis from addressing a frenzied public on any of the other days of his extended absence?
They may have gotten their answer on Wednesday.
Did DeSantis have Covid in December? That would explain why he suddenly disappeared for a few weeks, then came back sounding like he’d been spent his time away being waterboarded on a roller coaster.
His potential illness should elicit little sympathy, though, as DeSantis undoubtedly had access to as many doses of Regeneron as he needed — one of his top donors, billionaire investor Ken Griffin, owns a whole lot of stock in the company that produces the monoclonal antibody treatments.
Here’s a quick rundown of some important developing stories. As always, you can become a premium member of Progressives Everywhere for twice-weekly emails that include more stories, deep dives, and key updates.
Policy Updates
Missouri: In a sign of just how far-right our politics have moved, an extreme (and likely unconstitutional) gun freedom law signed by GOP Gov. Mike Parson last year has drawn criticism from police groups and spurred Democrats to propose a new law under the guise of “backing the blue.”
The state’s Second Amendment Preservation Act declares most federal gun control laws null and void in Missouri and gives residents the right to sue any police officer that tries to enforce them. It also bans police from cooperating with the FBI or other federal agents on the pursuit or prosecution of anyone charged with gun crimes that the law declared null and void.
Mississippi: How about another strange role reversal in a red state’s politics? Republican Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann is now making the case for Medicaid expansion in the state — he just refuses that term, given the negative connotation it carries with fellow GOP politicians.
Hosemann said legislation to provide that health care access will pass “when we start focusing on real life Mississippians… who are really suffering who don’t have to be, who are dying leaving their children motherless. I think we have a sense of values in Mississippi, and I think that will be energized by that discussion.”
Hosemann recently was asked by a reporter about the possibility of expanding Medicaid.
“What is expansion of Medicaid? That is a lazy question,” Hosemann retorted. “What you need to be thinking about is how are we going to cover people who are working in Mississippi who have catastrophic illnesses? That is the real question.”
To be clear, the actual public in Mississippi has no problem with the term “Medicaid expansion,” with recent polls finding that 68% of voters in the nation’s poorest state support broadening access to the federal health care program. It’s just stubborn, nihilist GOP leadership that still will not budge.
Ballot Initiatives
Oklahoma: One election cycle after successfully passing Medicaid expansion (and using the term to boot), progressives in Oklahoma are now aiming to legalize recreational marijuana in the state. Medicinal marijuana is already legal.
Michigan: With Roe v. Wade likely to get at last partially overturned this fall, Michigan activists are racing to qualify an abortion protections initiative for the 2022 ballot. The initiative would guarantee a broad raft of rights related to reproduction and women’s health:
This proposal would amend Michigan’s Constitution to explicitly affirm Michiganders’ right to make and carry out decisions relating to pregnancy, including abortion, birth control, prenatal care and childbirth. The amendment would also prohibit criminal punishment for a miscarriage, stillbirth or abortion.
Once again, it’s shaping up to be a busy November for ballot initiatives in Michigan.
Work Sucks
Maine: Well, this sucks. Gov. Janet Mills continues to use her veto pen to kill key priorities of the state’s labor unions, which helped her toppled right-wing Gov. Paul LePage back in 2018. On Friday, she squashed a bill that would have allowed farmworkers to unionize, a low blow she justified by saying she wanted to protect family farms and prevent rising food prices.
In her veto statement, Mills cast herself as a “committed supporter of collective bargaining rights for workers generally,” but her record more than suggests otherwise. She has vetoed bills that would have expanded worker bargaining power over and over throughout her three years in office, so much so that unions have been trying to find a potential primary challenger.
NLRB: On the bright side, the many conflicts of interest that permeated the Trump-era NLRB may well wind up leading to some of its most consequential pro-corporate decisions being re-examined and perhaps even overturned. Love to see union-busters get their comeuppance.
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Power mongers, idiots and nut jobs, the new Republican Party. What a bunch of criminals!