Four for the Fourth 2023: Second Thoughts About DeSantis' Flailing

So the Governor of Florida Ron DeSantis is running around, campaigning - rather badly at it - for the 2024 Republican nomination for the presidency, and his biggest message is "let's make America like Florida" selling his argument that he's turned the Sunshine State into a bastion of FREEDOM against "woke" librulism.

The thing is, DeSantis hasn't really done anything for freedom in Florida. He's supporting book bans and whitewashing of racism from our history books. He's cutting back on social services that could free rural families from poverty. DeSantis even went out of his way to use the line-item veto power to slash at budget items to punish fellow Republicans who refused to back him in his presidential campaign, not a very liberating thing to do.

But it's been two big political items that DeSantis committed that are coming back to hammer him. Above all, his harsh stance on immigration that drove him to push for and sign legislation attacking migrant workers and their employers. Digby has the current dirt on that:

It’s a super great idea to crack down on immigrant labor during a time of full employment and a building boom in a big agriculture state. So smart. And that’s what Ron DeSantis has done so that he can pretend he’s a tough hombre in a border state (which he isn’t.)

I should mention that's a sarcasm font. Digby then quotes from a recent Wall Street Journal report:

Florida’s agricultural and construction industries say they are experiencing a labor shortage because a new immigration law that took effect July 1 is leading migrant workers to leave the state.

The law, signed in May by Florida Gov. and GOP presidential candidate Ron DeSantis, seeks to further criminalize undocumented immigration in the state. It makes it a third-degree felony for unauthorized people to knowingly use a false identification to obtain employment. Businesses that knowingly employ unauthorized workers could have their licenses suspended, and those with 25 or more employees that repeatedly fail to use the E-Verify system to check their immigration status can face daily fines. 

Business owners and workers alike say the ranks of laborers in Florida have grown noticeably thinner.

“The employee who wants to work on the farm is not available anymore,” said Hitesh Kotecha, owner of a produce packaging facility in South Florida who leases land to farmers. “How are we going to run the farms?”

At downtown Miami’s construction sites, the story is the same: Workers have fled. Others are waiting to see what happens.

In Miami’s booming construction market, developers, construction companies and construction workers say the change happened as soon as DeSantis signed the legislation this spring. Workers at several construction sites in South Florida say a quarter to half of their teams are gone, exacerbating an already challenging labor shortage across the industry...

It's not just the employment:

In addition to increasing penalties on employers and workers, the new law requires hospitals that accept Medicaid to question a patient’s immigration status, and invalidates out-of-state driver’s licenses issued to people unauthorized to be in the U.S. It makes it a third-degree felony to knowingly transport into Florida a person who is undocumented and illegally entered the U.S. The law also adds $12 million to the amount of money the state has earmarked for its migrant-relocation program, bringing the total to $22 million this year. 

This is something that affects medical care, and people relocating to Florida for family/personal reasons. In the push to get at illegal immigrants who have fake IDs, we're going to see an increase in legal migrants having their IDs challenged and facing penalties for laws they're not breaking. This could even affect natural-born Latinos some of whom come from families that have been in the United States since before the goddamn siege at the Alamo. Wanna bet how quickly a Peruvian-American family at Universal Orlando or EPCOT visiting from Utah gets tossed into jail all because their dad's driver's license fails a "papers please" checkpoint on I-4?

It's a nightmare. There is no freedom here, only Republican cruelty.

And it's not just the Latinos suffering. White women are waking up to the reality that DeSantis just gutted their rights to alimony.

The way divorce works in the United States is messy, but alimony was a system that provided women coming out of a failed marriage some economic stability, based on the economic realities divorced women are more likely to fall into poverty after separation. Alimony can be a headache for the ex-husband, but it was a way to ensure women couldn't be forced by economic uncertainty to stay in a marriage that was broken (and likely violent/abusive).

What DeSantis passed ended "permanent alimony" and shifted the system to an adjustable format that uses a more complex and possibly confusing scaling system that undercuts any fiscal stability divorcing women could find. Here's some of the details (via NBCMiami news site):

Along with eliminating permanent alimony, the measure will set up a process for ex-spouses who make alimony payments to seek modifications to alimony agreements when they want to retire.

It will allow judges to reduce or terminate alimony, support or maintenance payments after considering a number of factors, such as “the age and health” of the person who makes payments; the customary retirement age of that person’s occupation; the "economic impact” a reduction in alimony would have on the recipient of the payments; and the “motivation for retirement and likelihood of returning to work” for the person making the payments.

The bill will set a five-year limit on what is known as rehabilitative alimony.

Under the plan, people married for less than three years will not be eligible for alimony payments, and those who have been married 20 years or longer will be eligible to receive payments for up to 75 percent of the term of the marriage.

The new law will also allow alimony payers to seek modifications if “a supportive relationship exists or has existed” involving their ex-spouses in the previous year. Critics argued the provision is vague and could apply to temporary roommates who help alimony recipients cover living expenses for short periods of time...

Everything I'm seeing so far becomes either a greater risk that women will lose alimony they were promised, to where they won't get any alimony at all.

For lower-income women, this merely ensures they will have no safety net should they try to escape a bad (violent) marriage. For upper-income women, this is going to ensure they are sliding down into lower-income status while their rich ex-husbands stay rich.

This is not going to bode well for women in Florida, who are already coping with the harsh anti-abortion laws DeSantis and the Florida GOP dumped on them. And it ought to horrify all the women across the United States where DeSantis is threatening to make America just like the hellhole he's making right now.

If there's any joy to be had, it's that for all of DeSantis' pandering on Far Right issues - to stake an early primary lead against donald trump - he has failed miserably. Everything DeSantis does in Florida isn't impressing the MAGA base voters that he needs to secure a primary win by June 2024. The way things are going, DeSantis could summon a special legislative session to pass laws giving MAGA voters everything they desire - Florida criminal charges against Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, criminalization of the Democratic party, mass arrests and deportation of everyone NOT White or Male or Obscenely Rich - and he'll still be losing to trump just sitting there whining about how unfair the world is towards himself.

It'd be tasty schadenfreude except for the reality that DeSantis is actively bullying, punishing, and harming Floridians all so he could prance on stage.

The quicker DeSantis loses the primaries and the quicker the federal courts undo half the damage DeSantis' laws are inflicting on us, the better.