You can’t keep a good man down. That’s probably why this past week’s been so lousy for Ron DeSantis. The Florida governor and failing presidential candidate couldn’t even present himself as a normal mammal during a crisis. No, instead, he acted like a petty loser and snubbed President Joe Biden when he visited Florida Saturday to inspect the damage from Hurricane Idalia.
The two had mutually agreed to meet earlier last week, but DeSantis didn’t offer a compelling explanation for not showing up. He claimed “security preparations” for the visit would prove disruptive to the recovery effort, which no one believes. He didn’t even give a heads up to Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) Administrator Deanne Criswell before publicly announcing the snub.
“What I can say is that I know that the governor and the president spoke while I was on the ground with the governor on Thursday,” Criswell said, “and the governor gave no indication at that time that he would not be meeting with the president.”
All DeSantis achieved with his stunt was further demonstrating that he has no class, while providing Biden yet another opportunity to show voters how he’s a real leader who actually cares about all Americans, even those who don’t vote for him. When local reporters asked Biden if he had a message for DeSantis, Biden declined to fuel the public feud DeSantis desperately craved while his constituents suffered. The president assured everyone, “We’re going to take care of Florida.”
While DeSantis hid like a coward, Senator and former governor Rick Scott — another Republican who doesn’t care much for Biden — nonetheless met with the president and thanked him for his quick response.
“Can I just say something real quick about what the president has done? First off, the president did a great a job with the early declaration before the storm hit the coast,” Scott said. “That was a big deal. It helped all these first responders.”
“And then how fast you approved through FEMA the individual assistance, the public assistance. It was a big people deal,” he added. “These are not rich communities. Many of them struggle … I want to thank you for doing that very quickly.”
Biden met with Scott in rural Live Oak, which is heavily Republican. Biden doesn’t care about the politics, just the people, and this all reinforced how small DeSantis is in contrast.
Also on Saturday, Judge J. Lee Marsh struck down DeSantis’s Jim Crow congressional map, ruling that it violated the state’s constitution. DeSantis had bullied the Republican-controlled Legislature into ditching its adequately evil gerrymandered map and approving his own racist map that eliminated the Black majority/plurality seat based in Jacksonville.
Marsh, whom Scott appointed in 2018 to the Leon County Circuit, specifically stated that DeSantis’s map violates Article III, Section 20 of the Florida constitution (Fair Districts Amendment). He wrote that “the Legislature cannot eliminate majority-minority districts or weaken other historically performing minority districts where doing so would actually diminish a minority group’s ability to elect its preferred candidates.”
Declaring the map unconstitutional, Marsh blocked Florida Secretary of State Cord Byrd from using it in future elections. Democratic Rep. Al Lawson, who’s Black, lost last year’s election under the now illegal map, but has said he’d run again if his former district was restored. Byrd, meanwhile, has vowed to appeal the ruling to the Supreme Court, currently a subsidiary of Harlan Crow Holdings.
Meanwhile, DeSantis is cratering in the polls, the inevitable result of people getting to know him. A Wall Street Journal survey of Republican primary voters has DeSantis at 13 percent to Donald Trump’s 59 percent. He was down just 24 points in April, and worse, his “very favorable” ratings have also crashed. He’s just five points ahead of Nikki Haley, which means the also rans will continue hammering him for the coveted “runner up in case Trump croaks” position.
It was a terrible weekend all around Ron DeSantis, so a great weekend for decent people.
[Politico / Wall Street Journal]
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