Florida in Five: Voters can fire the judges who tried to block abortion and marijuana ballot measures

Five stories to read from the past week in Florida politics.

Oct 13, 2024

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Welcome to another installment of Florida in Five: Five* stories you need to read from the past week in Florida politics.

One of the most surprising decisions of the current Florida Supreme Court landed about a year ago, when justices slapped down the state agency that signed off on a record-setting rate increase for Florida Power & Light, the state’s largest electric company.

In a 4-2 decision, Florida’s high court ruled that the Public Service Commission failed to justify why it had approved the rate deal for FPL, which, among other things, allows the Juno Beach-based giant to pocket an unusually fat profit margin.

Now, the Supreme Court didn’t reject the deal outright. It instead ordered the PSC — which is run by appointees of Gov. Ron DeSantis — to better explain itself first. That has led to more legal wrangling that included another round of oral arguments just last week.

Still, the ruling was, I would argue, an encouraging sign from what has generally been a truly timid court in recent years, particularly when it comes to challenging the DeSantis administration.

One of the two dissenting justices in that case was Justice Renatha Francis, who was appointed to the court by DeSantis — and who made crystal clear that she would have sided with the DeSantis administration and supported FPL’s rate increase.

“By all the benchmarks established by our case law and the statute, the agency provided enough support and explanation for us to review the settlement and determine that the proceeding was fair and the order correct,” Francis wrote in a dissenting opinion.

Francis is also one of two justices on the ballot this fall — meaning Florida voters can decide whether she should stay on high court.

It’s part of the state’s system of merit retention elections for appellate court judges and Supreme Court justices. While each is initially appointed by the governor, they are then placed on the ballot every six years so that voters can choose whether to keep them.

The other Supreme Court justice up for merit retention this fall is Justice Meredith Sasso, another DeSantis appointee who joined the court while the FPL rate case was already underway and didn’t participate in that initial ruling.

But Francis and Sasso have something else in common: They are the only two justices on the seven-member Supreme Court who tried to block both of the citizen-led constitutional amendments that qualified for this year’s ballot.

Francis and Sasso were on the losing sides of the 5-2 decision that authorized Amendment 3, which would legalize marijuana, and the 4-3 ruling that approved Amendment 4, which would overturn Florida’s near-total abortion ban.

Might be something to keep in mind as you fill out your ballot.

*To paraphrase Barbossa, five is more what you’d call a guideline than an actual rule.