Florida in Five: Voters threw him out. DeSantis brought him back. What happens next?
Florida in Five: Voters threw him out. DeSantis brought him back. What happens next?
Five stories to read from the past week in Florida politics.
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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.
So I stole the idea for this week’s topper from McKenna Schueler, who just wrote a smart piece for the Orlando Weekly newspaper identifying some of the anti-abortion judges up for merit retention votes this year.
That got me thinking about two appellate-court judges in particular who I think are worth paying attention to.
One of them is on Schueler’s list, which focused on judges who will appear on Orlando-area ballots: Jared Smith, a judge on the Sixth District Court of Appeal.
Smith might just be the most infamous judge in all of Florida. He’s the former Hillsborough County Circuit Court judge who once refused to let a 17-year-old with an unplanned pregnancy get an abortion because, in part, her school grades weren’t good enough.
The decision, which was later overturned, outraged local voters, who threw Smith off the bench just a few months later — only to see Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis turn around and stick Smith on a higher court.
Smith’s back on the ballot this year, in a vote that will determine whether he can continue as an appellate court judge for another six years. Hillsborough voters won’t have a say this time, though; the Sixth DCA, which stretches from Naples to Orlando, doesn’t include Tampa Bay.
The other is Judge Bradford “Brad” Thomas, a Jeb Bush appointee who serves on the First District Court of Appeal in north Florida.
Thomas recently wrote an unusually extreme abortion opinion. It involves the state’s forced notification and consent laws, which prohibit anyone under the age of 18 from obtaining an abortion without first notifying and getting permission from a parent or guardian.
Parental notification was actually the big abortion debate in Florida when I first started covering Tallahassee 20 years ago. And it’s always stuck with me as the quintessential example of something that sounds so simple and reasonable on the surface — but is actually quite complicated and even dangerous if you take just a moment to think it through.
Obviously, any good parent would want to know if their teenage daughter was going through something as serious as an unplanned pregnancy, to be there for them, and to help them make the smartest, safest decision for themselves and their future.
But most young people who need an abortion do talk to their parent — because they have a healthy family relationship, not because the government makes them.
The young people who don’t are in much more dangerous situations, like young women who live with, or have fled from, abusive homes. And it’s those vulnerable young people who are impacted by forced consent and notification laws.
What supporters of Florida’s abortion notification and consent laws will tell you is that these laws include protections for young people in dangerous family situations — by giving them the option to go to court instead and get what’s known as a “judicial bypass” or a “judicial waiver.”
What they don’t tell you, though, is that some anti-abortion judges simply refuse to grant these waivers.
Sometimes they find fig-leaf excuses — like when Smith cited that 17-year-old’s GPA as a reason to deny her a waiver. But sometimes they don’t even bother with that.
Which brings us back to Thomas. He wrote an opinion earlier this year in which he argued that no young person should ever be able to get an abortion without first notifying and getting permission from a parent or guardian.
The state’s entire judicial bypass system “unquestionably violates the parents’ rights…by excluding them from the courtroom and from notice and any opportunity to be heard regarding their minor daughter’s decision to terminate her pregnancy,” Thomas ruled in a concurring opinion published in January.
“It is difficult to imagine a more grievous violation of constitutional law,” Thomas wrote. “This the state cannot do.”
It’s a notion that may eventually be tested before the U.S. Supreme Court.
But in the meantime, Thomas must again be tested before north Florida voters.
*To paraphrase Barbossa, five is more what you’d call a guideline than an actual rule.
Nothing to see here
A crane collapsed in Hurricane Milton. Authorities aren’t investigating (Tampa Bay Times) ($)
Pepe Fanjul makes an appearance
How Republican Billionaires Learned to Love Trump Again (The New Yorker) ($)
But don’t say climate change
‘You need boots to live here, or a boat’: King tides are swamping Miami streets again (Miami Herald) ($)
See also: Storms Be Damned, Florida Keeps Building in High-Risk Areas (Wall Street Journal) ($)
An issue to watch
Polluted water from Mosaic phosphate plant likely spilled to Tampa Bay during Milton (Tampa Bay Times) ($)
See also: Milton likely to hit Florida’s phosphate mining hub, worrying environmentalists (Tampa Bay Times ($)
Well this sounds quite bad
Why the DeSantis administration lawyer who threatened TV stations over abortion ad quit (Miami Herald) ($)
See also: Florida abortion ban sends young woman to Illinois to end a pregnancy that was harming her (Palm Beach Post) ($)
Perspectives
DeSantis admin threatens criminal charges for TV stations airing ads he dislikes. Putin would be proud (Orlando Sentinel) ($)
Abortion advocates learn its dangerous to disagree with Gov. Ron DeSantis (Florida Times-Union) ($)
What do Florida cows and lab-grown meat have to do with Florida hurricanes? (Palm Beach Post) ($)
Another conviction in Florida’s ghost candidate scandal, but the senators who benefited remain in office (Orlando Sentinel) ($)
I am from Sarasota, Florida, currently live in Orlando. The Gulf Coast used to be very pretty and unpretentious. We vacationed on Siesta Key a couple weeks every summer at a row of easygoing cottages on the beach. It was the kind of coastal Florida that Jimmy Buffett wrote as Living in 3/4 Time. Key West was entirely that way and to a degree still is. Time moves slower, unhurried. I used to go to sleep listening to the waves and remember how the air was salty. 1973 was the last year we were there. A development group bought the land and built a five story condo on it.
That was the start. There’s no free access to Siesta Beach anymore. It’s $$ one way or another. Further north, Pensacola Beach was one of the last places to develop. That happened in the 1980s as people looked for remaining coastlines to grab. One of the saddest things about Florida is, a lot of natural beauty was lost by uncontrolled development. It’s not a concern to our Legislature (hasn’t been for years).
Whew, man, the people running this state are corrupt and crazy. As for judge retention, my guideline is simply to vote against anyone who's a member of the Federalist Society. As for rebuilding, when I was going to FAU in the early 80s for ocean engineering, one of our professors told us that he's taken part in establishing a no-rebuild line up the Atlantic coast (might have been Gulf too, but I don't recall for sure) and the state took one look and said, "No thanks, there's too much money to be made!"