By Charles C. W. Cooke
Friday, May 05, 2023
Is this what it felt like to be a progressive during
the Great Society?
Today, the Florida legislature concludes its 2023
session. And good Lord has it made the most of it. In the
space of just three months, Governor DeSantis and the Republican supermajority have
created the largest school-choice program in American history, banned abortion
after six weeks of pregnancy, made Florida the 26th constitutional-carry
state in the nation, forced unions to abide by the Supreme Court’s Janus decision,
cut taxes by $2 billion, banned sex-change operations from being performed on
minors, barred DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) initiatives in
universities, expanded the use of mandatory E-Verify in the state, achieved a
previously unthinkable collection of tort reforms, declared driver’s licenses
issued to out-of-state illegal immigrants invalid in Florida, prohibited state
and local governments from considering ESG (environmental, social, and
governance) factors in their contracting and investing decisions, extended last
year’s Parental Rights in Education law through twelfth grade, made it illegal
for financial institutions to discriminate on the basis of “religious,
political, or social beliefs,” and prevented credit-card companies from
tracking their customers’ gun purchases.
In recent weeks, Governor DeSantis has been keen to point
out that politicians who wish to effect change must first win their elections.
The GOP’s achievements within this legislative session underscore his point.
Florida is not Florida by accident. It is Florida because, for the last 28
years, the Republican Party has controlled the state’s legislature, and, for
the last 24 years, it has controlled the governor’s office. This, not posting
memes on Twitter, has allowed it to prohibit the taxation of any form of
income, to require any tax or fee increases to receive the blessing of a
supermajority of both legislative houses, to create the top fiscal and economic environment
in the country, to ban affirmative action, to reject Obamacare’s Medicaid
expansion, to appoint six out of the state’s seven supreme court judges, to provide
the sane response to Covid that attracted hundreds of thousands of émigrés
during 2020 and 2021, and to accumulate all of the other policy wins that,
frankly, are just too numerous to list.
I do not like every last thing that Republicans have done
in Florida, and I have been happy to say as much. But that is not my point here. My point —
the sine qua non point, really — is that Florida provides a
remarkable example of a political organization having conceived of, and then
executed, a coherent vision. Until 1999, Florida had elected only two
Republican governors since Reconstruction. Since then, voters have refused to
elect a single Democrat to the mansion. Better still, Republicans have been
rewarded for their efforts. From the end of the Civil War until 2021, there
were more registered Democrats in the state than Republicans. Today, the
Republicans have an advantage of 454,918, the Republican governor has a 59–39 approve–disapprove
rating, and the legislature has so many Republican legislators sitting in it
that it could pass any legislation it wished to over a gubernatorial veto.
This should matter. It should matter when other state
GOPs are looking for a model to follow. It should matter when conservative
organizations are thinking about how to achieve their goals. And, yes, it
should matter when the national Republican Party is looking for a nominee to
lead it into 2024. The current evidence suggests that there are only two men
who could plausibly be chosen as that nominee next year: Donald Trump and Ron
DeSantis. That being so, it seems perfectly obvious to me that DeSantis should
be the pick. Donald Trump lost the 2020 election and gave us Joe Biden; then
helped Republicans to lose the 2021 Georgia runoff, which made it difficult to
check Joe Biden; and then helped Republicans to struggle in the 2022 midterms,
which made it impossible for the Senate to block Biden’s terrible nominations
to the judiciary and federal agencies. Ron DeSantis won his reelection by 19
points, and then set about presiding over a whirlwind of conservative policy
reforms that have prompted voters in swing states such as Arizona, Georgia,
Nevada, and elsewhere to tell pollsters that they prefer him to both Biden and
Trump. When DeSantis announces his campaign in a few weeks, he will be able to
point to a record of political achievement that is unparalleled in recent
memory. If they’re smart, Republican primary voters will take note.
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