The GOP's Attack On Disney Is A Constitutional Test We Cannot Afford To Fail
If Ron DeSantis wins this battle, the future of American democracy could be in great danger. Here's why.
by Justin Rosario
It is an exciting time for Republicans. With a supermajority of extremists on the Supreme Court, the GOP has declared war on democracy and our core concept of freedom in the United States.
In Florida, Governor Ron DeSantis’ attack on Disney over its right to free speech is evidence that Republicans are testing the waters for something much bigger.
Disney is a big and obvious target that presented itself when the company publicly pushed back on DeSantis’ “Don’t Say Gay” bill. DeSantis ordered the Florida legislature to strip Disney of its ability to act as a self-governing body, and Florida Republicans meekly complied. DeSantis could have just made a big PR campaign out of the Disney fight and called for a boycott, but he took the opportunity to turn it into a national battle with enormous ramifications.
The real brass ring comes if and when Disney challenges DeSantis in court. If the GOP discover there are no obstacles to trampling the First Amendment with one of the largest corporations in the world, American democracy faces an unprecedented threat.
DeSantis doesn’t care about Disney
It’s possible that DeSantis didn’t get to go on Space Mountain as a kid (or maybe he did and was traumatized?), but one thing is clear; Ron DeSantis doesn’t care about Disney any more than he cares (or knows) about CRT or trans issues. Ron DeSantis wants to run for president and he’s in full practice mode.
Firstly, DeSantis is selling hate to his supporters while seeing how much of a rabid frenzy he can whip them into. He is also learning how to rule as a strongman, unconstrained by checks and balances.
Every future Republican candidate has paid very close attention to what Trump got away with while in office. The more intelligent, less mentally unstable among them are thinking very hard about how to do the same thing without the rank stupidity that crippled Trump. The ones with executive power, like DeSantis and Greg Abbott of Texas, are abusing their office as dry runs for ruling like a King.
DeSantis and his administration have made it extremely clear that stripping Disney of its status was a punitive measure. Reports Vox:
But in this case, the evidence that Florida targeted Disney because of its protected speech is overwhelming. DeSantis called upon Florida lawmakers to consider “termination” of Reedy Creek on Tuesday. On Wednesday, he sent a fundraising email to supporters where he denounced Disney for being “woke” and for criticizing him personally.
The email was explicit that DeSantis wants to punish Disney for its political views and because the governor believes that Disney is too close to the opposition party. “Disney and other woke corporations won’t get away with peddling their unchecked pressure campaigns any longer,” DeSantis said in his email. “If we want to keep the Democrat machine and their corporate lapdogs accountable, we have to stand together now.”
Florida Lt. Gov. Jeanette Núñez literally said it out loud:
Unlike Trump, DeSantis and Núñez are not accidentally saying the quiet part out loud. They are announcing their motives at the top of their lungs so there will be no confusion when the case goes to court. When DeSantis’s lawyers argue that none of this has anything to do with Disney’s public stance on “Don’t Say Gay”, the courts will have a choice: strike down DeSantis’s bill or allow it to stand.
If the courts strike it down, DeSantis will campaign on “liberal activist” judges thwarting the will of the people, and so on. But if the courts give DeSantis the green light knowing full well he was retaliating, it’s a game changer.
The stick and carrot of Republican tyranny
Right after Trump won the 2016 election, Matthew Yglesias penned an article on the extreme danger Trump represented to American democracy. It wasn’t the white nationalism or the tweeting or even the threat of violence (which hadn’t quite manifested yet). The real danger, Yglesias warned, was the systemic corruption Trump would almost certainly engage in. This would not be the petty “line my pockets” corruption that Trump and half of his administration engaged in. This would be something else entirely:
Many American administrations have featured acts of venal corruption, and Trump’s will likely feature more than most. [It absolutely did - Justin] The larger risk, however, is that Trump’s lack of grounding in ideological principles or party networks will create a systemically corrupt government. Such governments, Wallis writes, “are rent creating, not rent seeking, governments” that operate by “limiting access to markets and resources in order to create rents that bind the interests of the ruling coalition together.”
In other words, the government would pick winners and losers not according to what company had the best business model or even paid the most bribes but who most successfully curried favor. Imagine America’s entire electrical grid run by the geniuses who crashed the Texas electrical grid. Imagine every media outlet but Fox News and OAN being shut down because the FEC said so. Can’t happen? Think again.
As Tyler Cowen wrote several months ago, “If there were a President who wished to pursue vendettas, the regulatory state would be the most direct and simplest way for him or her to do so. The usual presumption of ‘innocent until proven guilty’ does not hold in many regulatory matters, nor are there always the usual protections of due process.”
The Supreme Court is in the middle of dismantling the federal government’s power to regulate anything, but they will make an exception when it comes to a Republican president using that power to illegally silence critics.
What Yglesias warned about in 2017 was bad, but that DeSantis is doing in 2022 is even worse. Using the power of the government to reward allies is corrupt. Using the power of the government to punish critics is a crime against the Constitution. This is why DeSantis is making it so obvious. If the courts give Republicans carte blanche to abuse the power of the government to attack anyone, that opens the door for unlimited power and unlimited abuse.
Republicans are already talking about purging the federal government of insufficiently loyal employees at every level. Trump was tripped up repeatedly by both his own incompetence and by demanding illegal acts from non-partisan workers who refused to comply. With the First Amendment trampled, anyone can be fired if they refuse to pledge allegiance to the regime.
Ohio Senate candidate and newly-minted extremist J.D. Vance was quite explicit about this according to Vanity Fair:
“I think that what Trump should do, if I was giving him one piece of advice: Fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people.”
Eventually, only those who play ball will be left. The system will become self-perpetuating. Your livelihood exists because of the corrupt government so you support the corrupt government in order to keep your livelihood. You become complicit on every level and, eventually, there are no lines left to cross.
It’s not too late
Currently, Republicans like DeSantis are limited by how much they can abuse their power. Businesses have the option of moving to friendlier environments.
Even if multiple Republican-controlled states try to punish national or international companies, at most, they’ll succeed in driving current and future business away in favor of a few triumphant news cycles on Fox. Devastating your tax base to own the libs is not a long-term strategy.
The real threat comes if Trump, DeSantis, or another Trump clone (minus the brain worms) cheats their way into the White House. Once inaugurated, whether through voter suppression and election fraud or through a second, this time successful, coup, the next Republican president will absolutely wield their power to lay waste to all of the perceived enemies of the right and secure his permanent reelection. Who is going to stop them? The courts that would have already signed the death warrant of the First Amendment? A Congress gridlocked by Republicans? Good luck with that.
If they are not stopped now, there will not be a next time. We were lucky that Trump was too incompetent and unstable to be an effective dictator. We cannot rely on that kind of luck again. Republicans have been Trump-proofing the process to make sure there is not a repeat of 2020. We have to do the same.
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