Ron DeSantis announced last month that he's running for president, after which -- I hope you're sitting down for this -- he proceeded to adopt extremely right-wing positions on a number of issues. Who could have possibly seen
that coming? Certainly not
National Review's Jim Geraghty:
In the last few days, Ron DeSantis has pledged to appoint Supreme Court justices who will “do better” than Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett and pledged to change the name of Fort Liberty back to Fort Bragg.... Your mileage may vary, but that strikes me as a strange selection of battles to fight....
Trump’s choices for the Supreme Court are, among conservatives, probably the least vulnerable part of his record as president....
There’s also something odd about the decision by DeSantis ... to pledge to re-rename the former Fort Bragg, now Fort Liberty, back to Fort Bragg....
Is a President DeSantis really going to expend some of his limited political capital in 2025 or 2026 in a fight with Congress to take down signs that say “Fort Liberty” and put back the signs that say “Fort Bragg”? Does DeSantis really want to go to the mattresses for Braxton Bragg, “the most hated man of the Confederacy,” who, it turns out, was a pretty lousy general?
Poor Geraghty. This completely unexpected development happened a few months after he reassured readers of
The Washington Post that DeSantis is
a super-chill middle-of-the-road guy:
If Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis runs for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination ... plenty of Americans across the partisan divide would have good reason to root for him to win the nomination.
... DeSantis would represent a return to normality.
... The governor certainly doesn’t shy from a scrap, but he fights for policies, not to prosecute vendettas.
... Independents and centrists might find themselves disappointed or irked with a President DeSantis. But they’d be irked within normal parameters, not fearing that he’d burn the country down in a fit of rage because he thinks someone wasn’t being fair to him.
Robert Iger of Disney, your thoughts?
DeSantis, for all his pugnaciousness, colors inside the lines, operating within the traditionally defined powers of his office and the constitutional framework of government.
Um, no. Here's
something we learned yesterday:
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has been working for months on plans to tear down and rebuild both the Department of Justice and the FBI....
The governor has privately told advisors that he will hire and fire plenty of federal personnel [and] reorganize entire agencies....
But his ambitions go beyond bureaucratic restructuring. He wants to physically remove large swathes of the DOJ from the District of Columbia, including FBI headquarters....
He vowed in that call to order “some of the problematic components of the DOJ” be uprooted, reorganized, and then promptly “shipped to other parts of the country.”
As we learned last month, DeSantis
wants to wield maximal executive power as president. Among other things, he enthusiastically advocates the politicization of the Justice Department:
... DeSantis’ opening message to Republican voters is that he would bring [a] methodical precision to the White House in ways that past executives – Trump included – failed to.
“Presidents have not been willing to wield Article Two power to discipline the bureaucracy,” DeSantis said. “I’ll come in and on day one we’ll be spitting nails.”
... He would dispel with the longstanding tradition that government institutions like the US Department of Justice operate independently from the president....
“Republican presidents have accepted the canard that the DOJ and FBI are quote, independent,” DeSantis said. “They are not independent agencies. They are part of the executive branch. They answer to the elected President of the United States.”
One of his plans appears to be
the criminalization of corporate diversity efforts, as Breitbart reported yesterday:
On Monday’s “Hugh Hewitt Show,” ... DeSantis stated, “[W]e’re also going to refocus functions of things like federal law enforcement.... So, for example, like the Civil Rights Division, our Civil Rights Division in Justice will do all discrimination. Yes, of course, you don’t discriminate against a racial minority, but you also have to look at corporate America, government, academia, how they are wielding things like DEI in a discriminatory manner against other people. And so, we will say no tolerance for discrimination of all kinds, regardless of whether you’re in the majority or the minority.”
And Jim Geraghty assured us that DeSantis was such a mellow guy! Who knew?
No comments:
Post a Comment