POLITICUSUSA
After Barack Obama defeated Mitt Romney in 2012, Democrats began to plan for the next election in 2016. They could have not imagined, at that point, that they would be running against a failed businessman and reality TV star.
In an interview with Fox Business, former President Donald Trump said he’d consider running in 2024 with Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (R) as his running mate.
“Well, he’s a friend of mine. I endorsed Ron. And after I endorsed him, he took off like a rocket ship,” Trump said.
Over the last 5 years, states like Georgia and Arizona have become bluer and helped Democrats gain control of the senate. At the same time, states like Florida and Ohio have become redder.
Florida, once the biggest swing state in the country, now has a GOP governor and two Republican senators. That does not mean, however, that Democrats can’t win there.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (R) pushed back against requiring vaccine passports in his state, saying he wouldn’t allow them.
“We are not supporting doing any vaccine passports in the state of Florida,” he said. “It’s completely unacceptable for either the government or the private sector to impose upon you the requirement that you show proof of vaccine to just simply be able to participate in normal society.”
Within weeks of being in office, Joe Biden passed a massive stimulus package. The legislation will put money in the pockets of millions of Americans and also aid countless small businesses.
The measure is favored by over 2/3’s of Americans and more than half of the country’s Republicans. GOP lawmakers are now in the unenviable position of having the slam the massively popular bill.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (R) slammed the “failed Republican establishment” in remarks at the Conservation Political Action Conference (CPAC).
“Florida’s leading on the issues that matter to conservatives,” DeSantis said. “We don’t spout hollow rhetoric. We take decisive action.” He referred to Florida as “an oasis of freedom” and praised his administration’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic.
Rep. Charlie Crist (D-FL) has requested that the Department of Justice launch an investigation into Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (R) has confirmed he will order that flags be flown at half-staff at public buildings in honor of conservative firebrand Rush Limbaugh. The often controversial radio personality died earlier this week of lung cancer.
Donald Trump has claimed that voting by mail is safe in Florida because the governor is a Republican. The President has been at pains to explain why mail-in ballots should be used in that state but not others.
When Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez took to the House floor last Thursday to address the widespread sexism at work in the halls of Congress and deeply embedded in American culture and society, she had to suspect her remarks would garner some media attention.
The Orlando Sentinel‘s editorial board criticized Florida Governor Ron DeSantis after he blamed the high number of unemployed people for the state’s failure to pay unemployment benefits.
DeSantis made the remarks in response to a reporter’s question about delays that have affected individuals who first applied for unemployment in March.
“I can tell you that DEO goes through this, and nine times out of 10 the application’s incomplete. And I think if you have complied in that time period, and your application’s complete, and you qualify, I think 99.99% of those folks have been paid,” DeSantis said at the time.
His statements prompted a rebuke from the Sentinel: “As if getting laid off isn’t scary enough, as if getting put through the unemployment wringer isn’t humiliating and frustrating enough, Gov. Ron DeSantis has decided to start blaming the jobless for the state’s failure to pay benefits,” the editorial board wrote.
“In other words, the governor thinks the vast majority of the hundreds of thousands of people who still haven’t received unemployment benefits to pay for rent and food have only themselves to blame. User error,” they continued. “Not a state unemployment system that was designed to fail and frustrate workers who find themselves out of a job through no fault of their own. A system that, in the year 2020, is asking people to fax information.”
The editorial board goes on to say that it empathizes with DeSantis and his frustration, noting that he “is taking a lot of heat for an albatross he inherited from former Gov. Rick Scott.”
“But we’ve reached a new level of tone-deafness when responsibility is shifted from the state to the citizens who desperately need benefits they’re entitled to,” they say, later concluding that DeSantis:
…probably is right that many of those who haven’t been paid were deemed ineligible to receive unemployment for one reason or another. What’s mystifying is how DeSantis, knowing better than anyone how lousy and glitchy the state’s system is, can be so confident those people truly are not eligible.
This was a bad moment for the governor. People are hurting. They’re scared. They’re broke. But DeSantis gets peevish, and sounds like he’s totally over answering questions about unemployment benefits.
Republican Florida Governor Ron DeSantis called his state “God’s waiting room” for senior citizens during a coronavirus briefing.
“Florida is ground zero for the nursing home, we’re God’s waiting room,” DeSantis said. “We have a huge number of facilities, a huge number of residents.”
When he noted that the city of Orlando has 68 COVID-19 patients currently hospitalized, he described the number as “probably a two-hour stretch in Brooklyn” in a jab at the large number of fatalities in New York City.
“If you go back six weeks, there were people saying that Florida was going to be another New York or another Italy,” DeSantis said. “Those have all been proven to be false. Florida’s performed better than anyone predicted.”
You can watch DeSantis’s remarks in the video below.
People over the age of 60 make up roughly 28 percent of Florida’s population. Seniors are also especially vulnerable to the coronavirus, which according to the most up-to-date statistics, has claimed at least 1,074 lives in the state. Florida has currently recorded 31,528 coronavirus cases.
On Saturday, DeSantis said he is in no rush to lift restrictions on business operations in the wake of the pandemic. Although restrictions expire on April 30, it seems he will extend social distancing requirements through May.
“We’re not doing in-person sports yet, no matter what. That’s just not going to happen in May,” he said. “Another thing in Phase 1, they say movie theaters with social distancing, I’m not there yet on the movie theaters. I think it is an enclosed environment (and) you are much better off being outdoors then in an enclosed environment — that’s just a reality.”
Americans enduring unemployment have typically, in the culture of the U.S. political economy, not been responded to with sympathy but rather with disdain, judgment, and blame.
And this has been true, we see, even when the nation has faced conditions of great economic austerity, begging the question, how can we blame people for not working when there is a scarcity of jobs?
Former FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb has called on Texas and Florida to do more to contain the spread of Covid-19. Dr. Gottlieb told CNBC that the states’ governors needed to take action.
“I think the real wild card here and the decision point on whether or not we’re gonna have the bad outcome that Dr. Fauci and Dr. Birx talked about is what populous states like Texas and Florida do,” he said.
“[They] really haven’t taken aggressive steps even now,” Gottlieb said.
“They’re large states, they have large urban areas that have very dense populations and if they don’t get more aggressive, then we could be on the cusp of some of these bad outcomes.”
Gottlieb said Texas and Florida should act ‘very aggressively right now’ in order to keep the number of infections low.
He went on to explain how the federal government had limited authority to impose restrictions on states.
Watch the video:
Dr. Scott Gottlieb says he’s worried that large states like Florida and Texas have not been aggressive enough in combatting the coronavirus outbreak. “I don’t understand why those governors have not acted more forcefully.” https://t.co/jB8m6i5yyO pic.twitter.com/IqAMbhKQ4h
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis was forced to sign an NDA and not disclose to the public information about the Russian hacking of his state's voter databases.
The Trump administration is backing off its plan to use disaster relief funding to build a Mexican border wall due to pushback from members of both parties in Congress.
Officials in the White House told news outlets on Thursday that President Trump is considering the use of billions of dollars of Army Corps of Engineers funding to build his unpopular border wall, which has been deemed to be unnecessary and ineffective.
The Corps of Engineers funding was originally allocated by Congress for states and territories suffering from storm or wildfire damage but has not yet been spent. The affected areas are Puerto Rico, Florida, Texas, and California.
Trump came up with the idea as a way for him to avoid the need to obtain the approval of Congress in order to build his border wall.
On Friday, after additional pushback and complaints from conservatives in Congress — as well as the Wall Street Journal — Trump said he’s “not looking” to declare a national emergency for the border wall right now.
Trump’s allies in Congress had denied that he is planning to divert disaster funding for the wall.
“I’ve spoken directly with the White House,” Texas Rep. Kevin Brady, the ranking member on the House Ways and Means Committee, said in a tweet.
Trump, he wrote, “Fully supports Corps funding to help Harvey communities rebuild/prevent future flooding.”
Brady is referring to 2017’s Hurricane Harvey in Houston, which inflicted $125 billion in damage, primarily from flooding. Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, also said Friday he opposes “any reprogramming of Harvey disaster funds.”
Basically what happened is that Trump and his advisers backtracked on the idea of diverting disaster funding after outcries from Republicans in the affected states.
For Trump to diverting disaster funding would mean real harm to many communities that are still recovering from storms and wildfires. It would also set an undesirable precedent for presidential use of money appropriated by Congress. It might also be unconstitutional, and would be subjected to legal challenges.
“This is weaponizing disaster assistance funding,” Craig Fugate, the former administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, said. “It’s using it for purposes to extract concessions or force issues that have nothing to do with a disaster.”
On Friday several state governors criticized Trump’s planned move, saying it would make their states more vulnerable.
For example, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a conservative and Trump supporter, said he is against using hurricane funding for a Mexican border wall. Florida is still recovering from several hurricanes in the past few years, including Hurricane Michael, which hit the state in October and caused at least 60 deaths.
Puerto Rico Gov. Ricardo Rossello, still suffering from the devastating impacts of Hurricane Maria in 2017, said:
“No wall should be funded on the pain and suffering of U.S. citizens who have endured tragedy and loss through a natural disaster.”
President Donald Trump declared that “an honest vote count is no longer possible” in the controversial Florida midterm elections for the state’s governor and U.S. Senate positions. The president is now claiming (with no evidence) that many of the ballots are “missing or forged.”
Trump tweeted:
“The Florida Election should be called in favor of Rick Scott and Ron DeSantis in that large numbers of new ballots showed up out of nowhere, and many ballots are missing or forged. An honest vote count is no longer possible-ballots massively infected. Must go with Election Night!”
The Florida Election should be called in favor of Rick Scott and Ron DeSantis in that large numbers of new ballots showed up out of nowhere, and many ballots are missing or forged. An honest vote count is no longer possible-ballots massively infected. Must go with Election Night!
It’s possible that Andrew Gillum is the biggest surprise of the 2018 midterm election season.
Very few people thought he could win a crowded Democratic primary for Florida’s governor, yet he did.
Very few people think that a true liberal progressive who endorses all of the positions of Bernie Sanders can be elected governor of a Deep South state, but he might.
Since his shocking win against four other prominent and well-funded Florida Democrats in the August 28 primary Gillum has been leading his Republican opponent Ron DeSantis in almost every poll.
It seems that there is just something about the charismatic 39 year-old African American mayor of Tallahassee that people just like — and respect.
In recent days Gillum has also had the opportunity to demonstrate his poise and his leadership skills in the face of blistering attacks from the President of the United States.
DeSantis was hand-picked by Trump, and he has taken all the credit for the young congressman’s victory in the GOP primary. So if DeSantis loses it will be seen as a clear slap in the face for the president.
In his desperate attempts to prevent that from happening Trump has taken to Twitter to make ludicrous and outrageous charges against Gillum.
In the worst of these tweets Trump wrote:
“In Florida there is a choice between a Harvard/Yale educated man named @RonDeSantisFL who has been a great Congressman and will be a great Governor – and a Dem who is a thief and who is Mayor of poorly run Tallahassee, said to be one of the most corrupt cities in the Country!”
In Florida there is a choice between a Harvard/Yale educated man named @RonDeSantisFL who has been a great Congressman and will be a great Governor – and a Dem who is a thief and who is Mayor of poorly run Tallahassee, said to be one of the most corrupt cities in the Country!
Democratic gubernatorial candidate Andrew Gillum has opened up a 12 point lead over Republican Ron DeSantis (54%-42%) as Florida women are backing Democrats.
President Donald Trump is lashing out in anger the Florida Republican Party’s gubernatorial nominee, former congressman Ron DeSantis, POLITICO reported Tuesday.
This is not a positive development for DeSantis with less than seven weeks until the crucial midterm elections on November 6th.
According to
POLITICO