DeSantis’ New Campaign & Amending America Vs. Amending Florida - Top 3 Takeaways – January 31st, 2024
- Making America Florida. Governor DeSantis’ presidential campaign may be over but his desire to effectively make America Florida...isn't. While Palm Beach County State Representative Rick Roth is busy once again fighting in the state legislative session for a proposed constitutional amendment which would make it harder to amend Florida’s constitution (which as Roth points out has been amended 400 times)... Governor DeSantis is calling on the federal government to amend the US Constitution (which has only been amended a total of 27 times), four more times. The name of DeSantis’ new campaign is to “Hold Washington Accountable”. And the four ways he’d like to hold Washington accountable are by establishing these four U.S. Constitutional Amendments. 1) Impose term limits on members of Congress 2) Require Congress to pass a balanced budget each year 3) Provide the President with line-item veto power 4) Prohibit imposing any law on citizens that doesn’t apply to members of Congress. Not so coincidently, Florida has all those laws in place. There are term limits for all state-level elected officials. Florida has a balanced budget amendment to our state’s constitution. Our governor has the ability to issue line-item vetoes and Florida’s public officials are governed by the same laws and with access to the same programs as the citizens of the state – without special carve outs (though they do get to vote on their salaries). And here’s the thing. Do those sound good to you? Would you support them if you were given an opportunity to do so? Do you think at least 60% of your fellow Americans would to? I do (though the national pressure campaign against a balanced budget amendment would be unlike any negative campaigning you’ve ever seen as fear mongers would tell those on government assistance programs that the free puppies, and free candy, and free Biden bucks and even the free legacy Obama phones, that are anything but free, that they’d all be taken away and for everyone else the message would be that the economy would crash into a depression if the federal government didn’t spend far more than it takes in which is hilariously ironic). But is there even the slightest of chances that just one of those four will be adopted soon? Of course not. Getting at least two-thirds of Congress or two-thirds of states to agree to even propose them is currently implausible and that’s prior to getting at least three-fourths of the states onboard to ratify it or them. DeSantis no doubt knows this too which somewhat sadly makes the pitch little more than populist political fodder for the foreseeable. My biggest takeaway from this pitch is that he may already be laying the groundwork for another presidential campaign in four years. But anyway, this exercise led me to two related thoughts. Maybe the most important federal constitutional amendment Governor DeSantis could propose isn’t what he’s offered up but instead...
- What Florida does to amend our state’s constitution. The direct democracy approach with 60% voter approval. If, for example, most Americans want those proposed Amendments but the people we’ve elected to represent our interests, don’t - the direct democracy approach to amending the US Constitution would in theory be the best play. But of course, that thought is as DOA as DeSantis’. And that brings me full circle to the effort by Rick Roth to make it harder to amend Florida’s constitution. The country’s founders made it super hard to amend the federal constitution, so it’s only been amended 27 times. Florida’s founders created a different system for amending the state’s constitution that makes it a lot easier to amend and it’s been amended 400 times. Does our country have some really big policy problems? Yep, no doubt. Is it still a great country? Yep, no doubt. Is Florida a great state with generally excellent policies in place? Of course. That’s why we continue to lead the country in net migration with those coming here legally and illegally as mentioned in the story I brought you yesterday. So, in other words the American experiment still works. And the irony is that if Rick Roth proves successful with his proposed constitutional amendment which would raise the threshold for amending Florida’s constitution from 60% to 66.7%, which is very much in doubt once again this year (it passed its first House Committee vote on a divided vote and it hasn’t yet been proposed in the state senate), it would be done using the existing system which means only 60% of the vote in November would be required. But if it does pass...
- Not much would change with Florida’s constitution. Maybe Rick Roth’s best argument for his proposal this year is that if you like Florida the way it is then pass his proposal the way it is. On the one hand the difference between 60% of the vote of Floridians being required to amend Florida’s constitution as opposed to 66.7% might not sound like much. In reality, it’s huge. At least in terms of outcomes. In 2019 I did an analysis of Florida’s proposed constitutional amendments to see what the impact would have been if two-thirds of the vote was required to approve constitutional amendments in the state. The survey said...most of Florida’s constitutional amendments wouldn’t exist. What I found was that 59% of the constitutional amendments that passed in Florida did so by receiving at least 60% of the vote, not more than 66.7% of the vote. So yeah, on the one hand you can say that Florida wouldn’t be the same state that it is without the current amendment threshold in place. On the other hand, history suggests that Florida will mostly remain the same state that it is if you raise it.