The NPR Politics Podcast - So There's A Lot Happening In Florida Right Now

Episode Date: April 27, 2022

A flurry of headlines out of the Sunshine State: Gov. Ron DeSantis — a rising star in the Republican party and apparent presidential hopeful — is feuding with Disney after it criticized a new law limiting dicussion of gender and sexual identity in schools, a severe GOP gerrymander that will limit Black political power in the state, and new voting restrictions.This episode: White House correspondent Scott Detrow, national correspondent Greg Allen, and national political correspondent Mara Liasson.Support the show and unlock sponsor-free listening with a subscription to The NPR Politics Podcast Plus. Learn more at plus.npr.org/politics Connect:Email the show at [e-mail] the NPR Politics Podcast Facebook Group.Subscribe to the NPR Politics Newsletter.Find and support your local public radio station.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hi, this is Alan in Pensacola, Florida, and I'm about to start my 21-hour road trip to Providence, Rhode Island, where I will be starting my dream job. This podcast was recorded at 1.55 Eastern on Wednesday. Forgot what day it was for a second, even though somebody just told me it is Wednesday, April 27th. Things may have changed by the time you hear it, but I will have crossed 11 state lines along the way. Okay, here's the show. Or he'll still be on I-95. Really hard to tell. Good luck. Now I want to know what that job is. Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Scott Detrow. I cover the White House.

I'm Mara Liason, national political correspondent. And today we are headed to Florida, which has been in the spotlight for a number of reasons in recent weeks. There is an ongoing fight between Disney and the state's governor over the parental rights and education bill, which critics refer to as the Don't Say Gay Bill. That's led Governor Ron DeSantis to sign a bill taking away Disney's special tax privileges. There's also a battle over redistricting and the state's new congressional maps and voting rights as well. Many other storylines to get to. They all lead to Florida rapidly shifting from a swing state to the heart of what MAGA governing looks like. So let's bring in our Florida man, NPR's Greg Allen, who is based in Miami.

Hey, Greg. Hi, Scott. I hope you're okay with me calling in our Florida man, NPR's Greg Allen, who is based in Miami. Hey, Greg. Hi, Scott. I hope you're okay with me calling you a Florida man. I'm stuck with it. He is now. So, Greg, let's start with this high-profile bill by just reminding us what this legislation does. Right. Well, the bill is an education bill that tells all public schools in the state that you can't provide any instruction in sexual orientation or gender identity in grades kindergarten through third grade. And that bill then became very contentious. It was seen as a target, especially against the trans community, but the LGBTQ community in general.

Advocates for the LGBTQ community tried to change the bill to say, let's ban all sex education in those K-3 grades. And the Republican sponsors resisted that. And that's pointed out that it really was about targeting the LGBTQ community, which is what led them to go with the don't say gay moniker. And just briefly, Mara, this is part of a broader national trend of many Republicans framing education, framing a lot of curriculum that gets to diversity as some sort of threat, as some sort of danger, as some sort of culture war. Right. Well, the big theme for Republicans is parental rights, whether it's teaching about racial history in a way that they think makes white students, quote, uncomfortable, or in this bill, teaching about sexual orientation.

And parental rights is broadly popular. Some of the specifics in these bills might not be, and there are Republicans who think that some of them go too far. But there's no doubt that Republicans feel that this particular front in the culture wars is something that really will work for them. They saw it work in the governor's race in Virginia, and Ron DeSantis is someone who has national political ambitions. This is something that is aimed clearly at appealing to the Republican base, which is what you need if you're running for the nomination for president.

Greg, so this bill signed into law, how does it go from that to a fight between the governor of Florida and one of its largest and probably its most culturally important employer? What happened, I think, really, it was kind of a failure as Disney leadership here. The company has always had a very good stance on gay rights, on LGBTQ issues, and they were kind of caught flat-footed by the passage of this legislation. The CEO of the company, Bob Chappick, came up with this idea that we would work then to overturn this Don't Say Gay, the parental rights and education bill over time. We'll work against it now that it's been passed. And that's what really got Ron DeSantis' ire up. And he basically called him out on that, said that they'd gone too far, they'd crossed a line. And crossed a line by pushing back against a piece of legislation, right? By voicing an opinion,

basically, in terms of how he framed it. Yes. And I think that what we heard is that they were mad because they were buying into the don't say gay label and framing it that way. Well, where was Disney before the law was passed? That's part of the problem here is that Disney just did not engage in this. It's not really clear to me why not. But because of that, the CEO of Disney was under fire himself. And then he responded in a way that ends up leaving him on the defensive, which is very unusual here.

You'd think that a powerful employer and a powerful lobbyist with so much money for political contributions would be listened to. But it's not clear that they actually did weigh in early on, and they certainly weren't listened to after the fact. It seems very much a core part of that company's identity when it comes to the movies it creates, celebrating diversity, saying that no matter what your background, you are a valued person. So the initial muteness seemed to make a lot of people angry. And then, of course, when they spoke out about it, you got to this point where DeSantis targeted Disney. And Greg, can you explain what happened next with Disney's unique rights around Disney World being revoked?

Right. Well, you know, DeSantis went further. He started criticizing Disney for being a woke corporation. And there was some residual ill will about the way they handled the pandemic requiring face masks much later than he believed they should, you know, that kind of thing. So there was already some tension there. And then that really came to a head with this parental rights and education bill. But then it was really even more of a surprise that then he would attack their special status that they've had in Florida for 55 years now. Back when Disney World was first being planned here, Walt Disney himself, and then he died,

but his brother Roy and then other company executives went to the state and said, we need a special status here because we're going to build something special. We're going to build this city of the future, Epcot, which was going to be this futuristic city. Some of us have probably seen the, remember the old videos videos were about this.

Of course, that never did happen. Epcot was just a theme park. So they never really delivered on that promise. But when they made the promise, they were given all these special rights that you would give to a city. They have the right to operate their own police force, their own sewer plants, their own, they do all their own services themselves. They raise their own taxes. They write their own municipal bonds, which is a key part of this. And as a result, they are exempted

from nearly all state regulations. And who picks up the cost of running these areas if Disney isn't going to do it anymore? Question number one, yeah. I mean, there's two counties that these districts are close to, Osceola County and Orange County. Orange County would get the biggest blow to it. And it's really not clear what the financial outcome will be here. I mean, there's nearly a billion dollars in outstanding debt that would be turned over to the this. They would also get all the assets supposedly, but it's possible that Disney could do some switching around and move assets from one place to another. So it's possible the counties could end up with all the debt and very few of the assets. And there's lots of other questions about it too besides that. So Mara, let's zoom out. What is Ron DeSantis trying to do here? Is he trying to establish himself as a 2024 presidential contender? But not only just as Trump doesn't run, but if he runs against Trump, because it seems to me he has signed a lot of bills into law that give him the chance to make the argument, look, I got this conservative, this MAGA type agenda signed into law. President Trump never did that on so many fronts. Yeah, I don't know if that's the argument he'll make against Donald Trump if he ever runs against him. But there's no doubt that this is about who is going to be the inheritor of Trumpism. And I think that's where the Republican

Party is right now. They're kind of beyond Trump as a person, even though he still has a pretty iron grip on the party. But Ron DeSantis is running as the number one anti-woke Republican, whether it's pandemic rules or parental rights in schools against, you know, teaching sexuality. He's going to position himself as the biggest enemy of the left. And I think that's his main strategy for 2024. That's where the Republican Party is today. And what's so interesting to me is that the incredible alliance that the modern Republican Party had

with the corporate community has been completely severed. It's taken a long time, you know, for this divorce to happen. But corporations now can expect retaliation if they speak out against a Republican Party cultural position. All right, we're going to take a quick break. When we come back, we will talk more about what's happening in Florida with redistricting and voting rights. We are back all over the country. States have been redrawing their congressional maps as a result of the 2020 census.

And in Florida, the current proposed map is the subject of a legal battle. So, Greg, Republicans control Florida's legislature. Like you said, they've got pretty wide margins. And yet the map that lawmakers produced was not Republican-leaning enough for DeSantis. Is that a fair way to put it? Yes, I think definitely. I mean, they were, frankly, afraid of going back to what happened a decade ago when they did the last set of maps, which just dragged them to the courts for years and really ended up with – it was expensive, but it was very embarrassing because in the discovery process, it turned out all these lobbyists and all these Republican operatives had submitted maps under false pretenses, and it was a mess. And so they didn't want to go through that again. They came up with maps that were surprising.

They were so moderate that they didn't attempt to really gerrymander that much. And DeSantis wasn't going to stand for that, and so he came up with his own map. He told them before they even passed him, he was going to veto them. They tried to mollify him by passing something a little different and giving him a couple options, but he still vetoed them. And then he came up with his own set of maps, which are much more Republican leaning than we've seen. And what would the general breakdown be? His map would likely give Republicans 20 seats versus eight for the Democrats. And this is in a state where the parties are almost evenly divided. Voters are almost evenly divided between the two parties.

And he did that, of course, by targeting African-American voting districts, districts that were set up under court with court approval 10 years ago to protect the voting power of African-American voters here in Florida, because, of course, we have a history of discrimination at the polls against voters here. And that was one of the things that was set up under court order. He eliminates two of those districts. And by doing that, he totally scrambles the map. And then they did other things, too, besides that, to make it more Republican-leaning. Mara, how does this fit with the broader picture as more and more of these maps get locked into place with, of course, primaries already happening? Right. There's no doubt that the Republican Party represents a minority of voters nationwide, but they become the majority in

legislatures or in Congress because they rely on all of these minoritarian institutions and partisan gerrymandering is first and foremost among them. I think that gerrymandering across the country didn't lean as far towards Republicans as Democrats were worried that it would, but Republicans only need a little bit of edge to take back control of Congress. So I would say in general, Republicans are more aggressive gerrymanderers than Democrats have been. And this map of DeSantis' is, you know, case in point. Just draw the lines so that even if Republicans win a minority of the vote statewide, they still end up with a big majority of seats. Amara, while you're right that this is a tactic Republicans have really embraced and maximized, this is also something Democrats do as well in the states where they have just as

much power. Absolutely. It's just that Republicans do it a little more. Yeah, I think that's fair to say. And Greg, we could probably fill an hour on all of the various updates in Florida. But let's just touch on one more thing that fits into a big national trend. And that's voting rights. So many Republican controlled states have passed laws over the last two years restricting voting rights. What is the latest on that front in Florida? Well, there's a new bill that was just signed into law by DeSantis that would set up his own election police force. And it also gets rid of drop boxes, he says. They give them a new name. They have to be monitored, they end what he calls ballot harvesting, which is people collecting absentee ballots and delivering them to registration offices, things like that. But the interesting thing here is that last year they passed an

election law that was even more restrictive in terms of voting, and that law was just recently struck down by a federal judge here in Florida who said that this is part of a pattern that he's seen here in Florida over the last 20 years of the Republican-dominated legislature producing one election reform package after another that discriminates against minorities. He said this one does so, and he says it's become so egregious that he says every new election voting law that comes forward here in Florida has to be brought to his court to be approved before it can go into law. And so that order has, of course, has been appealed to the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals in Georgia. We'll see what happens with that, whether it might go to the Supreme Court.

But a federal judge saying there's been so much discrimination in Florida that I have to look at every voting law going forward is a pretty remarkable thing in itself, which is, we'll have to see how that plays out. All right, that is it for today. Greg Allen, thank you so much for joining us. You're welcome. We will be back in your feeds tomorrow. I'm Scott Detrow. I cover the White House. I'm Mara Liason, National Political Correspondent. And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.