Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis previewed more of his 2024 pitch Monday night with a new emphasis on the next president’s ability to push the Supreme Court further to the right, calling for new justices in mold of Clarence Thomas and “improvements” to others such as Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., a Republican appointee who has sometimes sided with the court’s liberal wing.

Speaking to a Christian media conference in Orlando, the soon-to-be GOP presidential candidate also leaned into the idea that he could serve eight years if elected — an implicit contrast with former president Donald Trump, the Republican polling leader, who could only serve four more years. DeSantis recounted how he flipped the Florida Supreme Court to conservative control as governor and speculated to an enthusiastic crowd that several U.S. Supreme Court justices could need replacements over the next two presidential terms.

“I think if you look over the next two presidential terms there is a good chance that you could be called upon to seek replacements for Justice Clarence Thomas and Justice Samuel Alito and the issue with that is, you can’t really do better than those two,” DeSantis said in his address to the National Religious Broadcasters Convention. He went on to say that, “if you replace a Clarence Thomas with somebody like a Roberts or somebody like that, then you’re gonna actually see the court move to the left, and you can’t do that.”

DeSantis suggested that those two justices, as well as Roberts and liberal Sonia Sotomayor, could require replacements over two presidential terms.

“So it is possible that in those eight years, we have the opportunity to fortify justices … Alito and Thomas as well as actually make improvements with those others, and if you were able to do that, you would have a 7-2 conservative majority on the Supreme Court that would last a quarter century,” DeSantis added, to raucous applause.

Judge Carolyn Carluccio, the Republican nominee for the open Pennsylvania Supreme Court seat, removed a resume touting her anti-abortion stances from her website.

The resume, which was originally posted on her campaign’s “About” page and was accessed through an internet archive, uses coded rhetoric stating that the judge is a “Defender of 2nd Amendment Rights and All Life Under the Law.”

Carluccio is the President Judge of the Montgomery County Court of Common Pleas and defeated Commonwealth Court Judge Patricia McCoullough in Tuesday’s Republican primary to earn her party’s nomination for the open seat. She will face Democratic nominee Daniel McCaffery in November’s general election.

The vacant seat opened following the death of Chief Justice Max Baer. Democrats currently hold a 4-2 majority on the court.



The resume isn’t the only piece of evidence pointing to Carluccio’s ideological opposition to reproductive rights.

In February, Carluccio submitted a questionnaire to the Pennsylvania Coalition for Civil Justice Reform, a business-friendly 501(c)6 organization, stating that she received endorsements from the PA Pro-Life Federation and the Pennsylvania Republican Party.

The Pro-Life Federation’s website states they are against abortion from the moment of conception and grant legal protections to fetuses.

ORLANDO, Fla. (AP) — A popular Orlando restaurant that regularly features drag shows filed a federal lawsuit against the state of Florida and Gov. Ron DeSantis on Monday, less than a week after he signed a bill that targets drag performances.

The lawsuit filed in Orlando federal court by the owner of Hamburger Mary’s Orlando claims the state is depriving the business of its First Amendment rights to free expression. The restaurant is asking the court to temporarily stop the law from taking effect while the case moves forward.

DeSantis has made anti-LGBTQ+ legislation a large part of his agenda as he prepares to seek the Republican presidential nomination. He signed the bill restricting drag performances — along with bills that ban gender-affirming care for minors, restrict discussion of personal pronouns in schools and force people to use certain bathrooms — last Wednesday in front of a cheering crowd at the evangelical Cambridge Christian School in Tampa.

Hamburger Mary’s Bar & Grille has more than a dozen locations around the U.S., with the Orlando restaurant opening in 2008. According to the lawsuit, the restaurant had hosted “family friendly” drag shows on Sundays, but the new Florida law is forcing them to ban children from all shows. This has led to a 20% drop in Sunday bookings.

Forget about Texas being pro-life. When it comes to guns, abortion and the lives of women, Texas has chosen the path of death.

The effective overturn of abortion access for women in Texas means that women must now travel out of state to safely end their pregnancies. In addition to that burden, many advocates for women have feared that these barriers would increase the risk of women being trapped in abusive relationships — as carrying a pregnancy to term and giving birth ties women more closely to abusers, via their shared children.

As if that weren’t enough, gun owners in Texas, including domestic abusers, have simultaneously become more empowered because of the state’s “permitless carry” laws — and because of a federal appeals court ruling striking down a law that prohibited people under domestic violence restraining orders from having guns. Advocates have hypothesized that pregnant women in Texas and their unborn children would be more likely to die at the hands of the men in their lives.

These fears became a fatal reality last week for 26-year-old Gabriella Gonzalez, who was allegedly killed by her boyfriend, 22-year-old Harold Thompson, after returning to Dallas from Colorado, where she had obtained an abortion.

TikTok on Monday sued to block Montana from banning the popular video app, escalating its efforts to stop a prohibition that would be the first of its kind in the nation.

In a lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court for the District of Montana, the company said Montana’s legislation violated the First Amendment and parts of the U.S. Constitution that limit state powers. The ban was “unconstitutionally shutting down the forum for speech for all speakers on the app,” the company said in the lawsuit.

TikTok sued days after Montana’s governor, Greg Gianforte, signed the ban — which would fine the app if it operated in the state or app stores if they allowed it to be downloaded — into law.

The state law has become a test case for whether it is possible to prohibit the use of TikTok, which is owned by the Chinese internet company ByteDance, over national security concerns. The ban, which is set to go into effect on Jan. 1, has already raised questions about how it would be enforced within Montana’s borders.

“We are challenging Montana’s unconstitutional TikTok ban to protect our business and the hundreds of thousands of TikTok users in Montana,” Brooke Oberwetter, a TikTok spokeswoman, said in a statement. “We believe our legal challenge will prevail based on an exceedingly strong set of precedents and facts.”

1. Biden Stans

One of the criticisms I often hear about Joe Biden is that he’s a tool of the progressive left who has given them full run of the store.

This doesn’t make a ton of sense! It seems to me that many (most?) lefty progressives are frequently frustrated by Biden because of his tendency to compromise with Republicans and conservative Democrats—as well as his reluctance to wade into the kind of big, structural fights that liberals believe are necessary.1

From where I sit, it looks like Biden is the centrist president everyone always says they want.2

Biden passed the American Rescue Plan that included a lot of spending, but it was short on progressive give-aways and long on help for working families. The Inflation Reduction Act was passed on party line, but was full of spending for rural states. He passed a bipartisan gun reform law that was modest enough to leave gun-reform advocates wanting a lot more. He accomplished a big infrastructure spending law with large-scale Republican support.3 He passed the CHIPS Act to jump-start domestic semiconductor manufacturing with lots of Republican votes. He passed the Respect for Marriage Act with loads of Republican votes, too.

Wherever Gov. Ron DeSantis goes, he brings greetings from “the free state of Florida.” He heralds his “Florida Blueprint.” And he brags about how many people originally from whichever state he happens to be visiting love taking advantage of Florida’s warm weather and low taxes.

But a funny thing has happened as DeSantis travels the country with a “Make America Florida” message that underpins the Republican’s soon-to-launch presidential campaign.

DeSantis has found that not everyone wants to be Florida. And he has encountered spirited pushback from competitive fellow governors and GOP officials who believe that their states have done just as much, if not more, to advance a conservative agenda.

“It’s a lot of fun competing with my colleagues and Republican governors across the country,” Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds, who has hosted DeSantis in the first-in-the-nation caucus state, said in an interview with NBC News. “But make no mistake, we are competitors.”

ACLU
@ACLU

BREAKING: We’re suing Florida over a discriminatory property law that blocks most immigrants from China, Cuba, Venezuela, Syria, Iran, Russia, and North Korea from buying homes in much of the state.

The law singles out Chinese people for the harshest restrictions and penalties.

The new law harkens back to the anti-Asian land laws of the past century, which barred Chinese and Japanese immigrants from owning property in many states.

Those laws violated the fundamental right to equal protection — just like Florida’s does.

Laws like these are based on false claims about national security.

There’s no evidence that real estate purchases by people from China are causing harm, but there is a long history of similar policies making discrimination and violence against immigrants worse.

The bill legitimizes and expands housing discrimination, in violation of both the Constitution and the Fair Housing Act.

It is unfair, unjustified, and unconstitutional.

We, @aaldef, @acluFL, and @dehenglaw are ready to fight back against this racist policy.

Does he want to be called California Gov. Rob Bonta?

California’s attorney general last week told the San Francisco Chronicle’s Emily Hoeven that he is “seriously considering” a run for the seat that Gov. Gavin Newsom will vacate in 2026. The Bee was unable to independently confirm that statement.

While Bonta has yet to form a candidate campaign committee for the office, he would be a formidable challenger should he choose to run. In 2022, Bonta, who was appointed by Newsom, won an election to a full term as attorney general with 57% of the vote.

If elected, he would be the first Filipino American to serve as California governor.

He wouldn’t be the first California attorney general to use the position as a springboard to higher office. Kamala Harris rose from attorney general to U.S. senator and later vice president. Xavier Becerra, Bonta’s immediate predecessor, left the office to serve as President Joe Biden’s Secretary of Health and Human Services.

Should Bonta, a Democrat, choose to run for governor, he would join two others who have already announced their intentions.

In April, Lt. Gov. Eleni Kounalakis and former State Controller Betty Yee, also Democrats, both announced they want to become the first woman to serve as California governor.

Last week, Democrat Donna Deegan won an upset mayoral election victory in Jacksonville, Florida — up to then the largest city in the country governed by a Republican mayor. Democrats also scored a shocking win in Colorado Springs, where independent, Democrat-aligned Yemi Mobolade won the mayorship. Colorado Springs has had Republican mayors since residents began directly electing the office in 1979. Currently, Republicans hold the mayor’s office in only two of the thirty most populated cities in America.

Why do Republicans have such trouble winning mayoral races? The answer is fairly obvious — Republicans hate cities. More, the party is increasingly defined by its hatred of cities. That anti-urban animus hasn’t torched the party’s national electoral fortunes yet. But if you’re a Republican, there are worrying signs.

Cities don’t matter, right?

There’s a clear double standard here. When Democrats cast even a shadow of an aspersion on rural or white voters, the political press reacts as if the party has made a huge strategic and moral error. In 2008, while running for the Democratic nomination, Obama said that after small town midwestern voters experienced major job losses, “They get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them.”

This was obviously an effort (however clumsy) to express empathy, not a smear along the lines of Cruz’s “New York values.” But Obama’s Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton, said the remarks were “demeaning” and showed that Obama was an “elitist.”

Along those lines, there’s a steady drumbeat of articles in the press about how Democrats need to do better in appealing to rural voters. And it’s certainly true that Democrats could do better on many rural issues. At the same time, no national Democrat officeholder in my lifetime has ever said anything about “rural Iowa values,” or called rural Texas, or North Dakota, or rural anywhere a “hellhole” or an embarrassment to the nation. Democratic rhetoric on rural areas is virtually always focused on how to do better with voters in those places. Meanwhile, Republicans talk as if they’d like to light cities, and all their inhabitants, on fire. Why aren’t political pundits, and just everyone in general, scolding them for that?