A circuit court judge in Leon County, Florida, ruled that Governor Ron DeSantis had exceeded his authority by preventing local school districts from mandating masks. Governor DeSantis must not interfere with the right of school districts to protect the health and safety of students.
Fort Lauderdale, Fla. (AP) — School districts in Florida may impose mask mandates, a judge said Friday, ruling that Gov. Ron DeSantis overstepped his authority by issuing an executive order banning the mandates.
Leon County Circuit Judge John C. Cooper agreed with a group of parents who claimed in a lawsuit that DeSantis’ order is unconstitutional and cannot be enforced. The governor’s order gave parents the sole right to decide if their child wears a mask at school.null
Cooper said DeSantis’ order “is without legal authority.”
His decision came after a three-day virtual hearing, and after at least 10 Florida school boards voted to defy DeSantis and impose mask requirements with no parental opt-out.
Cooper said that while the governor and others have argued that a new Florida law gives parents the ultimate authority to oversee health issues for their children, it also exempts government actions that are needed to protect public health and are reasonable and limited in scope. He said a school district’s decision to require student masking to prevent the spread of the virus falls within that exemption.null
The judge also noted that two Florida Supreme Court decisions from 1914 and 1939 found that individual rights are limited by their impact on the rights of others. For example, he said, adults have the right to drink alcohol but not to drive drunk. There is a right to free speech, but not to harass or threaten others or yell “fire” in a crowded theater, he said.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Is anyone willing to bet DeSantis will not challenge this in the next higher court? Once a narcissist, psychopath/sociopath, and tyrant, always one.
DeSantis might be winning over Trump’s maskless unvaccinated brainless MAGA minions, but he is probably losing more voters than he is gaining.
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DeSantis should worry that his actions and inactions are killing off his supporters.
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Proof that, contrary to their professed identity as “conservatives,” Republicans will gladly prioritize short-term gains over long-term losses, as long as the next election finds them still in charge.
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And, Thomas, proof that Republicans aren’t really about local control (e.g., by school boards) but will quite readily turn to top-down authoritarianism to achieve their goals.
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Or does he want to make a dent in those with worse health care? Maybe he thinks the pandemic will make off with the elderly. Florida used to be stronger for the Democrats. Are a lot of those voters older? But now the electorate impacted by the Delta is younger. Is he to be hoisted by his own petard?
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Hmm, interesting. FL has so many elderly; it’s their major industry & they must be a powerful voting bloc. I’d always pictured them as the conservative dregs of the “Greatest Generation” [given FL politics in recent decades], but demographics would suggest they have an ever-increasing # of elderly liberal boomers… Anecdotally, the only people I know who spend 1/2 the year there now [& vote there] are in fact flaming liberals who tolerate FL politics because it’s a cheap retirement [& then give us an earful when we see them in August at their ‘other home,’ Cape Cod… but then what do I know, my friends are mostly flaming liberals 😉 Between those folks, and bona fide Floridians who are parents of pubsch children… he could be in trouble.
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bethree5
All of the people I call friends are flaming liberals .
Most of the retirees I know who moved to Florida are Trumpanzees.
I believe Florida’s early seeming success had a counter intuitive demographic driver. Like Sweden the household unit size limited the spread in elderly sealed communities. One person households with Widows and Widowers and having the Children and Grand Children a 1000 miles away limited the transmissions . As well as DeSantis fudging the numbers. Now that demographic is vaccinated and a more transmissible and deadly Delta variant has caught up to DeSantis in the younger unvaccinated households with Children.
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DeSantis is a hero in ed reform circles for his relentless bashing of public schools and constant cheerleading of private school vouchers.
There’s been very little mention in the echo chamber of his ridiculous and shameful politicizing of public school reopening policy and how it has harmed public school students in the state.
Just one more example of how the ed reform “movement” delivers absolutely no positive, practical benefit to students who attend public schools.
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Jeb! must be very proud of DeathSentence. He continues the paradigm: make pubschs the hotseat, target of onerous fed/ state ‘accountability’ red tape—including now a new twist, ban them from being able to protect themselves against covid-19!– thereby pressuring kids out into charters & voucher schools where FL could care less about your accountability or your covid-19 protocols. It’s been working in FL for 10-15 yrs, they probably have the swiftest ed privatization rate of any state. If he can just get over the covid-19 bad optics [e.g. if Delta peaks & disappears], he may prevail. No matter how many elderly liberal boomers retire there, they do it cuz prices are cheap– & part of that is that FL has the 7th-lowest per-pupil spending in the nation. If those supposedly liberal boomers can bear to sink 1ct’s investment in that state, I suspect they’re paying little attention to the plight of the nearly 55% of the state’s 4million children who are either living in or near poverty.
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Where’s Jeb Bush on DeSantis’s attacks on public schools? Jeb Bush is the national leader of ed reform. He never misses a chance to attack teachers unions. Is he forbidden to criticize a fellow member of the ed reform echo chamber? I thought Bush was an advocate for students. Unless those students attend public schools? If they do they’re expendable and should be sacrificed to Republicans immediate political goals?
Public school students need their own advocates. The ed reform “movement” works exclusively for charter and voucher students.
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It is good to know that there is at least one decent judge in Florida the believes that “individual rights are limited by their impact on the rights of others.” The selfish Libertarians like DeSantis are needlessly putting the lives of others in harm’s way. Their only consideration is the economy that ironically would bounce back much faster if people got the vaccine and followed safety protocols.
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I would call DeSantis a libertarian of convenience. He is fine with allowing business total freedom so long as they do not use their freedom to hurt his tribe. After that, not so much. Prayer in the schools? Fine, so long as the prayer makes his tribe happy. Muslim prayer would send him into an outer layer of the atmosphere. School choice? I wonder if he would like for his tax dollars to fund a school where they taught about the uncomfortable truth of real history. We all know what he would think about medical decisions being made by a person in consultation with their doctor. that works fine unless you happen to be a woman.
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Too true, I fear.
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He’s an Opportunitarian
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Agreed. He’s an authoritarian libertarian, a walking oxymoron, or as some may say, a moron with a belligerent attitude.
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Well said, Roy!!!
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“the economy that ironically would bounce back much faster if people got the vaccine and followed safety protocols.”
Yeah, that’s the ultimate irony.
These people are so dumb that they won’t even countenance fairly painless remedies like vaccinations and mask wearing, which are not even remotely like the lockdowns that were implemented early on.
Or maybe these folks actually prefer the lockdowns?
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It is beyond comprehension that people would take a veterinary worming medication instead of a vaccine already tested in millions of PEOPLE.
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The judge misquotes opinion of Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr, in the Schenk case. The relevant words from that opinion are “The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic.” the key is the word ‘falsely”. If the theater is on fire shouting :fire” is protected speech,
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key point
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An island of sanity in a sea off nuttery.
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One could say that Covid contagion is akin to the danger of an open-carry state where ostentatiously holstered weapons are easy to seize from their owners and shoot into crowds.
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yup
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The United States Supreme Court has twice ruled that states and school districts have the constitutional right to mandate vaccinations, rulings that also apply to masks — and those who would like to see those rulings overturned had better think twice because those rulings are also the basis for states having the power to regulate abortions: If state authority to mandate vaccinations is overturned, so is state authority to regulate abortions.
The key Supreme Court ruling that recognizes the authority of states to mandate vaccinations is Jacobsen v. Massachusetts. In this case Pastor Henning Jacobsen had a previous bad reaction to a vaccination and therefore refused the state’s mandate that he and his son be vaccinated because he believed that his family had a hereditary danger from vaccinations and that he also believed that vaccinations caused disease. The State of Massachusetts fined Jacobsen for his refusal to be vaccinated, so he took Massachusetts to court, and his case went all the way to the U. S. Supreme Court. The Court ruled in favor of the state, pointing out that “in every well ordered society charged with the duty of conserving the safety of its members, the rights of the individual in respect to his personal liberty may at times, under the pressure of great dangers, be subjected to such restraint, to be enforced by reasonable regulations, as the safety of the general public may demand” — adding that “real liberty for all could not exist under the operation of a principle which recognizes the right of each individual person to use his own [liberty], whether in respect of his person or his property, regardless of the injury that may be done to others.” Furthermore, the Court ruled that mandatory vaccinations are “necessary in order to protect the public health and secure the public safety”. The Supreme Court reaffirmed that ruling again in the case of Zucht v. King in which the Court ruled that a school system can refuse admission to any student who fails to receive a required vaccination.
The practice of mandating vaccinations for the Common Good of all Americans is part of America’s tradition from the very beginning: General George Washington, The Father of America, issued the order on Feb. 5, 1777, that mandated vaccinations for all Revolutionary War soldiers and any citizen wanting to join the Revolutionary Army. General Washington declared in writing that “I have determined that troops shall be inoculated. This expedient may be attended with some inconveniences and some disadvantages, but I trust its consequences will have the most happy effects. Necessity not only authorizes but seems to require this measure, for should the disorder infect the army in the natural way and rage with its virulence we should have more to dread from it than from the sword of the enemy.”
General Washington, who had himself suffered from smallpox as a teenager, strongly believed in the effectiveness of vaccination and in 1776 had persuaded his wife to be vaccinated. Back then, vaccination was nothing like the painless pinprick of today’s vaccinations with vaccines produced on germ-free labs — back then vaccination was painful because it required taking a sharp metal “scratcher” on which there was smallpox virus gotten from someone else’s smallpox sores and scratching those viruses into your skin.
General Washington mandated vaccination because he and America’s other Founding Fathers believed that Americans should always act first for the Common Good of every other American, not for their personal interest — and America’s Founding Fathers put that belief in the Common Good being first above individual interests in writing in the Preamble of our Constitution.
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Excellent. Thanks for the history lesson!
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This is a very interesting issue. I read an article awhile back about masking during the bubonic plague during the reign of Elizabeth I. Even with bodies stacked and rotting like cord wood in the streets of London, some refused to take the precautions the queen suggested. As a powerful monarch, she was still incapable of enforcing her rules, largely due to the feeling on the part of the poor that the rules were made to benefit the wealthy.
It is also interesting from the standpoint of the discussion of individual rights. In the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, it was deemed necessary to state that the rights of one man extended only to the point where they inhibited those of another. That this judge would think it important to give examples of this principle at work goes a long way toward explaining why we have become almost ungovernable in recent years. This is very obvious. A business may have the right to sell to anyone, but it obviously does not have the right to harm the customer with its policy. Thus discrimination in business is a violation of freedom, because your freedom is being used as a power. A person who uses power excessively likewise violates rights in a variety of ways. It is common these days for some to argue for freedom for the individual when the individuals in question benefit. Some idealisim that is.
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It used to be that, according to the Supreme Court, you could not even falsely yell “fire” in a crowded theater.
But now you can actually light a fire in a crowded theater and get the OK from the Supreme Court’s “Con$ervative” majority.
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Who knew Jose Feliciano was a conservative rabble rouser?
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Well, I couldn’t find the link. But somewhere in the last 24 hrs I read a judge’s decision [perhaps against FL govr banning mask mandates, perhaps in another state, or perhaps over another issue] which cited a number of past state judicial decisions that made it crystal clear: individual ‘liberty’ is abridged by the effect of individuals’ choices on the safety/ health/ rights of the general public. It gave me a sense of peace: sanity was returned to the public square. I’ve been having a bizarre sensation over the past several weeks—between state legislatures’ proposals to repress voting rights, and rights to teach civics/ current events/ controversial subjects, and rights to declare a local mask mandate– of having emerged Through the Looking Glass to some upside-down, crazy world where individual choice is primary and there are no public rights at all. As though we didn’t even live in a governed society.
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Bethree, I share your feeling that we are living in an upside-down world, where common sense has disappeared, and democratic institutions are imperiled.
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Well said, Ginny!
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The Second Coming
BY WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
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Seems altogether appropriate
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World to DeSantissssss: “You’re an idiot.”
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After Dubya I thought, good, no more stupid presidents! Then we got even stupider with the Idiot. Now Reps want to shove the stupidest into the White House! If that happens, we’re gonna need a bigger dictionary entry for stupid.
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If Alan Doucheawits and Ted Cruz were not enough proof, DeSantis is proof positive that having a functioning brain is not a necessary precondition for getting a degree from Harvard Law school.
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Or even for teaching there.
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True that
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I hope next is Gov. Lee of TN and his antimask mandate.
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Antimask mandate ?
Does that mean you have to wear an antimask?
Do those hep prevent spread of antiviruses like Norton and Mcafee?
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What happens when a mask meets an antimask?
Do the two annihilate?
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How do you produce antimasks, anyway?
In the Large Mask Collider in Switzerland?
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Which is there more of in the Universe?
Masker? Or antimasker?
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How about just in Tennessee?
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Masker?
Or antimasker?
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