Ron DeSantis Isn’t ‘Authoritarian’ for Requiring Accountability for School Shootings and Corruption

Whenever there is a school shooting, liberals and progressives say that “doing nothing is not an option,” and they charge Republicans and conservatives with offering nothing but thoughts and prayers. Well, Florida Republicans have done something; they’ve done quite a bit, in fact, under governors Rick Scott and Ron DeSantis. The thanks they get is to get called fascists.

Kathryn Joyce of Salon plugged into her “Ron DeSantis is an authoritarian” macro a story that really does not help her cause. Her complaint is that DeSantis suspended four elected members of the Broward County school board and replaced them with his own appointees. As I have written at some length (see here and here) in the case of Hillsborough County state attorney Andrew Warren, the Florida constitution gives the governor fairly broad powers to suspend or remove Florida officials, even elected ones, for varying kinds of malfeasance. One can argue that the people of Florida have given too much constitutional power to the governor, but so long as DeSantis has that power, he has a corresponding responsibility to exercise it in order to hold state and local officials accountable when they disregard the law or fail to protect public safety within their legal powers. That’s just basic good government — like in Texas when Rick Perry tried to use the comparatively weaker powers of his office to remove a district attorney who tried to get out of a drunk-driving arrest and abused the cops who booked her, and Perry’s political opponents retaliated by indicting him.

What happened here? The Broward County school system was the site of the Parkland shooting in 2018 at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, where 17 people died — the fifth-worst school shooting in U.S. history in terms of fatalities. DeSantis won a previous court battle to hold accountable Broward County sheriff Scott Israel over his failure to keep the school safe. Joyce complains that “after the 2018 mass shooting at Parkland’s Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, long viewed as one of the most desirable schools in Broward, [former Broward superintendent Robert] Runcie’s program became a focus of local grief and a target of conservative attacks.” Yes, other than that, how was the play, Mrs. Lincoln? News4 in Jacksonville has a more apt headline: “DeSantis axes school board members where massacre happened.” Even Joyce has to acknowledge that DeSantis’s executive order followed the recommendation of a grand jury empaneled to investigate the Parkland shooting, which revealed serious malfeasance and resulted in the criminal indictment of the superintendent:

When Republican Ron DeSantis was elected governor, he promptly called for a grand jury to investigate whether school policies had enabled the tragedy, ultimately leading to Runcie’s arrest for alleged perjury in April 2021 and then, last week, the removal of all remaining Broward school board members who had supported him. . . . On Aug. 19, after a 16-month court fight to redact its contents, the grand jury report that preceded Runcie’s indictment was finally released, four days before Florida’s primary elections, which included Broward school board races and a school tax referendum. Then, last Friday, DeSantis announced he would follow the report’s recommendation to unseat the four remaining Broward school board members who had defended Runcie’s tenure, effective immediately. . . . Although it was completed in April 2021, a lawsuit by members of the school board denounced in its pages, seeking to redact their names, had blocked its release until now.

The report proved explosive as the grand jury wrote that five of Broward’s school board members should be removed by the governor, given their “deceit, malfeasance, misfeasance, neglect of duty and incompetence.” (Jurors wrote they had also considered abolishing the board altogether.) In scathing, often florid language, the report compared the board to a “pyramid scheme,” a “self-styled illuminati” and a fish that “rots from the head down.” It called Runcie a frequent liar who “speaks with a forked tongue” and invoked Picasso, Einstein and Shakespeare to describe the entire district leadership as arrogant, dishonest and unaccountable, and in need of “a deep and thorough housecleaning” that goes beyond the board to include unnamed longtime employees “corrupted” by the district’s culture . . . the vast majority of the 122-page report was about how the Broward district had mismanaged a $800 million bond referendum passed in 2014 primarily to repair roofs on school buildings.

The final fifth of the report turned to PROMISE and similar arrest diversion programs, arguing that, “In areas throughout this State, our children may be attending schools that are lying to us about how safe they are” and chastising Broward officials for their “autocratic conceit” in “subverting the ability of law enforcement to accurately assess and respond to student behavior.”

True, a good deal of the worst malfeasance here was not directly related to the Parkland shooting. But what was DeSantis supposed to do after receiving a report like this — send thoughts and prayers?