Allison Miller, a public defender seeking to become the next chief prosecutor of Pinellas and Pasco counties in central Florida, may face one of the strangest conundrums of any candidate for political office in the United States. She has said she would not prosecute people for seeking or providing abortions, in a state whose governor recently removed from office a sitting, democratically elected prosecutor—in Tampa, just across the bay from Pinellas County (St. Petersburg)—for saying the same thing.

The repeal of Roe v. Wade in June vested enormous control over women’s reproductive decisions in local officials. There has been plenty of talk since about the resulting geographic injustices: people seeking now-illegal abortions in blue localities may at least be shielded from prosecution, the thinking goes, while their counterparts in redder areas may face criminal punishment for the same acts. But in August, after Hillsborough County (Tampa) State Attorney Andrew Warren signaled he would decline to pursue abortion cases should Florida’s 15-week ban go into effect, Republican Governor Ron DeSantis suspended and replaced him with a member of the conservative Federalist Society. (Warren has sued to get his job back; a judge has said the case should be decided at trial, but hasn’t set a date.) 

The governor’s move, part of his broader push to undermine voting rights and override democratic results to install conservatives in local offices, summons an existential question for the shape of democracy in Florida. In the face of a governor willing to overturn an election to achieve his own ends, the familiar playbook of fighting for social change at the ballot box—organizing the grassroots, galvanizing young people and people of color, elevating candidates who will fight for reproductive justice—is under siege.

The threat of further undemocratic moves by DeSantis now hangs over Miller’s race—and by extension, any election in the state. What does it even mean to run for office when the governor’s political whims could turn a win into a loss? Miller compared running in DeSantis’s Florida to the myth of Sisyphus: the boulder rolls back down the hill every time, but he pushes it up again anyway. 

“We have a governor who if you disagree with him politically, he just removes you from office,” she told Bolts. “Sometimes it feels like a set up—or it’s all just theater.”

But this sense that the game has long been rigged was part of the reason Miller decided to run in the first place. As a public defender, she says, she has represented people facing the death penalty, and she has seen over and over again how much pressure there was to obtain a capital conviction. “The way the system is set up in Florida is that the prosecution, the state, truly does hold all of the cards,” she said. And yet she has kept fighting, first as a public defender and now as an outsider running on criminal justice reform. Miller’s decision to challenge Republican State Attorney Bruce Bartlett, a DeSantis appointee, has made 2022 the first time in 30 years that Pinellas and Pasco have experienced a contested prosecutor’s race. Bartlett and DeSantis did not respond to requests for comment for this piece.

In DeSantis’s Florida, many are now haunted by similar questions about how best to approach local campaigns. DeSantis is running for re-election himself this fall against Democrat Charlie Crist, and holds a narrow lead in public polling.

Progressive advocates vow to not get discouraged by the climate of uncertainty that has accompanied Warren’s suspension. “This is a first, right?” said Sara Tabatabaie, the chief political and communications officer for Vote Pro Choice, which aims to elect candidates who will defend abortion rights across the country. “But the response is we do it again,” she added. “And the reason is because we’re not going to be intimidated by somebody like Ron DeSantis. If DeSantis wants to show everyone that he doesn’t care that the majority of Floridians are pro-choice, then let him.”

In stripping federal protections for abortion access, the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision transformed down-ballot offices and races into a terrain of high-pitched political struggle. “This is the real battleground for the next decades—a real opportunity area,” said Paul Kim Bradfield, the Southern Regional Director for Run for Something, a national candidate incubator supporting Miller. “Republicans have been playing this playbook for decades… we’re kind of late to the game.”

Bradfield said over 1,300 Floridians filed a form on Run for Something’s website expressing an interest in running for local office since early May, when the Supreme Court’s decision leaked. That’s nearly three times as many as had registered interest between the beginning of 2020 and the leak.

“People are worried about what’s going on with their lives, what this means for them,” said Gretchen Johnson, the president of the St. Petersburg League of Women Voters (LWV), a nonpartisan group that promotes voter education. 

Johnson referenced the Tampa judge who ruled that a 17-year-old girl was too immature to get an abortion because her grades were poor. In August, he was ousted by voters. Historically, “most judges are retained,” Johnson said. Now, though, she added, people are realizing, “‘This is affecting my life—or someone’s life, and that matters—so we do need to pay attention.’”

But now that energy and outrage is running up against DeSantis’s strategy for bulldozing over the authority of locally-elected officials. 

“The governor has shown that …  targeting different candidates and different issues is not off the table for him,” said Bradfield. “There’s a great irony,” he added: “the Republican side has for a long time been the vocal advocates of home rule, like, ‘local government should decide this, this and this.’” Now that the left is testing those waters, though, there’s a broad move from the right to shut it down—whether via DeSantis’s suspensions or bills like the Florida legislature’s attempt to preclude Democratic municipalities from reducing their police budgets, a top priority for DeSantis after the Black Lives Matter uprising of 2020. 

“It can feel almost discouraging—you put all that effort and action into things and have this person unilaterally make decisions against it,” said Bradfield. But he wasn’t willing to sink into existential doubts about the purpose of voting if the governor may remove the victor. Bradfield emphasized that candidates and voters alike seemed more motivated than disheartened. 

“Being in his crosshairs…is certainly a risk that she faces,” he said of Miller, “but I think it can also be an opportunity.”

“It’s galvanizing,” Johnson said of Florida’s landscape in the aftermath of Dobbs and of Warren’s suspension. She believes that people’s attention to local races has never been higher.

Still, DeSantis is also cracking down on voting through other means. He inspired the creation of a state police force meant to investigate elections, which local advocates warn carries the risk of intimidating voters. Suppressive efforts typically affect the people who are already the most marginalized, further limiting their political power.

In August, DeSantis announced that this newly created office was pressing felony charges against 20 people who had voted despite not being eligible because of past convictions; this built on cases filed by local prosecutors this year against residents who voted despite owing court debt. There is no indication that any of these people did so intentionally or maliciously, The Guardian reported. The charges came after Florida Republicans adopted a law that deeply obfuscated the process for regaining voting rights in 2019, during DeSantis’s first year as governor; observers warned at the time that the new regulations were bound to confuse voters, and Warren vowed to help local residents. 

That law was a direct response to a constitutional amendment approved by voters in November 2018 to expand rights restoration. The amendment had passed overwhelmingly, 65 to 35 percent. DeSantis won on the same day by under 0.5 percentage points.

“Ours is supposed to be a government of laws, not a government of individual men,” DeSantis trumpeted at his press conference announcing Warren’s suspension. But laws have to be interpreted—DeSantis himself unearthed an obscure 1936 gambling precedent in order to justify removing a state’s attorney. And the governor plainly wants the individual people interpreting those laws to be his men, so to speak.

DeSantis’s excuse for suspending Warren was a statement the prosecutor signed, along with more than 80 counterparts across the country, which vowed not to bring cases against people for seeking or providing abortion care. Florida’s new 15-week abortion ban is not yet on the books—at the moment, Florida’s state constitution protects some access to abortion. Currently the ban that Republican lawmakers passed is tied up in court, but the state supreme court has swung right under DeSantis, who has appointed four of its seven members, and may well overturn that precedent. 

Still, DeSantis maintained that Warren’s signature was tantamount to professing intent to subvert the law. The governor also cited another statement Warren had signed that condemned the criminalization of trans people and gender-affirming healthcare; though anti-trans rhetoric has been a cornerstone of the DeSantis administration, there is no specific law that criminalizes trans people or healthcare in Florida.

DeSantis has turned Warren’s firing into an opportunity to force his political preferences onto an area of the state that has repeatedly rejected them. 

In the 2016 and 2020 elections, voters in blue-leaning Hillsborough County embraced Warren, a proponent of criminal justice reform. In office, the prosecutor exercised  his discretion to lower the number of people in jail and reduce racial bias in arrests and prosecution. His ouster has sparked a rapid shift toward the tough-on-crime policies DeSantis prefers. DeSantis’s choice to replace Warren, Susan Lopez, has already overturned a number of Warren’s initiatives, including his policies against prosecuting low-level misdemeanors and arrests stemming from the Tampa police’s wildly controversial bike-stop policy.  According to a U.S. Department of Justice inquiry, that policy targeted Black people, who make up only 26 percent of Tampa’s population,  in 73 percent of stops. Lopez has also announced her intent to seek the death penalty in a case where Warren previously declined to pursue capital punishment.

Meanwhile, DeSantis has also recently replaced four Democratic members of the Broward County school board with Republicans. The members were recommended for suspension by a grand jury for failures related to school safety, but the opportunity to install more ideologically aligned successors was not wasted on the governor. “To take out four women who are Democrats and replace them with four men who are Republicans—that’s certainly not representative of the demographics of Broward County,” said Miller. Now the chair of the Florida Board of Education, who is himself a DeSantis appointee, has suggested that the Broward County school superintendent—who didn’t even join the district until well after the grand jury had finished its deliberations—should be suspended, too. 

There are five other Democratic state attorneys in Florida, and DeSantis claimed to have “reviewed” all of them during his press conference announcing Warren’s suspension. Though one signed the anti-trans criminalization statement, and several issued statements condemning the repeal of Roe v. Wade, none besides Warren clearly stated their refusal to prosecute abortion cases. And none have spoken up loudly in support of Warren since his dismissal, perhaps a tacit admission of fear that DeSantis could do the same thing again. “If DeSantis can arbitrarily suspend an elected official without one shred of evidence they have done anything wrong, how far will he go to punish anyone else who disagrees with him?” Warren wrote in a recent editorial.

Miller said she sympathized with the dilemma. “I can certainly appreciate kind of keeping your head down and doing the work and standing by the message, but maybe not publicly making yourself a target,” she said. “I know most of them and I think they all are there because they want to help people—and you don’t have the ability to do that if you’re not in office.” After all, she added, “It’s not like the governor stopped with Andrew Warren.” 

Still, Miller herself has made a different choice. “For better or worse, I speak my mind,” she said. The stakes felt too high—and too personal—not to: she is a survivor of violent crime and sexual assault. “I was held at gunpoint when I was 14, and I was raped in college,” Miller told Bolts. “And so the idea of prosecuting a rapist, I would do with enthusiasm, but the idea of prosecuting a woman who aborts the product of that rape—somebody convince me how that possibly makes our community safer.”

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Smith, an appointee of Republican Governor Ron DeSantis, lost his re-election bid on Tuesday in Hillsborough County (Tampa). This blue-tilting region, long viewed as a national bellwether, was just stripped of its prosecutor by DeSantis over his defense of abortion.

After a campaign dominated by his decision in the January abortion case, Smith was ousted by Nancy Jacobs, a local attorney in private practice. Although the election was nonpartisan, vote breakdowns suggest that Smith drew support from GOP voters while Jacobs was backed by Democrats. 

The campaign broke the mold of Florida’s judicial elections, where the local establishment typically rallies to easily carry incumbents across the finish line. The editorial board of the Tampa Bay Times, which backed Joe Biden in 2020, endorsed Smith as well as the other sitting circuit court judge on the ballot this week, lauding Smith for the “respect he shows litigants in his court” even as it acknowledged issues in the abortion decision. (The other incumbent judge easily won.) Even the county’s elected chief public defender, Democrat Julianne Holt, endorsed Smith, though she ultimately pulled her support as the race became contentious in the final stretch.

Further south, in Miami-Dade County, James Bush, the only Democratic lawmaker who voted for Florida’s 15-week abortion ban, was ousted in a primary by challenger Ashley Gantt. Bush, who frequently sided with Republicans, was also the only Democrat who supported the recent law against discussion of gender identity and sexual orientation in Florida classrooms.

These twin results speak to the shockwaves felt both within Democratic politics and the general electorate ever since the Supreme Court overturned federal protections for abortion in June. Also on Tuesday, Democrats unexpectedly held a congressional seat in an upstate New York district that Joe Biden narrowly carried two years ago, adding to a streak of overperformances for the party since Dobbs; some Democrats also pointed to abortion as a factor in their win over the district attorney of Tennessee’s Shelby County earlier this month. 

John Fox, a Tampa-based Democratic operative who runs a PAC called Progressive Youth that campaigned against Smith, said the results in Florida show abortion rights is motivating voters.

“Abortion is a huge issue,” Fox told Bolts. “Voters are seeking out information on it, and anytime you can link that to voters’ minds in a genuine way, I think it’s going to be a winning issue.”

But Fox also stressed that those links are often obscure when it comes to the role of local officials, despite the mountain of races where abortion is on the line this year. Fox said he first made the connection to Smith’s race when he read about the judge’s January decision, but said it was hard for him to convince people to pay attention to such a downballot race. “These races are just so low information,” he told Bolts. “The chance that your life is going to be affected by a bad judge is significantly higher risk than a bad state House member or state Senator, and nobody really kind of knows what’s going on.”

Progessive Youth sent mailers to voters that hit Smith for ruling “based on his religious beliefs—not the law.” Another mailer sent by the same organization was specific to the Jane Doe case, stating, “Judge Jared Smith thinks women are too dumb to make their own bodily choices.”

Smith sought to save his job by rallying religious conservatives. “I’m a believer, I’m a judge and I’m a Christian,” he declared while campaigning in a church. Smith is also associated with a group that attacked Jacobs for having a “woke” agenda, Creative Loafing Tampa Bay reported earlier this month. 

“I think the only religion that belongs in the courtroom is the rule of law,” Jacobs told Bolts on Wednesday when asked about Smith’s comments.

But Smith’s record also testifies to the vast authority local officials already wielded over people’s access to abortion before Dobbs, let alone now. 

Smith’s decision in the January case was overturned by an appeals court that ruled he had abused his discretion in holding that “Jane Doe” was too immature to be granted a waiver from parental notification laws. But the very fact that he heard the teenager’s plea stems from restrictions Florida adopted that empower local judges to arbitrarily bestow reproductive rights upon specific teenagers, in a process known as “judicial bypass.” An investigation published by Mother Jones in 2014 documented how conservative laws combine with local anti-abortion judges in Florida to close the door for hundreds of minors every year. 

Jacobs would not comment to Bolts on Smith’s decision in January beyond pointing to the appeals court ruling that faulted his reasoning. She also stressed that she would apply Florida’s laws on abortion regardless of what they may be. 

Florida has not banned abortion at the moment, and for now a state supreme court precedent bars such a ban, but the state is currently implementing a 15-week ban, and the conservative supreme court could revisit its precedent. The state also has plenty of restrictions like a parental notification mandate that led to Smith’s decision in January.

Smith’s defeat also comes just weeks after DeSantis suspended the Democratic prosecutor Hillsborough County voters elected in 2016 and 2020, Andrew Warren, and replaced him with a conservative ally, Susan Lopez, who has promptly rolled back reforms put in place by her predecessor. In justifying his decision, which Warren is now challenging in court, DeSantis pointed to Warren’s public statement that he would not prosecute abortion cases. 

In ousting Smith, whom DeSantis appointed to his circuit court seat in 2019, Hillsborough voters signaled their distaste for the anti-abortion policies that the governor is only escalating. 

But DeSantis was more successful in other primaries on Tuesday in his quest to  reshape the state to his liking. DeSantis pushed to move local school boards to the right, endorsing and campaigning for candidates who express alarm about discussions of racism and the rights of LGBTQ students. Most of the candidates he endorsed across the state prevailing on Tuesday, including two in Miami-Dade, the state’s most populous county. Two of three school board candidates he endorsed in Hillsborough County also won.

A rare DeSantis failure in those school board races occurred in Alachua County (Gainesville), where  the governor had also ousted an elected official out under controversial circumstances. Diyonne McGraw, a former school board member who was removed from her position by the governor over objections to her residency in 2021 (those objections are no longer operative, according to The Alligator), won her old seat back, beating the conservative school board member the governor had appointed to replace her. 

In November, DeSantis will face Charlie Crist, a former Republican governor turned Democratic member of Congress. Crist, who supports abortion rights, cinched the Democratic nomination for governor on Tuesday. November will also decide control of the state legislature, an attorney general race that pits a Republican incumbent against  a former Democratic prosecutor who was herself targeted by a GOP governor over her reform stance, as well as the retention of five of the seven justices on Florida’s conservative Supreme Court.

Hundreds of thousands of Floridians will be barred from voting in those elections as a result of Florida’s extremely harsh felony disenfranchisement rules, including if they are too poor to pay off their court debt. DeSantis announced last week that a new elections police force set up this year was indicting people who erroneously registered to vote local Republicans in the state have already been prosecuting people for months for registering when they owed court debt, even though the state does not provide information to voters regarding their eligibility. 

Still, Fox is urging Floridians to pay attention and engage with local elections, like races for judge. “One of the lessons that people learned ever since 2016 is sometimes you just gotta—nobody is coming to the rescue,” he said. “If you see something and it bothers you, sometimes you just got to do it.”

The post Voters Oust Florida Judge Who Denied Teenager’s Abortion Request Because of Bad Grades appeared first on Bolts.

The suspension of this Democratic official, announced by the Republican governor at a news conference where he was flanked by Hillsborough County’s Republican sheriff and other local officials, is the latest chapter in the GOP’s sustained attacks on reproductive rights and transgender rights in Florida, as well as broader criminal justice reform efforts. 

DeSantis based the suspension on Warren’s statements that his office would not prosecute abortion-related cases and cases involving anti-transgender laws. DeSantis also mentioned Warren’s policies establishing a presumption against prosecuting certain behaviors.

DeSantis claimed that with those statements and policies Warren “neglected” his duties and “display[ed] a lack of competence” to carry out his duties. 

DeSantis replaced Warren with Susan Lopez, a local judge who is a member of the conservative legal organization the Federalist Society. His decision effectively kicked the Democratic Party out of an office it won in both 2016 and 2020, in a county that DeSantis himself lost by nine percentage points in 2018.

Florida Representative Anna Eskamani, a Democrat and fierce critic of DeSantis, called the governor’s move “a fascist approach to governing, if you can even call it governing.”

“It’s not about law and order. It’s about control,” Eskamani told Bolts. “He’s not only stripping away our personal liberties, but he is removing those who have the guts to stand up to him.” 

The move comes as Florida, in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision overturning Roe v. Wade, implements its 15-week abortion ban and considers more extreme bans. It also comes as the state fights challenges in court to the law known as the “Don’t Say Gay” bill, as well as a law banning trans girls and women from girls and women’s sports. In a particularly extreme step, the DeSantis administration also has filed a complaint against a restaurant in Miami because of its drag brunch, attempting to take away the business’s liquor license.

Warren had also pledged to not prosecute any ban on gender-affirming care for minors, though Florida does not have such a ban right now.

Warren’s statement on Thursday suggested he would be fighting back, although Warren himself declined to comment to Bolts and an adviser did not respond to a question asking if Warren planned to challenge the suspension.

“Today’s political stunt is an illegal overreach that continues a dangerous pattern by Ron DeSantis of using his office to further his own political ambition,” Warren said in the statement. “It spits in the face of the voters of Hillsborough County who have twice elected me to serve them, not Ron DeSantis.”

The move from DeSantis represents the most aggressive action yet from opponents of criminal legal reform efforts to derail the ambitions of local prosecutors elected on promises to reform the system and reduce incarceration. 

“We don’t elect people in one part of the state to have veto power over what the entire state decides on these important issues,” DeSantis said at the press conference. 

“Andrew Warren has put himself, publicly, above the law,” he added, citing concerns about “individual prosecutors nullify[ing] laws that were enacted by the people’s representatives.” He compared Warren to reform-minded prosecutors elected in California. “We are not going to allow this pathogen that’s been around the country of ignoring the law, we are not going to let that get a foothold here in the state of Florida,” DeSantis said.

But Aramis Ayala, a former state attorney who has faced her own attacks from DeSantis, called the governor’s move “the latest assault on Floridians’ fundamental rights and freedoms.”

“The rapid slide towards autocracy when it suits their political agenda is dangerous, appalling, and incredibly concerning,” Ayala, a Democrat who is now running for attorney general, said in a statement she shared with Bolts. 

Ayala announced shortly after becoming the chief prosecutor in the district that includes Orlando in 2016 that she would not bring capital prosecutions and declined to do so in a specific case. Republican Governor Rick Scott countered by reassigning the prosecution to another state attorney. Although Ayala challenged the move, the state’s Supreme Court eventually upheld the governor’s authority to reassign death-eligible cases under her jurisdiction in a 5-2 decision in 2017. 

On Thursday, DeSantis went much further, immediately suspending Warren from his office. 

Ayala on Thursday denounced the new move as antidemocratic. Warren “was elected and entrusted by the people—not once but twice—and it is the job of the elected state attorney to exercise prosecutorial discretion in the community they serve,” she said. “The suggestion that there was malfeasance or a dereliction of duty by the Hillsborough State Attorney Office is a dictatorial response and attack on the constitutionally protected right of free speech.”

Republicans elsewhere in the country have mounted parallel efforts to sideline prosecutors who promote criminal justice reform, though none has yet to go as far as DeSantis’s move on Thursday. Many governors do not have the power to unilaterally suspend local officials.

Pennsylvania Republicans have sought impeachment proceedings against Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner, a progressive who easily won re-election last year; one Republican this year even ran for governor on a platform of ending DA elections in Philadelphia and nowhere else in the state. Lee Zeldin, the Republican nominee for governor in New York, is promising to take action against Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg, who has like Warren set presumptions of not prosecuting some lower-level crimes. 

The Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision is likely to dramatically increase these clashes between the anti-abortion Republican politicians who run the state government in red states and Democratic officials who often govern urban areas in those states. Dozens of prosecutors in states like Arizona, Michigan, Texas, and Wisconsin, have said they will not enforce abortion bans, and some Republicans have signaled that they are looking for workarounds specific to their state like having the attorney general step in. 

In Florida, DeSantis’s executive order asserted that he has the authority to suspend Warren under Article 4, Section 7, of the state’s constitution, which sets out the governor’s authority for suspensions over issues like “neglect of duty.” DeSantis also used the provision in 2019 to suspend the Broward County sheriff from office, using the same claims of neglect of duty and incompetence. There, however, DeSantis acted shortly after a report was issued on the 2018 mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School where 17 students were killed. DeSantis’s decision to suspend the sheriff was based on that report’s conclusions about the training and preparation of law enforcement under the sheriff’s command, and it was upheld by the Florida Supreme Court.

But the broad move by DeSantis against Warren included no such report underlying it. It also made no mention of any cases that DeSantis objects to. The governor’s executive order instituting the suspension only mentions the prosecutor’s “public proclamations of non-enforcement.” These issues are certain to come up in any challenge to the suspension.

DeSantis’s claim that the announcement of a declination policy constitutes a failure of duty that fits under the state constitution rules may also come under scrutiny. 

Earlier this year, a conservative state Senator in Florida championed a bill this year that would have authorized the governor to suspend a local prosecutor who announces a blanket policy of not declining certain cases. The bill provided “that a state attorney adopting certain blanket policies constitutes a failure to execute his or her duty.” That bill did not pass the legislature, dying in the state Senate. Still, DeSantis interpreted Warren’s blanket policies as a neglect of duty in his announcement today.

Eskamani highlighted the hypocrisy of DeSantis suspending Warren because of steps he’s taken not to enforce certain laws, saying, ”this is the same governor who’s told school districts to ignore federal Title IX guidelines, especially on LGBTQ+ care and discrimination.”

Miriam Krinsky, executive director of Fair and Just Prosecution, the organization behind nationwide prosecutors’ joint statements on transgender rights and abortion rights that DeSantis cited in his order, pointed out that many prosecutors, including some conservatives, choose to not charge certain misdemeanors, a practice DeSantis assailed today. “There’s a potential for a legal challenge over the erosion of voter choice,” she told Bolts.

Ayala echoed that point in her statement. “Since when does the governor have veto power over the people’s choice?”

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