It’s not just criminals who get no sympathy from the Florida Supreme Court. There’s none for law-abiding citizens, either. Not when the choice is between public safety and the morbid absolutism of the National Rifle Association.
By a 4-1 vote Thursday, the court’s far-right bloc disapproved an assault weapons ban proposed for the 2022 ballot. Not only did the gun lobby ask the justices to reject the citizen’s petition drive, so did Attorney General Ashley Moody. She’s supposed to be the people’s lawyer, but she is arm-in-arm with gun manufacturers and others who believe the Second Amendment allows no limits on personal ownership of weapons of mass destruction.
Remember Moody the next time there’s a Florida dateline on news of a mass murder.
The ill-fated citizen’s initiative was inspired by the 2018 Valentine’s Day slaughter at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, where a 19-year-old former student armed with a military-style assault weapon left 17 students and teachers dead and 17 others wounded.
In the two preceding years, there had been mass murders of 49 people at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, and of five people at the Fort Lauderdale airport, but nothing had been done after those.
Now, those who organized the petition drive to prevent more such tragedies have gained only another bitter lesson in applied civics.
“Not only has the Legislature made it harder to pass ballot initiatives,” said the group’s chairwoman, Gail Schwartz of Boca Raton, whose 14-year-old nephew, Alex Schachter, was murdered at Stoneman Douglas. “Now the people must also face a court of right-wing ideologues who will only approve initiatives they agree with politically.”
The group’s real-world education began when then-Gov. Rick Scott and the Legislature refused to even consider, much less enact, legislation to properly limit the possession of AR-15s and similar weapons of mass destruction to law enforcement and the military.
Then they saw the Constitution Revision Commission refuse to consider the issue. Pam Bondi, Moody’s predecessor as attorney general, was on the gun lobby’s side that time, too.
Thursday, those who support sensible gun laws saw four justices engage in mischievous wordplay to deny the people an opportunity to vote on the issue.
It came down to a strained — and in our view discreditable — interpretation of 15 words in the initiative’s ballot summary.
Those words informed voters that the initiative “exempts and requires registration of assault weapons lawfully possessed prior to this provision’s effective date.”
Aha, said the four justices, the amendment “does no such thing.” It exempts only “the current owner’s possession of that assault weapon.”
To most people, that would be a distinction without a difference.
You’re not entitled to know who wrote this act of judicial malpractice. It was issued “per curiam” — for the court. Perhaps the actual author was ashamed. If not, he should be.
But the four had to sign it. They were Chief Justice Charles Canady and Justices Ricky Polston, Alan Lawson and Carlos Mu?iz. Justice John D. Couriel, the newest justice, did not vote.
Justice Jorge Labarga dissented, as he has often had to do since Gov. Ron DeSantis began turning the court into a chapter of the Federalist Society.
The ballot title, Labarga wrote, does what’s required — to clearly communicate the “chief purpose of the initiative and clearly summarize the content.
“In fact, the language is accurate, and the majority simply concludes that the language is insufficiently narrow,” Labarga said. “The ballot title and summary provide fair notice and equip voters to educate themselves about the details of the initiative.”
Here again, the people’s right to amend their own Constitution has been foiled by a trap the Legislature set with a 75-word limit on initiative ballot summaries. No such restriction applies to amendments the Legislature itself asks the voters to approve.
The excuse that the court majority seized upon to disqualify the assault weapons ban closely resembled arguments raised both by Moody and the NRA. Their briefs bristled with other objections as well, but the court needed only one to stiff the initiative.
It wasn’t the first time the so-called people’s lawyer — as the attorney general is often described — was clearly on the wrong side of the people’s right to vote.
She also argued against an initiative, still pending before the court, to legalize adult marijuana use, and against the open-primary initiative that the court did approve for the ballot.
The assault weapons ban had troubles enough without the court striking a lethal blow. Despite spending a reported $1.9 million, the initiative had only 145,000 of the necessary 766,200 voter signatures by the Feb. 1 deadline to make this year’s ballot.
As a result, organizers reset their sights on 2022. Now they face new legal hurdles the Legislature passed — and Gov. DeSantis signed into law — to make it harder and more expensive to collect signatures.
The campaign could start anew with revised language, but with no assurance that the attorney general and the Supreme Court would not come up with another spurious objection.
These are not good times for popular democracy in Florida.
Editorials are the opinion of the Sun Sentinel Editorial Board and written by one of its members or a designee. The Editorial Board consists of Editorial Page Editor Rosemary O’Hara, Dan Sweeney, Steve Bousquet and Editor-in-Chief Julie Anderson.
