Disney has filed a pair of oppositions that ask a judge to dismiss Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’ Motion to Dismiss a federal lawsuit where Disney says that the Governor trampled its First Amendment right to free speech.
The infringing actions from the Governor came when he worked with his rubber-stamp legislature to single out Disney and target a special taxing district then known as the Reedy Creek Improvement District. DeSantis worked with state legislators to create a bill that would give DeSantis sole power to appoint a Board of Supervisors that would oversee the District and anything that Disney does within the District requiring the District’s approval.
In a pair of memos that target DeSantis and his Central Florida Tourism Oversight District, lawyers for Disney don’t hold back, saying that the Governor has rejected the bedrock constitutional rule that says that “states cannot force government-approved political orthodoxy on the citizenry by punishing individuals and businesses who express political views that depart from official state doctrine”. They go on to say that DeSantis’ Motion to Dismiss “rests explicitly on the premise that states are free to wield the ‘structure and composition’ of representative political institutions as cudgels against those who express opinions not acceptable to the ruling party”.
Disney says this action is not only “legally unsupported”, but that the Governor’s actions are “profoundly un-American”. Disney notes that while it is a prominent target of DeSantis’ attacks on companies that express disfavored viewpoints, it won’t be the last. Disney says that “If the line is not drawn here, there is no line at all”.
Disney says that DeSantis and his hand-selected Board are “engaged in an ongoing constitutional mutiny”.
Disney says that DeSantis “publicly boasted about orchestrating a secret plan to punish Disney for its comments on public affairs and to exercise continuing control over its entertainment programming”, but that the presidential hopeful “seeks desperately to avoid any official responsibility for those acts”.
Disney says that the State “eliminated Disney’s voting rights in the governing body that regulates the use of its property, replacing the landowner-elected body with a Governor-appointed ‘state receivership’ board explicitly charged with using its land-use powers to control Disney’s speech”.
DeSantis has previously claimed immunity, but Disney says he can’t hide. Instead, Disney points to “settled standing and sovereign immunity rules” that say that any state executive officers are open to lawsuits where they are responsible for implementing, administering, or enforcing the law that leads to constitutional injuries. Disney says that it fulfills legal requirements by finding that its constitutional injuries are to traceable to DeSantis’ CFTOD and redressable by a judicial order declaring the laws invalid and enjoining CFTOD’s operations under those laws.
DeSantis is directly responsible for appointing allegedly unlawful officers to the CFTOD’s Board, which establishes the necessary traceability. As Disney notes, the Governor himself publicly charged the CFTOD Board to use their land-use powers to undermine Disney’s interests when DeSantis declared that his Board could approve property next to Disney for a state prison or to develop a rival theme park.
To be clear, Disney’s claim is not that the U.S. Constitution prohibits a state from establishing special districts with governor-appointed boards. The Constitution does, however, prohibit states from allocating government benefits and burdens on impermissible bases, including race, religion, and retribution for protected speech.
In other words, Florida cannot allocate rights and privileges to special districts expressly to punish (or favor) their residents’ political viewpoints—just as it could not do so expressly to punish (or favor) their residents’ race or religion.
Disney is asking the judge in the federal case to dismiss DeSantis’ Motion to Dismiss and allow the case to proceed to court.
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Disney is right. DeSantis must be stopped. Time to bring to light how he weaponized the legislature to kowtow to his illegal laws against Disney.