DeSantis’ sinking boat

Of course it was asinine, flying in the face of public health, for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis to issue an executive order banning the use of vaccine passports, which are an eminently sensible way for private businesses to stay open in a deadly pandemic. Of course it wouldn’t hold up in a court of law. And of course DeSantis’ lawyers now vow to keep fighting after a federal judge blocked the ban, granting Norwegian Cruise Line’s request for an injunction so they can continue to screen those on their boats for inoculation.

DeSantis may have graduated from Harvard Law, but all the legal education in the world can’t stop a man from putting poisonous politics over the well-being of his people.

U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams correctly sided with the cruise line’s claim that DeSantis rule unfairly inhibits the company’s ability to guard against outbreaks in the midst of an unprecedented pandemic — essentially forcing them to forfeit millions of dollars for no good reason. (She didn’t point out, but we will, that the anti-private-business rule comes from a Republican who claims to respect free enterprise.) The executive order’s overbroad. The governor’s overboard.

It’s the mirror image of DeSantis’ fight on masks, where, despite purporting to care about local control of schools, he is threatening to deny state education funding to districts that plan to require students and educators to mask up indoors as the COVID-19 delta variant drowns the state, a rule that makes all the sense in the world given that kids under 12 aren’t even allowed to get vaccinated yet.

Republican U.S. Sen. Bill Cassidy from Louisiana, a medical doctor, came out against the DeSantis’ attack on schools’ attempts to protect families, saying, “when it comes to local conditions, if my hospital is full, and my vaccination rate is low and infection rate is going crazy, we should allow local officials to make those decisions best for their community.”

In a country gone off the deep end, a Republican voice of sanity.