South Florida Sun-Sentinel Palm Beach (Sunday)
Moody’s flawed stand against abortion rights
Attorney General Ashley Moody will stand before the state Supreme Court Wednesday to argue that Floridians can’t be trusted to understand a ballot initiative that would protect abortion rights — and because of that, they should be stripped of the right to demand them.
Moody is asking the state’s high court to crush an initiative that’s already supported by nearly 1 million Floridians, and counting. If it makes the ballot, it’s likely to pass. Most polls show that voters support abortion rights regardless of their party. Without this amendment, the Legislature has already shown it will do everything in its power to destroy those rights.
That’s why voters deserve to have their say — and why Florida’s anti-reproductive-rights leaders are so desperate to make sure they don’t.
Just follow the rules
Here’s what voters would see on the ballot next November as Amendment 4:
No law shall prohibit, penalize, delay, or restrict abortion before viability or when necessary to protect the patient’s health, as determined by the patient’s healthcare provider. This amendment does not change the Legislature’s constitutional authority to require notification to a parent or guardian before a minor has an abortion.
In reviewing potential ballot amendments, the Supreme Court applies a threepart test. Two of those conditions have certainly been met: The summary must be no more than 75 words (it’s 49); the ballot question should be confined to a single subject (an easy call) and the summary should be “clear and unambiguous,” specifically describing what the amendment will do.
That last point is where Moody complicates things. Floridians have encountered all these terms before with regard to abortion rights — in state law and countless news stories. Yet Moody claims that voters will be confused about what a “healthcare provider” is, how much power they will have to determine what “health” means, and what constitutes “viability.”
As Moody argues: “But if ‘healthcare providers’ can determine for themselves whether an abortion is necessary to the mother’s ‘health’ or whether a baby has reached ‘viability,’ very little, if any, of the power to enact, prosecute, or adjudicate laws restricting abortion will be left to the three branches of government. This precipitous shift in lawmaking power should be made explicit to the voters. The ballot summary fails to do so.”
The problem with Moody’s arguments goes far beyond the scope of this amendment. She’s asking the court to speculate, with zero evidence, that voters don’t understand terms clearly defined in current law and medical practice. If justices take the bait, they will rewrite Florida’s longstanding standard for reviewing ballot questions, opening the door for judicial nitpicking on any ballot question they decide they don’t like.
The precedent Moody is seeking is so broad that a group of Republicans who have served in public office — including former Lt. Gov. Jennifer Carroll and several former lawmakers — registered their alarm in a brief, noting that several prior constitutional amendments far more complex than this one and were still approved for the ballot.
“The power of the people to decide for themselves what their fundamental law should be is so valued in Florida that courts exercise extreme restraint before blocking citizen initiatives from reaching Floridians,” they wrote. Amen.
A stacked legal deck
Five of the seven justices were appointed by Gov. Ron DeSantis, who barely bothered to disguise his expectation that they would serve his ideological whims on issues including abortion. A sixth justice, Charles Canady, brought to the court a long record of extreme anti-abortion views and his wife, Jennifer, is a state House member who sponsored a six-week abortion ban that makes abortion functionally illegal in Florida.
So the deck is stacked.
But Moody’s attempt to block voters from expressing their opinion at the ballot box is an insultingly audacious Hail Mary pass, even for a court that has had its goalposts moved significantly to the right by DeSantis and his Federalist Society cronies.
If justices sign off on her speculative arguments, they’ll abandon all respect for Floridians’ right to put questions on the ballot and obliterate any pretense that this state’s judiciary is a co-equal branch of government with the sole responsibility of upholding the law.
The tilting to partisan whims in a presidential election year will leave a stain that’s impossible to erase. It will only delay the inevitable: If the court strikes this amendment, reproductive-rights advocates say they will rally and return in 2026 with new language that should be more bulletproof.
Two newer justices, Renatha Francis and Meredith Sasso, face their first merit retention votes in November, on the same ballot the abortion amendment would appear. How will voters view their request to remain on the court if they insult Florida’s electorate so badly?
During Wednesday’s oral argument, which will be televised live on the Florida Channel, justices should sharply question why Moody is urging them to damage their own reputations based on her flimsy and duplicitous reasoning.
No matter what the court decides, voters should remember what Moody thinks of them and their rights. Her crushing disdain for liberty should disqualify her for the office she holds now, and doom any of her future political ambitions.
The Sun Sentinel Editorial Board consists of Opinion Editor Steve Bousquet, Deputy Opinion Editor Dan Sweeney, editorial writer Martin Dyckman and Editor-in-Chief Julie Anderson. Editorials are the opinion of the Board and written by one of its members or a designee. To contact us, email at letters@sunsentinel.com.