A defiant DeSantis critic won't back down
A defiant DeSantis critic won't back down
Carlos Guillermo Smith hasn't gone anywhere
Welcome to a Monday evening edition of Progress Report.
A federal judge today ruled that Florida’s ban on transgender care for minors is unlikely constitutional and therefore barred it from being enforced for the time being. Though it’s a dicey proposition to rely on the federal judiciary to provide any kind of long-term justice these days, this is unequivocally good news for families in Florida and anyone that receives medical care in the United States (ie all of us).
As Ron DeSantis sets out on his doomed presidential campaign, Democrats are trying to rebuild their party from the bottom up. What exactly that looks like depends on which lawmakers wind up in positions of power over the next few years. Today, we’re speaking with one of the Democrats’ most progressive and aggressive lawmakers about the state’s political miasma, the impact it’s having on working people, and what Democrats must do to return to prominence.
Oh, one thing: The New York Times Editorial Board put out a strong piece this weekend on Texas’s Death Star law and the antidemocratic scourge of pre-emption laws that have been sweeping across the nation. We’ve been covering the subject for a few years now, including this major story from back in April. If you want to stay months ahead of the game, please support our work!
For Carlos Guillermo Smith, this year’s recently concluded legislative session must have felt a bit like Groundhog’s Day.
As one of the most prominent LGBTQ+ figures in Florida politics, Smith has spent a dozen years fighting against state-sanctioned bigotry and democratic decline. He shows up wherever and whenever possible: Parades, protests, canvasses; marches on the Capitol, college campuses, and wherever good people are needed to stand up to bigots. In a state as large as Florida, that means logging hundreds of miles at a time to bolster the defiance of whichever corporate or Christofascist policy is being dangled over the heads of vulnerable people for the hateful sport of it.
The one fundamental difference this year is that for the first time since 2016, Smith is doing it all as a private citizen. Elected in 2016 to represent part of the Orlando area, he very narrowly lost his bid for reelection in a newly gerrymandered district last November.
“The months that I have spent outside of the legislature have strengthened my resolve to do this work,” Smith tells Progress Report. “It's been difficult to watch what's happening in Florida under one party role, but I simply couldn't and would not sit by and do nothing.”
With an open state senate seat in Orlando up for grabs in 2024, Smith’s hope is that he can make this absence from the legislature a short sabbatical. He launched his campaign over the weekend with a canvass for the petition signatures required to get abortion rights on the ballot next year, signaling his focus on coalition building after a brutal midterm election. Between now and then he’ll be continuing the fight against Republican encroachment on human rights in Florida, which has defined his time in politics.
After half a decade spent working in the legislature and serving as chair of the Orange County Democratic Party, Smith first ran for state House in 2016. That spring, a deranged gunman opened fire at an LGBTQ+ club in Orlando, killing 49 people. Smith had occasionally hung out at Pulse Nightclub, and the mass shooting, at that point the deadliest in American history, had a profound effect on him both personally and politically.
After taking some time off from the campaign to organize a candlelight vigil, Smith then used his platform to demand a forceful response from lawmakers. While he won his election that fall, the GOP-controlled legislature declined to pursue any significant efforts to prevent future atrocities. Though the legislature did pass a modest gun control bill after the Parkland mass murder in 2018, the Pulse tragedy and the inaction that followed would foreshadow the withering assaults on LGBTQ+ people to come.
Ron DeSantis’s arrival in Tallahassee and subsequent weaponization of bigotry and embrace of frenzied religious fanatics brought Smith further to the forefront of an embattled resistance. He spoke out against the GOP’s initial “Don’t Say Gay” law more forcefully than perhaps any other lawmaker, and was deeply involved in the progressive dissent against corporate corruption that has engulfed both major parties in Florida. He was also a powerful advocate for disabled Floridians, who were systemically ignored by the state government.
Smith’s absence from the legislature has coincided with the worst session in modern history. This year alone, Republicans threw out local renter protections, rigged the property insurance market on behalf of the industry, expanded the “Don’t Say Gay” law, banned gender-affirming care, authorized corporations to sue small towns, all but banished undocumented immigrants, and launched a gigantic school privatization program.
“Florida families are being rent gouged. Millions in our state are losing health care. We have a massive teacher shortage made worse by an extreme legislature that turned our classrooms into political battlefields,” Smith says. “The community needs someone to put people over politics and put in the work to solve real problems. And that's why I decided to run for state senate.”
Running in a blue-leaning but not definitively Democratic district, Smith will have to fight hard to win both the general election and any possible primary that surfaces in the months to come. Democratic leaders may be looking for a more malleable and corporate-friendly challenger, making the early months of Smith’s campaign pivotal for fundraising and exposure.
Below is a condensed and edited version of my conversation with the former state representative and candidate for state senate.
Progress Report: It feels like a new and more ruthless version of the Republican Party is now in charge. How did they get to this point of far-right extremism?
Smith: Now that Republicans have a supermajority in both chambers, they have used that supermajority to advance the most extreme policies and take our state in a dangerous new direction. Take gun violence prevention, for example: The governor signed permitless untrained carry, to let people secretly carry guns in public with no criminal background check or training. It signals the reverse of the progress that we've made in Florida since Pulse and since Parkland. The House even passed a bill to lower the age in Florida to purchase a AR 15 from 21 to 18. It's outrageous.
Speaking of young people, you’ve spent a lot of time at New College, organizing and protesting with students against DeSantis’s hostile takeover, as well as your alma mater, the University of Central Florida. What’s the atmosphere been like on campuses, now that there’s not so much media attention?
Well, there's an energy of fear and outrage on college campuses; fear that if faculty or campus leadership speaks out, they'll be punished and defunded. That's already happening. It’s an outrage that the state and this regime would use its power to cross so many lines and shatter democratic norms in a way that they didn't even foresee.
But that fear and outrage are turning into action. You see young people are organizing on campuses across the state. They showed up en masse to Tallahassee and in their communities to oppose these attacks. But what we know is, the damage that has been done in Florida is one that will require sustained. And it will require sustained engagement and organizing to reverse that will go beyond one election cycle.
Polls indicate that for all the conservative noise and wagon circling, this stuff is extremely unpopular in Florida. Republicans have been prioritizing it for a while, so there is no ambiguity — they’re fully behind it. Yet they sailed to victory in Florida’s midterm elections. So where’s the disconnect?
Well, the reality is our base was demoralized and we didn't have a strong top of the ticket. The National Democratic Party pulled out all of its resources from Florida, and that had a devastating impact on our ability to turn out the vote. Democrats stayed home in Florida. And one of the first things that I said after the November elections was something along the lines of if we get abortion rights and legalizing cannabis on the ballot in 2024, just watch how quickly things turn around for Florida Democrats.
[Note: As of this week, a campaign to get legal recreational weed has enough signatures to qualify for the 2024 ballot. An abortion rights initiative is not far behind.]
These are the issues that are overwhelmingly popular with voters even in Florida. That should be driving not only turnout but also driving voters to elect Democrats across the state, because these are the values and policies that we believe in.
But Democrats in Florida have sort of avoided a lot of them, right? They’ve voted for giveaways to big real estate developers and policies that screw tenants. Many are avoiding the civil rights fights now, too.
We cannot be shy as Democrats about embracing our core values, which are aligned with the majority of Floridians. Take the $15 minimum wage, for example, that overwhelmingly passed in Florida, the same Florida that elected Ron DeSantis as governor. But you had Democrats shy away from the $15 minimum wage. People need to really understand that going towards the middle and making ourselves Republican-light is simply not working in Florida and never has.
And even if Democrats do make progress in 2024 and pick up some seats, they’ll be the minority party. Is there another approach to stopping the most wretched policies being pumped out by the GOP?
What we can be done is we can actually put up a real fight to defend our fundamental rights and freedoms. And we can lead and fight for the issues that we really care about, like affordable housing, expanding health care, raising people's wages, and improving their benefits. The bread and butter issues that continue to fall by the wayside will be top priorities in addition to defending our rights and freedoms.
You’re from Orlando, you’ve represented Orlando, and you’d do so again if you win this race. What do you make of DeSantis’s war with Disney? It’s strange to root for a major corporation.
When we see the petty and vindictive way that DeSantis has declared on Disney for having the temerity to stand up for LGBTQ families, we also have to understand that if he is allowed to get away with using the government to punish individuals or businesses that exercise their First Amendment freedoms, we will continue down a very dark path in the state that is not a democracy.
The way you hold corporations accountable is by demanding fair wages and better benefits and ensuring they pay what they owe, not by implementing hostile government takeovers, vindictive policies, and temper tantrums.
In the context of the Disney workers, we can learn a thing or two from Disney workers on holding corporations accountable. We demand they pay higher wages and better benefits, like Disney workers just did. They just successfully were able to negotiate through their union an $18 minimum wage that will go beyond the Disney workers but lift all boats for tourism workers across Central Florida. That's how you do it.
It’s got to be nice to see DeSantis getting thumped by Disney and Trump, even if you don’t exactly love them.
Well, let me just put it this way: The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards karma being a bitch.
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