Gov. Ron DeSantis said, if elected president, he would not allow courts to put Trump in prison

Gov. Ron DeSantis said, if elected president, he would not allow courts to put Trump in prison

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said if he were elected president, he would not allow the U.S. justice system to put former President Donald Trump in jail or prison.

“The idea that we’re going to put an almost 80-year-old former president in prison – that’s not going to be good for this country,” DeSantis said, answering a question during a caucus event at Jethro’s BBQ in Ankeny, Iowa Tuesday evening.

The comments came after the Colorado Supreme Court released its decision barring the former president from the Colorado ballot under the 14th Amendment – a decision likely to be appealed to the federal Supreme Court.

The Colorado lawsuit is one of many legal battles Trump faces as he competes for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination. Multiple state courts have heard challenges to Trump’s place on primary and general election ballots, and the former president has been charged in four criminal cases.

The Florida governor said he believes that Trump’s legal challenges are one facet of a politicized court system and the “weaponization” of federal agencies, issues that also hurt less famous Americans.

He pointed to former President Gerald Ford’s decision to pardon former President Richard Nixon in 1974 – a decision DeSantis said was criticized, but one that was necessary to allow the country to “move forward.”

“We got to start healing this country at some point,” DeSantis said. “And I think the left, they are hell-bent on using the levers of power to go after people they don’t like and it’s got to stop. And I’m the only guy running that can conceivably put a stop to it. That’s just the reality.”

Steve Deace, a conservative talk show host, speaking in support of DeSantis at the event, said he believes that “everything they’re doing to Donald Trump legally is complete B.S.” But he also said he does not agree with Trump supporters who believe that the former president has a plan to defeat these legal challenges.

The Colorado Supreme Court decision is just the beginning of Trump’s legal battles, he said, pointing to other legal challenges in states like Wisconsin, Nevada and Arizona.

At the same time as DeSantis’ Ankeny event, Trump held a rally in Waterloo. The former president currently leads in Iowa and national polls by a wide margin. In the most recent Des Moines Register/NBC News/Mediacom Iowa Poll, 51% of likely Republican caucusgoers said they planned to support Trump in the 2024 Iowa caucuses. DeSantis came in second at 19%, and Nikki Haley, at 16%.

This story was published earlier by the Iowa Capital Dispatch, an affiliate of the nonprofit States Newsroom network, which includes the Florida Phoenix.

The post Gov. Ron DeSantis said, if elected president, he would not allow courts to put Trump in prison first appeared on Daily Florida Press.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Committee week in Florida’s Capitol: Welcome to the festival of ignorance

Image
Legislators came to town for the autumn ritual of political harlotry they call “committee week.” Tallahassee’s collective IQ dropped by a good 60 points. That’s bad, but what they propose doing to Florida is worse. Seems Sen. Joe Gruters, R-$ara$ota, who also is chairman of the Republican Party of Florida, was intimately involved with a plot to quash the Democratic vote. Remember that “ voting reform ” bill the governor signed on “Fox and Friends” last May? The one that restricts access to ballot drop-boxes, limits vote-by-mail applications, forbids giving people standing in long lines a bottle of water, and lets partisan poll watchers police canvassing boards? Even though Florida ran an immaculate election in 2020, Republicans goose-stepped in time with the Madman of Mar-a-Lago and claimed with straight faces they merely wanted to prevent election “fraud” — which is about as common as polar bears in Miami. (What fraud there was, was courtesy of the GOP .) Joe Gruters ...
Read more

U.S. House GOP would make it easier for feds to give public lands away to states

Image
U.S. House Republicans included in the new rules for the chamber they passed this month a provision meant to make it easier for Congress to give away public lands. The provision is a fairly technical piece of the 55-page  rules package . It affects internal House accounting and requires that anytime Congress were to give any federal lands to a state, municipality or tribe, it would not be counted as a loss to the federal budget. House Republicans had an identical rule when they controlled the chamber from 2017 to 2019. Advocates and critics agree the measure would be helpful to any effort by the House to transfer federal lands to states. But they disagree about the wisdom of such giveaways. Republicans and conservative groups see states as preferable stewards of most public lands. Those closest to the land are in a better position to make decisions on how to manage them than those in Washington bureaucracies, they say. Environmental groups and Democrats see federal divest...
Read more

Democratic governors press U.S. Senate to act on voting rights legislation

Image
WASHINGTON — Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and 16 other Democratic governors are urging the U.S. Senate to pass two bills that aim to protect voting rights. Both measures need 60 votes to advance under Senate rules but have been stalled by Republican opposition in the evenly divided Senate. “Without decisive action by the federal government this year to protect voters’ access to the ballot and ensure the integrity and transparency of our elections, the voices of Americans across the country, especially Americans of color, will be suppressed,” the governors wrote in a Monday  letter  to U.S. Senate leadership. Governors who signed the letter include Jared Polis of Colorado, Tim Walz of Minnesota, Steve Sisolak of Nevada, Phil Murphy of New Jersey, Michelle Lujan Grisham of New Mexico, Roy Cooper of North Carolina, Kate Brown of Oregon, Tom Wolf of Pennsylvania and Tony Evers of Wisconsin, among others. One bill, known as the  John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act of 2...
Read more