DeSantis platforms conservative activist in backing U.S. constitutional amendments
To announce his support Monday for constitutional amendments to balance the federal budget and impose term limits on Congress, Gov. Ron DeSantis didn’t stay in Tallahassee or even from Washington, D.C.
No, he went to Naples, home turf for Tarren Bragdon, leader of the Foundation for Government Accountability, which is trying to gin up support for those amendments plus others to give U.S. presidents the line-item veto over budget bills and forbid Congress from exempting itself from the laws it passes.
Bragdon was on hand during a news conference when DeSantis and House Speaker Paul Renner came out for the four constitutional amendments. Proposals to call a constitutional convention to take up term limits and a federal balanced budget amendment both have passed the full House and are set for Senate floor action later this week.
Bragdon pitched the measures as “in the spirit of the Founding Fathers,” “common-sense limits on government while at the same time expanding freedom and opportunity for all.”
“This movement that the governor outlined is about ensuring that the spirit of America is reflected not just in our past glories but in our present actions and in the future that we’re all building for our children and grandchildren. It’s a union of states and individuals and we honor the essence of our nation: freedom, bravery, accountability, and an unwavering commitment to freedom and prosperity for all.”
“These are really, really, I think, broadly appealing reforms. I think they’re long overdue and I think that they represent appropriate corrective measures to the ills that we have been witnessing in Washington, D.C., not just over the last few years but really over the last many decades,” the governor himself said.
National relevance
DeSantis showed no sign of retreating from his bid for national relevance since suspending his campaign for president, attacking the Biden administration for its border policies and “weakness” on foreign policy, particularly in reference to the drone attack on a U.S. military installation in Jordan that killed three U.S. servicemembers. The U.S. blames Iran-backed militants, although the Iranian government has denied responsibility.
Meanwhile, the governor is considering dispatching his Florida State Guard to the Mexican border as Texas Gov. Greg Abbott is blocking federal agents from access to the area.
Although he has endorsed Donald Trumps’ reelection bid, DeSantis appeared to question the former president’s ability to beat Biden (as the governor had done during his campaign).
He offered a caveat: “I wouldn’t have run if I didn’t think my chances were the best on all of this. I may not be the right guy,” he said.
“I think Biden’s been a failed president, but I also thought he was a failed candidate in 2020. And I didn’t think there was any way but, yet you know, here we are. So, I think we live in some strange times but that’s just the nature of it. Ultimately, it’ not just, you know, the person with our jersey’s in or not in — yeah, that’s fine. But it’s like, are you going to deliver and actually fix all these problems that are there.”
Ongoing relationship
Regarding the amendments, DeSantis has allied himself with Bragdon before, appointing him during his first year in office to a state Florida Government Efficiency Task Force, along with other conservative movement leaders and Republican campaign donors. Bragdon also served on the governor’s first-term transition committee.
As the Phoenix reported back then, the FGA is a nonprofit think tank that Bragdon founded in 2011, after moving to Naples, seeking to restrict access to welfare programs. Bragdon previously served in the Maine Legislature and as adviser to former Maine Gov. Paul LePage. He participated when Republican Pam Bondi was Florida attorney general in an unsuccessful federal legal defense of a state law requiring suspicion-less drug testing for welfare recipients.
The foundation’s mission is to formulate and promote policies that successfully move individuals from dependency to full-time work and allow them to quickly escape from poverty and job loss and to reduce fraud in welfare and unemployment programs to protect resources for the truly needy,” the group wrote in its IRS tax Form 990 for 2022, the last on record.
The group reported revenues of $14 million and about $12 million for expenses. The millions, in part, were used to “restore confidence in elections” and investigate “the influence of political ideology in government, schools, and public boardrooms” and “protect the rights of parents, retirees, and workers.” Bragdon earned more than $463,000 in total compensation that year.
In the tax form, the foundation refused to disclose its donors “on the rounds that such disclosure may chill the donors’ First Amendment right to associate in private with the organization.”
However, The Guardian has reported that one major backer is Illinois billionaire Dick Uihlein, described by the news organization as “one of the key funders of election denial.”
‘Not a tough sell’
Members of the Florida Legislature are limited to eight years’ service in each chamber. Additionally, Florida governors hold the power to veto line items in the state budget, chiefly targeting individual project fin members’ home districts, but presidents do not.
“Do turkeys slip through the budget process, or bad spending measures do they slip through? Absolutely, they slip through. That’s why you need governors like America’s greatest governor, Ron DeSantis, to be able to look at those and say, look, we’ve got to pare back,” Renner said.
The amendment effort will require coordination with states supporting the proposals, not all of whom have OK’d identical language, DeSantis acknowledged. With many states now hold legislative sessions, “this is something that’s very easy for them to certify going forward.”
Term limits are “not a tough sell and it’s not a partisan issue, and it has appeal across any demographic line or partisan line you can do, so let’s do it. Let’s get this done. Let’s not complain about Washington and do something to constrain Washington for a change,” the governor said.
“Some have said it lets the lobbyists run the show. Well, in Washington, D.C., the lobbyists are already running the show. Could it get any worse? They say, well the staff becomes more powerful. Most of these big spending bills that are thousands of pages that nobody reads, those are written by staff, they’re not written by the members,” DeSantis said.
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