The legal battle lines are solidifying over how Florida's restoration of felons' voting rights should be implemented.
A stack of 10 briefs were filed this week at the state Supreme Court, which will hear oral arguments Nov. 6 on whether a new law was improperly written to disenfranchise the very people whose access to the ballot box was supposed to be restored by the will of the voters.
The dispute is one of the most important voting rights cases in years, legally and politically.
Florida is by far the biggest politically purple state in the country, and Democrats see significant potential benefit from adding as many as 1.4 million people with felony convictions to the rolls in time for the presidential election.
Promoters of ballot initiatives and advocates for prisoners' rights hailed last fall's referendum as a historic victory, because turnout was enormous and almost two-thirds of the state supported voting-rights restoration to felons "who have completed all terms of their sentence, including parole or probation," excluding people "convicted of murder or a felony sexual offense."
But the Republican-controlled Legislature voted this spring to limit the scope of the voter-mandated constitutional amendment, by requiring felons to make good on all "legal financial obligations" — mainly restitution, fines and court fees — before being eligible to vote.
The Republicans in charge in Tallahassee — Gov. Ron DeSantis, Secretary of State Laurel Lee and the leaders of the House and Senate — all filed legal briefs sticking up for the new law, saying those payments are part of sentences and so the law is reflecting the language of the amendment.
Voting rights advocates and civil rights groups emphatically disagree and have filed a federal lawsuit to get the law struck down, arguing it amounts to an unconstitutional poll tax and violates a number of other constitutional civil rights. DeSantis has persuaded the Florida Supreme Court to weigh in on the somewhat narrower question of whether the law is within bounds in responding to the wording of the referendum.
"All of these aspects of Florida's sentencing scheme work in tandem to achieve Florida's sentencing purposes," the lawyers for the House wrote in their brief.
Costs and fees "are categorically not terms of sentence because they bear none of the hallmarks of sentencing," the Fair Elections Center said in its brief, because they are "non-punitive and simply serve to compensate the government for the costs of administering criminal justice."
The American Civil Liberties Union, the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, and the Brennan Center for Justicefiled a brief declaring that the state's history "of denying votes" to African-Americans reveals the GOP's bad faith in linking finances and voting rights.
"Historically, Florida disenfranchised a higher percentage of its adult citizens than any other state in the United States, more than 10 percent of the overall voting age population, and more than 21 percent of the African-American voting age population," the civil rights groups wrote.
Eric Trump, the newly appointed ALT5 board director of World Liberty Financial, walks outside of the NASDAQ in Times Square as they mark the $1.5- billion partnership between World Liberty Financial and ALT5 Sigma with the ringing of the NASDAQ opening bell, on Aug. 13, 2025, in New York City.
Why does the Trump family always get a pass?
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche joined ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday to defend or explain a lot of controversies for the Trump administration: the Epstein files release, the events in Minneapolis, etc. He was also asked about possible conflicts of interest between President Trump’s family business and his job. Specifically, Blanche was asked about a very sketchy deal Trump’s son Eric signed with the UAE’s national security adviser, Sheikh Tahnoon.
Shortly before Trump was inaugurated in early 2025, Tahnoon invested $500 million in the Trump-owned World Liberty, a then newly launched cryptocurrency outfit. A few months later, UAE was granted permission to purchase sensitive American AI chips. According to the Wall Street Journal, which broke the story, “the deal marks something unprecedented in American politics: a foreign government official taking a major ownership stake in an incoming U.S. president’s company.”
“How do you respond to those who say this is a serious conflict of interest?” ABC host George Stephanopoulos asked.
“I love it when these papers talk about something being unprecedented or never happening before,” Blanche replied, “as if the Biden family and the Biden administration didn’t do exactly the same thing, and they were just in office.”
Blanche went on to boast about how the president is utterly transparent regarding his questionable business practices: “I don’t have a comment on it beyond Trump has been completely transparent when his family travels for business reasons. They don’t do so in secret. We don’t learn about it when we find a laptop a few years later. We learn about it when it’s happening.”
Sadly, Stephanopoulos didn’t offer the obvious response, which may have gone something like this: “OK, but the president and countless leading Republicans insisted that President Biden was the head of what they dubbed ‘the Biden Crime family’ and insisted his business dealings were corrupt, and indeed that his corruption merited impeachment. So how is being ‘transparent’ about similar corruption a defense?”
Now, I should be clear that I do think the Biden family’s business dealings were corrupt, whether or not laws were broken. Others disagree. I also think Trump’s business dealings appear to be worse in many ways than even what Biden was alleged to have done. But none of that is relevant. The standard set by Trump and Republicans is the relevant political standard, and by the deputy attorney general’s own account, the Trump administration is doing “exactly the same thing,” just more openly.
Since when is being more transparent about wrongdoing a defense? Try telling a cop or judge, “Yes, I robbed that bank. I’ve been completely transparent about that. So, what’s the big deal?”
This is just a small example of the broader dysfunction in the way we talk about politics.
Americans have a special hatred for hypocrisy. I think it goes back to the founding era. As Alexis de Tocqueville observed in “Democracy In America,” the old world had a different way of dealing with the moral shortcomings of leaders. Rank had its privileges. Nobles, never mind kings, were entitled to behave in ways that were forbidden to the little people.
In America, titles of nobility were banned in the Constitution and in our democratic culture. In a society built on notions of equality (the obvious exceptions of Black people, women, Native Americans notwithstanding) no one has access to special carve-outs or exemptions as to what is right and wrong. Claiming them, particularly in secret, feels like a betrayal against the whole idea of equality.
The problem in the modern era is that elites — of all ideological stripes — have violated that bargain. The result isn’t that we’ve abandoned any notion of right and wrong. Instead, by elevating hypocrisy to the greatest of sins, we end up weaponizing the principles, using them as a cudgel against the other side but not against our own.
Pick an issue: violent rhetoric by politicians, sexual misconduct, corruption and so on. With every revelation, almost immediately the debate becomes a riot of whataboutism. Team A says that Team B has no right to criticize because they did the same thing. Team B points out that Team A has switched positions. Everyone has a point. And everyone is missing the point.
Sure, hypocrisy is a moral failing, and partisan inconsistency is an intellectual one. But neither changes the objective facts. This is something you’re supposed to learn as a child: It doesn’t matter what everyone else is doing or saying, wrong is wrong. It’s also something lawyers like Mr. Blanche are supposed to know. Telling a judge that the hypocrisy of the prosecutor — or your client’s transparency — means your client did nothing wrong would earn you nothing but a laugh.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.