The Courage to be Free: A Memorino of a New Florida Attorney General and Insights on a “Holy Father’s Day”
His book is called “Rights of Man,” and it is from Thomas Paine’s work that most of the platform came from. And like Paine, Skidmore was a universalist who rejected the notion that rights were limited to people of a certain class or station. “There can exist no power whatever to destroy equality of rights, but the power of violence and injustice,” Skidmore writes. They are still the same, even though they were originally equal, and nothing else can keep them out of the rightful owner’s possession.
He wasn’t a political theorist. He was a member of the New York Working Men’s Party at the time he wrote, and his role was that of a Machinist. He wrote a platform that called for a redistribution of land to all males and females over the age of 21 and an end to commercial monopolies.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis on Tuesday will release his book, “The Courage to be Free,” to much anticipation ahead of his expected plunge into the 2024 presidential race. It is not the first time that DeSantis has taken authorship to jumpstart his political ambitions.
As a little-known Navy prosecutor on the cusp of a bid for a Jacksonville-area congressional seat, DeSantis in 2011 released the audaciously titled “Dreams from Our Founding Fathers.” He has joked that the book – from an obscure publisher that mostly dealt in children’s titles and a thriller series produced by a middle school principal – received little acclaim and was “read by about a dozen people.”
It is an interesting glimpse into his governing beliefs at times, as they conflict with his current leadership style but could soon inform his platform as he seeks higher office. It shows the early seeds of his disdain for the media, strongly suggests Christianity is foundational to the Constitution and demonstrates his early willingness to buck establishment forces in his own party.
At one point, the Democrat said that Obama was unable to look beyond the codification of slavery at the nation’s birth and that he didn’t pay proper fealty to the Constitution. After the 2010 elections, Obama declared, “I couldn’t go through the front door at this country’s founding” – an opinion that DeSantis called flawed.
When it comes to taking actions, the governor has often shied away from public opinion, declaring he was not going to lead based on polls. The most restrictive abortion law in Florida’s history was signed by DeSantis, despite support for making it accessible to women.
The description of Obama as a messianic figure and his candidacy as one of singular historical significance drew the ire of DeSantis. But his own closing message to Florida voters last fall came in a 90-second video that suggested he was made by God on the eighth day to be a “fighter.”
He also compared Obama with George Washington, who, DeSantis wrote, possessed “a deep sense of humility, a humility that dovetailed superbly with the ethos of republican government.” He noted that the founding fathers were warned of demagogues who capitalize on popular prejudices by peddling false claims, by using questionable rhetorical techniques, or by sowing divisions within the body politic.
This criticism of slavery’s perversions clouding constitutional judgment extended to Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, the country’s first Black justice, DeSantis contended. DeSantis took issue with Marshall’s criticism of the Framers on the grounds that “the government they devised was defective from the start.”
“Though Obama made every attempt to draw comparisons between himself and Lincoln, it is actually one of Lincoln’s foremost political adversaries and one of Obama’s predecessors, Stephen A. Douglas, who argued like Obama that the Founders meant to exclude non-whites from the natural rights clarion call contained in the Declaration of Independence.”
The Supreme Court case that found enslaved African Americans could not claim citizenship and didn’t enjoy their rights was the subject of this rhetorical trick again in the book.
The 2010 passage of theAffordable Care Act, a signature domestic achievement for Obama, was one of the few topics which animated voters in the time when DeSantis published his book.
It has yet to be seen if the warning of putting America on a course to a government-run, single-payer system will come to fruition, though several Democratic candidates for president advocated this policy during the 2020 election.
“Initially justified by Obama as a needed remedy for the problem of rising health care costs that hurt members of the middle class, the post-passage euphoria revealed a different, more controversial justification for a federal overhaul of the health care system: the redistribution of wealth,” DeSantis wrote.
Even the requirement for insurance companies to cover adults and children with pre-existing conditions appeared problematic to DeSantis because it could lead to higher insurance costs.
The law was said to undermine insurance coverage for children. “By mandating that insurers take on more risk than is economically justifiable, ObamaCare forced insurers either to absorb financial losses or else increase premiums for all policies.”
DeSantis and the Board of Governors: What do you want to do about it? What does it take to be a free country
In his book, he wrote of a way of leadership that is rigid and focused on a strict reading of the Constitution. Limitations of the executive branch’s ability and adherence to separation of powers are included in this.
“If you are in one of these corporations, if you’re a woke CEO, you want to get involved in our legislative business, look, it’s a free country,” DeSantis said in 2021. I will fight back against you if you do that. And I’m going to make sure that people understand your business practices, and anything I don’t like about what you’re doing.”
Disney certainly learned that lesson. After Disney objected to the state’s efforts to restrict certain classroom instruction about sexual orientation and gender identity, DeSantis got the company’s special taxing authority. The state Legislature voted to give the government new powers over the land around Disney theme parks.
The Birth of Freedom: The Difficulty of the Declaration of Independence, and the First Amendments that Disrupted Founding America
Roosevelt is a professor of constitutional law at the University of Pennsylvania, and he said we get the Declaration wrong. He writes that the Declaration of Independence was not about human rights in the abstract. “It was not a declaration of concrete human rights, either.” Instead, the Declaration of Independence was about, well, independence:
It first explains the origin and nature of legitimate political authority. It then explains when the exercise of political authority ceases to be legitimate. And then it endeavors to show that the situation of the American colonists fits the criteria that justify rebellion.
Roosevelt wrote that Jefferson’s equality is a limited concept. It exists in the hypothetical state of nature, not the real world of political life. People may start out equal in the abstract, but do not stay that way when they enter into society.
Roosevelt’s answer lies in the Civil War and Reconstruction. Lincoln gave much of his modern meaning to the Declaration in his Gettysburg Address and he was the one who claimed the new birth of freedom. The old order had to be overturned by him and the United States. “Many people,” Roosevelt writes, “following Lincoln’s cue, think of Reconstruction as a process of better realizing founding ideals, through the process of change set out in the founders’ Constitution. We would do better to think of it as a revolution that destroyed Founding America.”
The results of that revolution — the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments — transformed American society. They were intended, as Frederick Douglass wrote in 1872, “to give full freedom to every person without regard to race or color in the United States.”
The power to enforce the amendments was given to Congress by means of appropriate legislation.