The late Justice Joe Boyd used to boast he was the only one on the Florida Supreme Court to have been officially declared sane.
In 1975, a utility company needed a small legal favor, so they wrote a draft opinion and slipped it to him.
That is not, as I’m sure you are aware, normal.
Boyd said he did nothing improper: Indeed, he said, he promptly hopped to the gents’, tore the thing up, and flushed it.
This sounded sufficiently odd to the Florida Legislature that they threatened to impeach him, only backing down when he agreed to a psychiatric exam.
He convinced the doctor he was not, in fact, as nutty as a fruitcake.
These days, you wouldn’t be blamed for thinking psychiatric exams might be in order for some in Florida’s political and legal establishment.
Or, even better, a moral compass: Many of the judges appointed over the last seven or eight years seem to have misplaced theirs.
Florida has just acquired a new Supreme Court justice, appointed by the governor.
There is no suggestion, however, he’s mentally ill. As for a moral compass, well, that remains to be seen.
Justice Charles Canady recently vacated the bench to parachute into a sweet gig directing the University of Florida’s new Hamilton Center for Classical and Civic Education.
White males
There were six Federalist Society candidates on the governor’s shortlist, raring to take Canady’s place: all male, all white.
One hopeful used to work for Liberty Counsel, an outfit that advocates for laws adhering to “Christian and biblical” principles.
One was on the First District Court of Appeals, where he ruled to dilute Black voting power by abolishing a North Florida congressional district.
One had an unremarkable practice in civil litigation; another wasn’t known for having a significant impact on the legal profession, but did gain some notoriety with distinctly un-clever X quips accusing late night hosts Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Kimmel, and Jimmy Fallon of having “Low T” and snickering like a third-grader at a “gross” picture of President Joe Biden kissing his wife, to which he added a cartoon of skeletal elderly folks having sex.
This is what passes for “judicial temperament” in Ron DeSantis’ Florida.
And how about this fellow John Guard, formerly Florida’s chief deputy attorney general?
He defended the state against Planned Parenthood and other Jezebels who think women should have control over their own bodies.
Donald Trump had planned to nominate Guard for a federal judgeship, but put that on “indefinite” hold after Guard was subpoenaed in connection with the Hope Florida investigation.
In case you’ve forgotten, Hope Florida is a program spearheaded by Casey DeSantis to bypass Big Gubmint nonsense like healthcare for children, housing assistance, and SNAP benefits, hooking up the Deserving Poor with churches and charities.
In 2024, Hope Florida was mysteriously given a nice hunk of cash from the $67 million settlement in a Medicaid over-billing case.
It should all have been returned to the taxpayers, but somehow Hope Florida got $10 million off the top.
Gingrich acolyte
The money went to a couple of PACs working against the proposed constitutional amendment to legalize recreational marijuana.
One of the PACs was controlled by James Uthmeier, then the governor’s chief of staff, now Florida’s attorney general and former boss of John Guard.
To many in the Legislature, that looked like money laundering.
The House of Representatives investigated; now the whole mess has been given to a grand jury to see if anybody needs indicting.
You will not be surprised to hear, given the circumstances, DeSantis didn’t choose Guard for the state Supreme Court.
You might be surprised to hear Guard got a nice consolation prize: an appointment to the Florida Second District Court of Appeal.
But the winner of the Supreme Court stakes is Adam Tanenbaum, a very conservative judge with a very impressive resumé: top of his class at UF, former intern for Newt Gingrich, stellar student at Georgetown, law professor, lots of experience working in the Legislature, and, most recently, First DCA judge.
Tanenbaum joins a court comprising three Latino men, one Latino woman, one Black woman, and one white woman. Canady was the lone white fellow.
So, Tanenbaum adds what DeSantis no doubt thinks is appropriate “diversity” to the court.
As the president reminds us, white people, especially white men, white people, especially men, have been “very badly treated” in America.
But with the new justice, the court can be proud of its ethnic diversity.
Its ideological diversity, however, is pretty much non-existent.
Six of the seven justices are DeSantis picks.
Six of the seven can be relied upon to rule the way DeSantis would like.
Sole dissent
In 2025, the court upheld the state’s six-week abortion ban and gutted Florida’s Fair Districts amendment.
Never mind that 63% of Florida voters approved the 2010 ballot measure to stop partisan gerrymandering and protect minority voting rights.
This court blew it off: How dare ordinary citizens choose to enshrine fairness in the Florida Constitution? What do they know?
For that matter, what does the American Bar Association, the 147-year-old group of legal professionals dedicated to upholding ethics and standards and promoting equal justice, know?
The court has now dumped the ABA as the state’s exclusive law school accrediting body, saying, “The Court is persuaded that it is not in Floridians’ best interest for the ABA to be the sole gatekeeper deciding which law schools’ graduates are eligible to sit for the state’s General Bar Examination and become licensed attorneys in Florida.”
Ron DeSantis loathes the ABA, calling it “a very, very partisan activist organization” because it promotes racial and ethnic diversity in law schools.
(See discrimination against white men above).
This would be the same radical Democratic Party ABA apparatchiks who gave U.S. Supreme Court justices Brett Kavanaugh and Samuel Alito their highest rating of “Well Qualified.”
As of right now, there isn’t really an alternative to the ABA.
Perhaps the Association for Biblical Higher Education can step up until the Federalist Society can create its own Law School Inquisition.
Who needs an independent judiciary? So 20th century.
The (sort of) good news is retrograde decisions weren’t unanimous: one justice, Jorge Labarga, appointed by Gov. Charlie Crist, cast a dissenting vote in each case.
Channeling slaveholders
The bad news is Labarga only has another 18 months on the bench: When he turns 75 in 2027, he’ll have to retire.
Tanenbaum’s record indicates he’s unlikely to join the court’s last moderate in voting against the majority.
When he was an appeals court judge, he ruled in favor of eliminating minority-access voting districts and penalizing school districts for enforcing mask mandates during the COVID pandemic.
He’s an out-and-proud “originalist,” one of those people who confuse the United States Constitution with holy writ — a trait he shares with six members of the U.S. Supreme Court — a sacred text that can only mean what it meant in 1789, law as set in stone as the Code of Hammurabi.
In 1789, women couldn’t vote and almost all Black people resident in the 13 states were enslaved.
Indeed, 25 of 55 framers were slaveholders.
Unless these 18th-century landed gentlemen had the prophetic talents of Nostradamus, a magic mirror, and time travel technology, they could have no idea what America would be like in the 21st century.
Yet the likes of Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Adam Tanenbaum insist they hold the key to what the Framers intended and/or what everyone understood to the Constitution to mean at the time.
Originalism is, as the prominent legal scholar Eric Segall says, “dangerous nonsense.”
It’s intellectually dishonest, too: Surely, “well-regulated militia” in 1789 meant a trained group of citizens who could protect the community against some tyrannical force, not (as the conservative court would have us believe) a nation of armed individuals empowered to shoot anyone who “threatens” them.
Stare decisis
As for stare decisis, the principle that courts should give a certain deference to precedents, it’s not popular with Federalist Society types.
Justice Tanenbaum has dismissed stare decisis as an excuse for what he sees as incorrectly decided cases.
Many of those supposedly bad decisions constitute “legislating from the bench,” which is nothing more than “judicial activism.”
(The overturning of Roe v. Wade and giving the president unlimited immunity — that’s not “judicial activism;” it’s just the intuited wisdom of 237 years ago).
The language of the Constitution should be paramount. If the judge will simply do what it says, no one can say they’re legislating from the bench.
Tanenbaum has written: “elevating the text of the Constitution over prior erroneous judicial reasoning could not fairly be labeled as ‘judicial activism.’”
You might want to ask how he’s so sure he knows what reasoning is “erroneous.”
You might also wonder if this is merely a convenient way to dismiss previously settled law because it offends the judge’s politics.
The United States Supreme Court will soon issue a decision on the 1965 Voting Rights Act, the core of civil rights in our democracy. Chances are better than even they’ll eviscerate it.
Ron DeSantis is counting on it. That’s why he’s demanding a special session in April.
He wants the Legislature to draw new congressional maps — maps to finally finish off most districts that might elect a Black or Latino or, God forbid, Democratic representative.
If the new map gets through the Legislature, it will undoubtedly end up before the Florida Supreme Court — and the governor’s hand-picked justices are waiting.
We’ll soon find out how sane and how moral they are.
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