Donald Trump’s SAVE America Act is dead. After weeks of lies and threats, Senate Republicans now admit they cannot pass it. Yet, that does not mean the threat is behind us.

On Wednesday, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis — a man Trump once called “Meatball Ron” — signed his own state version of the anti-voting legislation into law. Now, starting in 2027, Floridians will have to prove their citizenship status in order to register to vote. Student ID will no longer be an acceptable form of voter identification.

That is, unless my law firm’s lawsuit stops it first. For weeks, I had publicly promised we would sue to block the new law. To time the lawsuit with the governor’s signature, I had the misfortune of watching DeSantis’ awkward bill signing via livestream. 

Trying his best to seem normal, he took voting rights away from his own residents with one stroke of his pen. 

This isn’t the first time DeSantis has made it harder to vote in the Sunshine State. Nor the first time I have sued. In fact, DeSantis and I have been sparring over his war on voting for years.

In May 2020, I sued DeSantis over his failure of a voting plan during the COVID pandemic. By July, we had exacted a settlement to help mitigate the challenges voters would face.

In 2021, DeSantis and GOP lawmakers famously banned anyone except poll workers from distributing food and water to voters waiting in line, cut the period over which absentee ballot requests will be honored and shortened the time drop boxes may be used. I sued him six minutes after he signed the law.

Then, in 2023, Florida targeted voter registration groups with a host of new restrictions. Once again, we sued and won a partial victory that the state of Florida is still appealing.

Over the years, I have sued Florida over its targeting of college students, restricting mail-in voting and, on several occasions, redistricting. The latter of which DeSantis has been particularly brazen.

Despite a ban on partisan gerrymandering in the state constitution, DeSantis has repeatedly insisted on maps that disadvantage Democrats and their candidates. He has also disregarded a provision that is intended to protect minorities in the redistricting process.

DeSantis also created an office dedicated to investigating and prosecuting election crimes and allegations of illegal voting — of which there are virtually none. Yet, on Tuesday, he bragged, “We’ve now brought more prosecutions for voter fraud in Florida since that office was created than probably everywhere else in the country combined at this point.”  

Of course, that is not the full story:

Many of the people prosecuted are formerly incarcerated individuals who were told they were able to vote, after Floridians overwhelmingly passed a ballot measure restoring their rights in 2018. 

The GOP legislature then responded by weakening the measure — now, if you have a criminal record in Florida, your voting rights aren’t restored until you pay all fines and fees. 

After doing so, the Florida government took this opportunity to target its own residents. In 2022, Florida officials loudly announced that they charged 20 people with alleged voter fraud for voting in the 2020 election. While many of the cases were dismissed in the end, it doesn’t take away the suffering these people endured. They didn’t know they were breaking the law — they were just trying to be part of their community. 

As the midterms get closer and DeSantis is eyeing a 2028 presidential run, his policies and rhetoric are growing more and more extreme. While he has always been a proud vote suppressor, he was not always an election denier. In 2023, he dismissed Trump’s fraud claims, saying, “all those theories that were put out did not prove to be true.”

Now, when it comes to the 2020 election, he is starting to sound a lot like his former opponent.

“We saw what happened in the 2020 election, in some of these states where they had the mass mail balloting. You had ballot harvesting, Zuckerbucks,” the governor said on Tuesday. “You had all these different things [that] were happening where no one knew what the hell was going on.”

While those in his audience at the recent bill signing may not know what is going on, DeSantis certainly does. He is a Harvard-trained lawyer. But he is also a political opportunist. Ron DeSantis, with his stupid little lifted boots, is attacking voting for political gain. I’m glad he feels small. He should.  

Now, here's some joy from our pawtners in the opposition movement.