By DARA KAM
News Service of Florida
TALLAHASSEE – The Florida Supreme Court this week issued explosive decisions that rolled back decades of legal precedents and set in motion a dramatic restriction on abortion while paving the way for an electoral clash over abortion rights in November.
In a 6-1 decision last Monday, justices ruled that a privacy clause in the state Constitution does not protect abortion rights. That overturned precedents dating to 1989 and effectively gave the go-ahead to a six-week abortion limit that the Republican-controlled Legislature and Gov. Ron DeSantis approved last year.
But justices, in a sharply divided decision, also approved the wording of a ballot measure that would enshrine abortion rights in the Florida Constitution, galvanizing Democrats and other supporters who say the issue will be “front and center” in November.
The proposed constitutional amendment says, in part: “No law shall prohibit, penalize, delay, or restrict abortion before viability or when necessary to protect the patient’s health, as determined by the patient’s healthcare provider.”
The ruling on privacy rights will have the most-immediate impact. The case stemmed from a 2022 law that imposed a 15-week limit on abortions, but lawmakers last year also tied the six-week limit to the case. The court’s ruling means the six-week restriction will take effect May 1.
In a 51-page majority opinion, Justice Jamie Grosshans wrote that the Constitution’s privacy clause does not address abortion and that voters did not understand it to include a right to abortion when they passed the clause in 1980.
“Era-appropriate dictionary definitions and contextual clues suggest that abortion does not naturally fit within the rights at issue. Reliable historical sources, like the technical meaning of the terms contained in the provision, the origin of the amendment, and the framing of the public debate, similarly do not support a conclusion that abortion should be read into the provision’s text,” Grosshans wrote in the opinion joined by Chief Justice Carlos Muniz and Justices Charles Canady, John Couriel, Renatha Francis and Meredith Sasso.
But in a dissent, Justice Jorge Labarga wrote that he is “convinced that in 1980, a Florida voter would have understood that the proposed privacy amendment ‘included broad protections for abortion.’” He pointed, in part, to the U.S. Supreme Court issuing the Roe v. Wade abortion-rights decision seven years before the 1980 state constitutional amendment passed.
The abortion-rights proposal will share the November ballot with President Joe Biden’s re-election matchup against his predecessor, former President Donald Trump. While Trump lost nationally in 2020, he defeated Biden by more than 3 percentage points in Florida.
Political insiders had largely written off Florida for Democrats in this year’s elections, as Republicans have built a large voter-registration advantage and hold all statewide elected offices and supermajorities in the Legislature.
But Democrats are seizing on the abortion issue as a potential crack in the GOP’s dominance in the state.
Hours after Monday’s court opinions, Biden’s campaign issued a memo with the subject line “President Biden’s opening in Florida.”
”Make no mistake: Florida is not an easy state to win, but it is a winnable one for President Biden, especially given Trump’s weak, cash-strapped campaign and serious vulnerabilities within his coalition,” the president’s campaign manager, Julia Chavez Rodriguez, wrote.
Abortion rights “will be front and center this election cycle,” she added.
SEEING GREEN
The court last week also set “potlandia” buzzing by giving the green light to a ballot proposal that would authorize recreational marijuana for people ages 21 and older, an effort that sparked DeSantis’ ire.
Attorney General Ashley Moody’s office had urged the court to reject the measure, arguing it would be misleading to voters and was not limited to a single subject as required by Florida law.
But the 5-2 decision, authored by Grosshans, found that the proposal met requirements under the court’s limited review.
“Our role is narrow — we assess only whether the amendment conforms to the constitutionally mandated single-subject requirement, whether the ballot summary meets the statutory standard for clarity, and whether the amendment is facially invalid under the federal Constitution. In light of those limited considerations, we approve the proposed amendment for placement on the ballot,” Grosshans wrote.
The recreational-marijuana measure comes after voters in 2016 approved a constitutional amendment broadly authorizing medical marijuana. Florida now has more than 600 medical-marijuana dispensaries scattered throughout the state.
Trulieve, the state’s largest medical-marijuana company, has spent more than $40 million on the effort to get the weed initiative before voters.
DeSantis criticized the pot proposal on Thursday, pointing in part to the number of dispensaries already in existence.
“Every part of Florida, not just South Florida, I see marijuana stores. … but do we really need to do more? With that? Do we want to have more marijuana in our communities? I don’t think it’ll work out well, but it is a very, very broad amendment,” DeSantis said.
STORY OF THE WEEK: The Florida Supreme Court upheld a law that will prevent abortions after six weeks of pregnancy, while also advancing a ballot proposal that would enshrine the right to abortion in the state Constitution.
QUOTE OF THE WEEK: “But the problem with some of these constitutional amendments is, it’s all rainbows and unicorns because it’s drafted by proponents. Which, in the case of both abortion and marijuana, it looks innocuous, but then you start asking yourself, well, can you smoke on a child’s playground, can you smoke in an elevator? Things that we’ve restricted when cigarettes are concerned.” — House Speaker Paul Renner, R-Palm Coast.
