By JIM TURNER
News Service of Florida
TALLAHASSEE – Recovery efforts from Hurricane Helene continued this week along the Florida Gulf Coast and throughout the Big Bend, where President Joe Biden made a brief tour of impacted areas.
Biden surveyed damages in North Carolina a day before visiting Florida’s hard-hit Taylor County on Thursday to view damages and talk with victims. U.S. Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla., and local officials joined Biden, who then went to Georgia, which also sustained heavy damage in the storm.
“During my meeting with President Biden, I stressed that the federal government’s response to hurricanes over the last two years has left too many Floridians, especially our farmers, hurting and with unmet needs — and this must be fixed now,” Scott said in a press release after meeting with the president.
As Biden was touring other parts of the state, Gov. Ron DeSantis held a separate event in Anna Maria Island in Manatee County, which he said was “planned” prior to the president’s visit.
White House Press Secretary Karine Jean Pierre, while enroute to Tallahassee on Air Force One, told reporters that the Biden administration has been “in touch with (DeSantis’) team.”
“We understand that he has other areas to survey today,” Jean Pierre said.
During his Manatee County appearance, DeSantis announced that he authorized some election flexibility for 10 counties affected by Helene.
Meanwhile, as voting by mail is underway, legal wrangling continues around a pair of proposed constitutional amendments on the Nov. 5 ballot.
POWER TO THE PEOPLE
The week kicked off with Leon County Judge Jonathan Sjostrom refusing to issue a temporary injunction to block the state Agency for Health Administration from disseminating what critics call “misinformation” over Amendment 4, which would enshrine abortion rights in the Florida Constitution.
“In an election campaign under these circumstances, the political power reserved to the people in (part) of the Florida Constitution means that it is not for the courts to intervene in this referendum campaign to decide what the people will be permitted to consider,” Sjostrom wrote.
The Floridians Protecting Freedom committee, which is sponsoring the proposal, filed a lawsuit Sept. 12 and sought the temporary injunction after the Agency for Health Care Administration began using a website and ads to disseminate information about the proposed amendment.
“Through this website, AHCA disparages Amendment 4 and Floridians Protecting Freedom as its sponsor, alleging fearmongering and lying,” the motion for a temporary injunction said.
Attorneys for the state countered that the Constitution does not give the committee a “right to muzzle AHCA’s public statements about an issue of immense public concern.”
With DeSantis helping lead efforts to defeat the amendment, Floridians Protecting Freedom contends the agency violated state law by using public resources to spread inaccurate information about the proposal.
Issues in the lawsuit included statements on the website such as, “Current Florida Law Protects Women, Amendment 4 Threatens Women’s Safety.”
Sjostrom wrote that the committee had not established legal standing to challenge the disputed information.
LIGHTING UP
Trulieve, Inc., Florida’s largest medical-marijuana company, filed a defamation lawsuit Wednesday accusing the state Republican Party of launching an “intentionally deceptive campaign” with mailers and TV ads to mislead voters over Amendment 3, which would allow recreational use of marijuana.
“The GOP knew that the claims in the deceptive mailer and ad were false, intentionally deceptive, and duplicitous but published them anyway in order to trick Florida voters into voting against a ballot initiative that would legalize the recreational use of cannabis in Florida,” the lawsuit said.
Republican Party of Florida Chairman Evan Power fired back that Trulieve was trying to “silence” the opposition.
“It is so funny that a company that puts almost $100 million into a political campaign is so sensitive about honest TV ads,” Power said in a text message. “The proponents of Amendment 3 are trying to take down these ads that they know are truthful ad are working.”
The lawsuit filed by Trulieve, which has spent nearly $93 million on the recreational-marijuana initiative, also accused the owners of two Fort Myers-based television stations of running a “demonstrably false” ad.
The TV ad features a gardener who sees a news broadcast saying that the amendment could “legalize recreational marijuana.” The gardener rushes to start planting but is confronted by a “Big Weed” character that says, “Actually, we wrote the amendment, so we’re the only ones that can grow it.”
Republican leaders in Florida largely have come out in opposition to the marijuana proposal.
DeSantis’ chief of staff, James Uthmeier, is heading two political committees aimed at defeating Amendment 3 and Amendment 4.
ACCREDITATION SCORE
Also Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Jacqueline Becerra rejected a challenge by Florida to the constitutionality of the accreditation system for colleges and universities.
The system plays a critical role in higher education because schools must be accredited for students to receive federal financial aid. Florida alleged, in part, that the federal government delegates too much authority to private accrediting agencies to carry out the system.
But Becerra issued a 45-page decision that granted the Biden Administration’s motion to dismiss the case. She wrote that the state’s “sweeping criticism of the legislative scheme by which the federal government provides students with financial aid for their postsecondary education collapses distinct functions of the process, disregards undisputed facts, and then uses legal standards that are not controlling to urge the court to deny the (federal government’s) motion.”
Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody’s office filed the lawsuit last year after clashes between state officials and the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges, the longtime accrediting agency for colleges and universities in Florida.
Attorneys for the state argued that “Congress has ceded unchecked power to private accrediting agencies to dictate education standards to colleges and universities, and it has forbidden the U.S. Department of Education from meaningfully reviewing, approving or rejecting those standards.”
STORY OF THE WEEK: Relief efforts continued to ramp up after deadly Hurricane Helene caused widespread flooding along Florida’s Gulf Coast before making landfall Sept. 26 in Taylor County.
QUOTE OF THE WEEK: “Right now, I’m really not contemplating a special session. We’ve got a lot of big issues that are floating around, and now we can add Hurricane Helene, and in not just the ag space but all over.” — Senate President-designate Ben Albritton, a Wauchula Republican and citrus grower.