Should Florida Supreme Court Justices Pariente, Quince, and Lewis Get the Boot?

Judicial Retention Sample Ballot

By Spartacus Thrace

An issue facing Florida’s voters in the November 2012 election is:  Should Barbara J. Pariente, Peggy A. Quince, and R. Fred Lewis each be allowed to keep their jobs as justices on the Florida Supreme Court?

Each is up for a merit retention vote this year, and each has generated considerable controversy with decisions that opponents describe as anti-democratic judicial activism in denigration of constitutional rule of law in Florida.  In particular, each has been accused of overstepping their authority in making law, as opposed to interpreting existing law, with far-reaching consequences for the people of the state.

Separation of Powers

As with all other states, Florida has organized its government upon the democratic premise that when a single person or group has too much power, that person or group can become dangerous to the citizens.  To prevent such concentration of power, Florida has embraced the trias politica principle espoused by John Locke and Baron de Montesquieu, which separates the government into distinct executive, legislative, and judicial divisions.  The Florida constitution also gives each branch certain defined powers not shared with the other branches, a concept knows as “separation of powers.”

Florida’s scheme of separation of powers is set forth in Article II of the state constitution which provides:

The powers of the state government shall be divided into legislative, executive and judicial branches. No person belonging to one branch shall exercise any powers appertaining to either of the other branches unless expressly provided herein.¹

Why Barack Obama Won in 2008 and What it Means for the Republicans in 2012

 

Ribart's cross-sectional plan for L'elephant triomphal, grand kiosque a la gloire du roi (Photo Credit: Wikimedia Commons)

 

By Spartacus Thrace

November 3, 2010, marked the first day of the 2012 Presidential Campaign: Barack Obama and the Left are well advanced in their preparations for what may be the American political showdown of the century.  Assuming that Barack Obama will be the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee in 2012, conservatives have a lot to do to get ready.

As the results of the 2010 midterms show, a lot has changed since 2008.  Whereas Obama and the Democrats reigned supreme in 2008, they have now lost control of the House of Representatives to a resurgent Republican Party and are threatened with a full-scale rout in 2012.  While it might be easy for the Republican Establishment to become complacent about the prospects, conservatives should prepare for the showdown by fully understanding why the Republicans were beaten in 2008, and how that defeat is relevant to preparations for 2012.

Barack Obama won and John McCain lost primarily due to the following:

Obama Rips Off the Tea Party Brand With “Orlando Tea Party”

(Source: http://www.domaintools.com/historic-thumbnails/orlandoteaparty.org)

By Le Corbeaunoir

The ballot qualified “TEA Party” is not the only non-Tea Party Movement group coveting the term “tea party” and attempting to deny or degrade its use by the Tea Party Movement:  It appears that Barack Obama and his presidential campaign organization, Organizing for America (OFA), are attempting to co-opt the Tea Party “brand” with the publication of a website called “Orlando Tea Party.”

SHAM: Who the Hell is TEA Party Candidate Victoria Torres and Why is She Running in My District?

By Angry Wasp

I live in Florida House District 51 in Seminole, Florida, which is part of Pinellas County.  I am a veteran, work a regular job, own the house I and my family live in, pay my taxes, keep my lawn mowed and trimmed, am friendly with my neighbors, and I vote in every election.

Rep. Janet Long (D-Seminole)

The other day, when I was at the computer checking on who was going to be on the ballot in November, I saw that someone named Victoria Torres was running for the House District 51 seat as a TEA Party candidate, along with the Democrat incumbent Janet Long and Republican challenger Larry Ahern.

Larry Ahern, Republican Candidate for Florida House District 51

Victoria Torres?  I never heard of her, but I thought, well, if she’s part of the tea party crowd she’s probably as fed up as I am about the way our government is going.  I decided to check her out, even though I had pretty much already decided to vote for Larry after meeting him at a local candidates’ night in my neighborhood.

I Googled “Victoria Torres” and, boy, did I get a shock.

There were all kinds of articles linking her to a couple of political scam artists in Orlando, but no sign of a campaign website.  Thinking that maybe she had just gotten some bad press lately but might otherwise be OK, I continued to search for her website and any information I could find out about her.  It seemed that the longer I looked the less I found, and things just weren’t making sense.  This made me even more curious about who this lady was, and why she was running in my district.

The Smell In the Room: Controversy Over Florida’s New Ballot-Qualified TEA Party

By Le Corbeaunoir

TEA Party Logo

The creation of the TEA Party as a minor political party in Florida in August 2009, its subsequent qualification of federal and state candidates to be on the November 2010 ballot under the TEA Party name, and other activities of people closely connected to that party have sparked a major political row with implications extending to the 2012 presidential election and beyond. At the heart of the controversy is a fight to the finish between members of the new political party and grassroots Tea Party movement organizers over proprietary ownership and control of the name “Tea Party” and other aspects of the Tea Party “brand” in Florida. The controversy is about power, control, and money, and who gets to define what “Tea Party” means in Florida.

FORMATION OF THE BALLOT-QUALIFIED TEA PARTY

The ballot-qualified “TEA Party” and the “Tea Party movement” are not the same thing. They do not share organizations, leaders, or members, and they are ideologically opposed. The movement is decentralized with power diffused among its many factions. The party is centralized, with power concentrated in the hands of a few. The movement has grown spontaneously across the state over the past year-and-a-half or so, while the party was created by a filing with the Florida Secretary of State in August 2009.

Tea and Sympathy

COMMENTARY

By Korso

The Era of Obama brought with it a number of unintended consequences–and not just for that part of the electorate who bought into the whole hope and change thing, only to discover that they’d been baited and switched.  It also, at long last, blew the cover off the mainstream media-as-watchdogs scam, and laid bare the full-left tilt of news organizations desperate to engineer an election rather than cover it.  Short of wearing “I Grok Barack” t-shirts and throwing the man a ticker tape victory parade, our reporter brethren couldn’t have been more biased.  And people noticed.

Which carries us to the here and now, and my how things have changed.  The Tea Party has grown into a full-blown resistance movement–nay, a Fifth Column in the administration’s view–and so naturally, true to their modus operandi, the media are doing their damnedest to tar and feather them with the broadest brush possible:  racism.  That’s right, folks–if you’re a bit worried about the country running up a trillion and an half dollar deficit in a single year, if you think that a socialized health care system might lead to poor service and runaway costs (as it has everywhere else it’s been tried), if you have compunctions about government taking over huge swaths of the private sector, you can’t possibly have arrived at these conclusions out of mere principle.

The Last Straw — It’s Time for Crist to Quit the Senate Race

COMMENTARY

By Spartacus Thrace

(JANUARY 11, 2010 UPDATE) — It wasn’t even close.  Marco Rubio has today defeated Charlie Crist 106-54 in a straw poll held in Pinellas County, home of Charlie Crist. The poll, conducted by the Pinellas County Republican Executive Committee among 177 of its members in attendance, was a test of Crist’s strength among the Republican base and among long-time Crist stalwarts. Crist’s overwhelming loss to Rubio is being delared by the media as a major symbolic blow to Crist’s efforts to secure the Republican nomination for Senate on August 24th. Conservatives are hailing the result as proof that Crist is seen as a RINO (Republican In Name Only) even in his home county and that Crist is an obstacle to reforming government in accordance with conservative principles. A video provided by the PCREC shows the reaction of the crowd as the results were read by PCREC Chairman JJ Beyrouti (hat-tip to PCREC):

Charlie Crist

(January 9, 2010) — On Monday, January 11, 2010, Governor Charlie Crist will be facing a straw poll among Republicans in his home county at the meeting of the Pinellas County Republican Executive Committee (PCREC).  If Crist fails to achieve anything less than an overwhelming victory against his main challenger Marco Rubio it will be a failure for Crist.  If Crist is resoundingly rejected by those very Republicans who nurtured his brilliant political career since its inception, it will could signal a political Waterloo on Florida’s August 24 Primary Day for a man who has set his sights as far as the White House.

Crist knows all of this, and his obvious concern about the straw poll was shown when he and (now-former) Chairman of the Republican Party of Florida Jim Greer crashed the PCREC meeting in October.  Ominously, the crowd of about 200 Republicans attending that meeting was polite towards Crist and his friend, but not enthusiastic.

Local straw polls do not necessarily correlate to what the rest of the voters in that political party are thinking, nor do they indicate what voters outside that party will do on Election Day, but they are significant in other ways.  If, for instance, one candidate consistently loses straw polls held by local executive committees across the state while another candidate for the same office consistently wins them, it is a fair indicator that the losing candidate will do poorly in a closed primary because the people who vote in these straw polls tend to be the most influential people in that party.  That is the situation that Crist is in today, having lost handily to Rubio in straw polls all over the state, and it’s now time for Crist to rethink his Senate candidacy.

Rise of the Florida Tea Party Challenges Republicans

By Le Corbeaunoir

Florida Tea Party

The Florida Tea Party has registered with the Florida Secretary of State’s Division of Elections and is now an officially-recognized political party in the State of Florida.

The party, which registered in August, is chaired by Frederic B. O’Neal, a self-described “Reagan Democrat” who recently changed his party registration from Democrat to Tea Party in order to become the chair.

O’Neal is a Windermere, Florida attorney who presently represents the Sons of Confederate Veterans, a group wanting a “Confederate Heritage” specialty license plate that features the Confederate flag. That proposal died in legislative committee — apparently because the lawmakers thought it was too politically incorrect to deal with — and O’Neal has filed a lawsuit on behalf of the Veterans against members of the legislative committee and against the Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles (DHSMV). A federal judge has dismissed the portion of the suit against the legislators on the basis of legislative immunity but left the portion against the DHSMV standing. O’Neal is more widely known for his representation of high-profile tax protesters such as political consultant and radio talk show host Doug Guetzloe.

Sen. Paula Dockery

The “TEA” in Tea “Party” is an acronym for “Taxed Enough Already,” although the new party has an agenda that is broader than mere tax reform and at election time will be targeting those state senators who supported SunRail and supporting politicians who opposed it such as Paula Dockery in her campaign for the Republican nomination for governor. There has also been some media speculation that Marco Rubio might jump to the Tea Party if he fails to win the Republican Party nomination for U.S. Senate, but Republican insiders think that unlikely.  That may become more likely, however, if the Tea Party movement grows in strength to a point where it can have a statistical impact on election results.