From Chief Judge Mark Walker's opinion today in Floridians Protecting Freedom, Inc. v. Ladapo:
Floridians will vote on six proposed amendments to their state constitution this election cycle, including Amendment 4, titled "Amendment to Limit Government Interference with Abortion." Voting has already begun.
The State of Florida opposes Amendment 4 and has launched a taxpayer-funded campaign against it. Floridians Protecting Freedom, Inc., the Plaintiff in this case, has launched its own campaign in favor of Amendment 4.
Plaintiff does not challenge the State's right to spend millions of taxpayer dollars opposing Amendment 4. The rub, says Plaintiff, is that the State has crossed the line from advocating against Amendment 4 to censoring speech by demanding television stations remove Plaintiff's political advertisements supporting Amendment 4 or face criminal prosecution.
Plaintiff's argument is correct. While Defendant Ladapo refuses to even agree with this simple fact, Plaintiff's political advertisement is political speech—speech at the core of the First Amendment. And just this year, the United States Supreme Court reaffirmed the bedrock principle that the government cannot do indirectly what it cannot do directly by threatening third parties with legal sanctions to censor speech it disfavors. The government cannot excuse its indirect censorship of political speech simply by declaring the disfavored speech is "false." "The very purpose of the First Amendment is to foreclose public authority from assuming a guardianship of the public mind through regulating the press, speech, and religion." "In this field every person must be his own watchman for truth, because the forefathers did not trust any government to separate the true from the false for us." To keep it simple for the State of Florida: it's the First Amendment, stupid….
