Florida governor sends message statewide with suspension of Hillsborough State Attorney

Gov. Ron DeSantis, promising the “liberal media meltdown of the year” announced Thursday he’s suspending one of Florida’s elected state attorneys for pledging not to enforce the state’s new 15-week abortion ban.

While the suspension targeted Hillsborough’s state attorney, political experts suspect it was intended to send a message statewide.

That message DeSantis made loud and clear in his news conference Thursday morning: You don’t get to pick and choose which laws to enforce.

Some of the governor’s critics question whether DeSantis overstepped his authority in this case.

Andrew Warren, state attorney of Florida’s 13th Judicial Circuit signed two pledges in June vowing not to use his office’s resources to enforce abortion laws or laws criminalizing medical professionals who provide gender-affirming care for trans young people.

That’s all DeSantis needed to indefinitely suspend Warren Thursday morning.

“We are not going to allow this pathogen that’s been around the country of ignoring the law, we are not going to let that get a foothold here in the state of Florida. We are gonna make sure that our laws are enforced and that no individual prosecutor puts themselves above the law,” said DeSantis.

Nick Seabrook, chair of the University of North Florida’s Poly Sci Department, said for a governor to outright suspend a state attorney in a case like this is unusual.

“Gov. DeSantis has been more aggressive in using this power against local officials who — in his view — are not properly enforcing the laws of the State of Florida,” said Seabrook.

Democratic State Representative and former Planned Parenthood employee Anna Eskamani, D-Orlando, worries about what kind of message the suspension will send to locally-elected officials throughout the state.

“This has a chilling effect on prosecutorial discretion, no matter the degree of it, and that should be alarming to every local Floridian,” said Eskamani.

And there is a question regarding whether DeSantis acted preemptively since the state attorney in question hadn’t had an opportunity to act on his pledge.

“And it puts a huge question mark on the power of prosecutorial discretion, which has been a well-established practice in the legal field for generations,” said Eskamani.

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen something like this in recent years.

In 2017, the then-state attorney of Florida’s 9th Judicial Circuit, Aramis Ayala, vowed she would not seek the death penalty in any case.

Former Gov. Rick Scott responded by reassigning her potential death penalty cases and slashing her budget.

She’s now running for attorney general.

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