Voters have the power to oust four far-right FL Supreme Court justices on Nov. 8. Will they use it?

[In It to Win It]

Florida Bulldog

The midterm elections could transform the Florida Supreme Court, but probably won’t.

Next month voters can choose to evict up to five of the court’s seven justices. In theory, Floridians could respond to the court’s regressive designs by firing most of the designers.

They could do what the Sun Sentinel urged in an editorial last week: Remove Justices Charles Canady, Ricky Polston, Jamie Grosshans and John Couriel, all key players in the court’s “harsh new majority.” The newspaper recommends keeping moderate Justice Jorge Labarga, “whose principled but lonely dissents in high-profile cases have exposed the majority’s radical activism.”

Yet it will be astonishing if any of the four conservatives lose at the polls.In the 44 years that Florida voters have been empowered to retain or reject appellate judges, they’ve never once dropped a Supreme Court justice.

This campaign season, editorials in some major newspapers call for rejecting the four arch-conservative justices, arguing they’ve broken trust with the public. Traditional media aren’t as far-reaching and influential as they used to be, however.

Proven vote-getting techniques like splashy advertising productions, social media saturation and a vigorous ground game seem to be reserved for the many higher-profile campaigns in the run-up to Nov. 8. It’s hard to compete for airtime with Gov. Ron DeSantis versus Charlie Crist or Rep. Val Demings versus Sen. Marco Rubio.

PARIENTE’S SPOT-ON PREDICTION

The justices told the Orlando Sentinel editorial board that the smear campaign was part of then-Gov. Rick Scott’s plot to reshape the court in his own partisan image.

“I think it’s a smokescreen for the real issue, which is a political party wanting to control all three branches of government,” Pariente told the board.

The counterattack worked. The justices won retention with 67-68 percent of the vote.

But their mandatory retirement at the end of 2018 let incoming Gov. DeSantis finish the job of transforming the court from majority-liberal to supermajority-conservative.

Today, as Pariente foretold, Republicans dominate all three branches of Florida government.

Karl said the high court’s post-midterm agenda is obvious.

“I fully anticipate that the Florida Supreme Court will uphold the 15-week abortion ban,” he said, “and reverse the 1989 case [the In re: TW decision] that found our Florida constitutional right to privacy guarantees the right of a woman to make her own health care decisions.”