State accuses amendment’s sponsors of ‘unreasonable delay’ and ‘gamesmanship.’
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Both sides fighting over Florida’s abortion amendment have responded in a Florida Supreme Court case that will determine whether the ballot measure’s new financial statement will go on the November ballot.
The state filed a response to Floridians Protecting Freedom’s “petition for quo warranto” this week, stating the pro-abortion rights group is “unhappy” with the latest fiscal impact statement for Amendment 4, and that is why they “contend the process is defective.”
Amendment 4, which needs at least 60% of the vote to pass, would allow abortions up to fetal viability, usually about 24 weeks of pregnancy.
While the new statement says the total impact of the amendment is also “indeterminate,” it also says more abortions “may negatively affect the growth of state and local revenues over time,” and potential litigation “will result in additional costs to the state government and state courts that will negatively impact the state budget.”
The fiscal impact statement, which will be on ballots with the amendment summary, could sway voters to reject the amendment, meaning the Heartbeat Protection Act – the current ban on abortion after six weeks – would stay the law of the land.
The parties representing the state include Senate President Kathleen Passidomo, House Speaker Paul Renner, the Florida Impact Estimating Conference (FIEC) and its members: Amy Baker, Azhar Khan, State Board of Administration head Chris Spencer and Rachel Greszler, an anti-abortion researcher.
Lawyers for the state say Floridians Protecting Freedom, which is behind the proposed amendment, never argued that only the Supreme Court was allowed to order a new fiscal impact statement during the conference’s three meetings in June and July, and instead delayed their opposition until after a second, revised statement was made final.
“The petition should be denied at the gate because of the sponsor’s ‘unreasonable delay’ and gamesmanship in seeking relief only after lobbying the FIEC for the revisions it wanted,” a filing states.
Floridians Protecting Freedom shot back it could only file the petition for quo warranto after the conference made its final call on the revised statement, saying it “could not have challenged (the new statement) until it officially acted without authority.”
The Florida Supreme Court ordered the case to be expedited in late July, days after Floridians Protecting Freedom filed its petition.
The panel’s original statement finalized last year deemed the amendment’s fiscal impact to be “indeterminate.” But once the six-week abortion ban was upheld, abortion-rights proponents argued and won in trial court that tighter abortion restrictions would cost the state more money and therefore the measure needed a revised statement.
In an unprecedented move, Renner and Passidomo, both Republicans, decided to reconvene the financial impact panel while the case was under appeal, and the state brought in outsiders to represent its interests — to defeat Amendment 4.
Gov. Ron DeSantis has the abortion measure “very, very extreme,” and said the Florida Supreme Court “dropped the ball” allowing the measure on the ballot.
The Executive Office of the Governor paid Michael New, an assistant professor of social research at the Busch School of Business at The Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., $300 an hour, and the Florida House of Representatives paid Greszler, a senior research fellow with the Roe Institute at the conservative Heritage Foundation, also based in Washington, $75 an hour to represent the House, according to the Florida House’s Office of Open Government and House spokesperson Jenna Box Sarkissian.
Floridians Protecting Freedom has called the latest fiscal impact statement “politically charged.”
“The current statement is a distorted narrative fueled by political agendas and a corrupted process,” said the ACLU of Florida’s Michelle Marra Morton in a statement. “It is rife with anti-abortion talking points and far-fetched scenarios designed to scare voters into maintaining the status quo of a near-total ban on abortion.”
Ana Goñi-Lessan, state watchdog reporter for the USA TODAY Network – Florida, can be reached at agonilessan@gannett.com.
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Publish date : 2024-08-09 06:57:00
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