OPINION: This article may contain commentary which reflects the author's opinion.
Democrat California Gov. Gavin Newsom has taken to attacking Florida with a series of ads targeted at getting residents to move from the Sunshine State to his.
“Freedom is under attack in your state,” Newsom said in the ad paid for by his re-election campaign airing in a state where his voters are not.
“Republican leaders – they’re banning books, making it harder to vote, restricting speech in classrooms, even criminalizing women and doctors. I urge all of you to join the fight, or join us in California, where we still believe in freedom,” he said.
“I urge all you living in Florida to join the fight”
This appears to be the ad Newsom is running on Fox News in Florida this weekend.
pic.twitter.com/P0IcpkVU7T— Alex Thompson (@AlexThomp) July 3, 2022
And now Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has hit back when asked about the California governor’s ad campaign.
“Everyone wants to talk about me and Florida. I’m just sitting here, little old me, doing my job,” he said at a press conference.
“I can just tell you this, I was born and raised in this state, and until the last couple of years I rarely if ever saw a California license plate in the state of Florida, you now see a lot of them. I can tell you if you go to California you ain’t seeing very many Florida license plates,” he said.
🔥 😎
— Christina Pushaw 🐊 🇺🇸 (@ChristinaPushaw) July 9, 2022
It is likely that Gov. Newsom is getting desperate as there has been a mass exodus from his state, CNBC reported.
More than 360,000 people left California in 2021, in what some are calling “The California Exodus” — many leaving for states like Texas, Arizona and Washington.
And a rising number of former Californians are migrating out of the country altogether and are instead heading south of the border. Many are seeking a more relaxed and affordable lifestyle in Mexico.
California continuously ranks high as one of the country’s most expensive states to live in. The median asking price for a home in California is about $797,470 — only 25% of the state’s households could afford that in the fourth quarter of 2021.
This month Gov. DeSantis fought back against the courts after a 15-week abortion ban in his state was stopped.
Leon County Judge John Cooper issued a temporary block on the legislation that was to take effect on Friday, July 1, Breitbart News reported.
“Florida passed into its constitution an explicit right of privacy that is not contained in the U.S. Constitution. The Florida Supreme Court has determined in its words ‘Florida’s privacy provision is clearly implicated in a woman’s decision on whether or not to continue her pregnancy,’” the judge said.
It is part of lawsuits nationwide against states that are enacting limits or bans on abortions.
“We did have a ruling in Tallahassee effectively enjoining the bill that we provided. … We knew that that was likely going to be what was decided in that case. We knew that we were gonna have to move forward and continue the legal battle on that,” the governor said on Thursday as he said that the decision was not “unanticipated.”
“It was not of course something, you know, that we were happy to see. And when you talk about — these are unborn babies that have heartbeat, they can feel pain, they can suck their thumb. And to say that the state constitution mandates things like dismemberment abortions — I just don’t think that’s the proper interpretation,” he said as he promised to appeal the decision.
On Friday, the Texas Supreme Court has nixed a lower court decision and allowed the state’s new abortion laws to take effect.
The court allowed the 1925 state ban on abortion to take effect in a ruling delivered late on Friday night, The New York Times reported.
The decision was the latest in a series of legal battles across the country following the Supreme Court ruling on June 24 that overturned Roe v. Wade, a half-century-old ruling that had established a nationwide constitutional right to an abortion.
In Texas, that meant a 1925 law written before Roe, which had banned abortions and punished those who performed them with possible imprisonment, automatically came into effect, said Ken Paxton, the state’s attorney general. Though not enforced after the 1973 Supreme Court ruling on Roe, it had nevertheless remained on the books.
That ban was temporarily blocked by a Harris County judge after abortion clinics sued for a stay, arguing that it had effectively been repealed after the landmark Roe ruling.
Pro-life victory! Thanks to my appeal, SCOTX has slapped down the abortion providers and the district court carrying their water. Our state’s pre-Roe statutes banning abortion in Texas are 100% good law. Litigation continues, but I’ll keep winning for Texas’s unborn babies. pic.twitter.com/xgQuDtEXQu
— Attorney General Ken Paxton (@KenPaxtonTX) July 2, 2022
“Pro-life victory! Thanks to my appeal, SCOTX has slapped down the abortion providers and the district court carrying their water. Our state’s pre-Roe statutes banning abortion in Texas are 100% good law. Litigation continues, but I’ll keep winning for Texas’s unborn babies,” the Texas attorney general said in a tweet on Saturday.
