Let us, for just a moment, pretend that Florida state Sen. Blaise Ingoglia is a serious man. On Tuesday, the Republican lawmaker filed a bill that would, if signed into law, ban the Florida Democratic Party. That is, at least, the overall effect of his bill, which targets any party whose platform had “previously advocated for, or been in support of, slavery or involuntary servitude.”
The combative, hyperpartisan, single-minded focus on trolling — or “owning the libs” — that Ingoglia’s bill represents has become the Republican Party’s guiding ethos, if one can call it such a thing. This post-policy method of politicking is focused more on narrative than outcome. Bills are drafted not to become law but to get a rise out of the enemy and applause from the base at how thoroughly the opposition has been put into their place. It is a contemptible way of going about life, one that makes me feel a faint sadness for the GOP elected officials who are so damned, condemned to debase themselves in favor of spouting incendiary nonsense.
This is not a bill crafted by an idiot.
Every once in a while, though, one of their attempts at salience breaks through, and I find myself almost impressed. Such is the case with the framing of the bill that Ingoglia puts forward, called SB 1248. This is not a bill crafted by an idiot. The text does not mention the Democratic Party directly. That would be likely found unconstitutional as a bill of attainder, a technical term for a law that targets a specific person or group for punishment. A federal court in 1973 tossed out an Arizona state law that blocked the Communist Party from organizing, as well as a related federal statute, on those grounds.
And yet it is clearly intended to target the Democratic Party by singling out advocacy of slavery in its platform. The 1848 party platform, for example, stated “that all efforts of the Abolitionists or others made to induce Congress to interfere with questions of slavery, or to take incipient steps in relation thereto, are calculated to lead to the most alarming and dangerous consequences.” And as the Tallahassee Democrat noted, of Florida’s 13 political parties, “11 of the parties (other than the GOP and Democrats) organized after 1985.”
Nor does Ingoglia’s bill bar Florida Democrats from voting — that would be a clear violation of their civil liberties. It would simply update their voting registration to reflect “No Party Affiliation.” They would also be able to form a new party, though the “name of the organization must be substantially different from the name of any other party previously registered” with the state.
Someone on Ingoglia’s staff spent no small amount of time thinking through the structure and crafting of this bill. Whoever is behind it should get marks for creativity, even if applied to such a pointless undertaking. But if the framing is fascinating for its calculation, his explanation for its purpose drags it back into the realm of the most boring and frequent attempts to own the left.
“For years now, leftist activists have been trying to ‘cancel’ people and companies for things they have said or done in the past,” Ingoglia said in a statement. “This includes the removal of statues and memorials, and the renaming of buildings. Using this standard, it would be hypocritical not to cancel the Democrat Party itself for the same reason.”
Yawn.
I can’t stress enough the poor critical reasoning on display anytime some fool gets on the internet and tries to win an argument by stressing that Democrats used to be the party of slavery. It’s true: The Democratic-Republican Party, as it was originally known, was a party of the agrarian elite under Thomas Jefferson and salt-of-the-earth rugged individualism under Andrew Jackson. The modern Republican Party was in contrast founded as an anti-slavery party in the 1850s. Southern Democrats clung to segregation even as the party overall became the party of the New Deal.
This is an unserious party filled with unserious people.
But this is not the gotcha that these lazy yahoos believe it to be. They never reckon with the post-Civil Rights Act realignment of the parties in their telling, as Dixiecrats fled to the welcoming arms of the GOP. They never account for the Southern strategy of the Republican Party in those years to specifically target racial resentment as a way to win votes in the South.
Ignolia’s bill is merely a way to use those half-formed criticisms and incomplete histories to try to embarrass Democrats. But he gives up the game by defending his bill’s necessity in terms of the movement to remove Confederate statutes and rename buildings named for slaveholders. The only way it would be “hypocritical” for him to not demand the same “canceling” of the Democratic Party would be if he himself agreed that those statutes needed to be torn down and buildings renamed.
Florida Democrats, unsurprisingly, were not baited into defending their party’s history or embarrassed into no longer being in favor of removing monuments to white supremacy from the public square. “Under Ron DeSantis, Senator Ingoglia is using his office to push bills that are nothing more than publicity stunts instead of focusing on the issues that matter most to Floridians, such as reforming property insurance, addressing housing affordability, and combating climate change,” the party said in a statement.
And this is why the bill that Ignolia has put forward is so thoroughly disappointing. All its cleverness, and for what? A brief moment of glory for the former state GOP chair that will never pass into law, despite a supermajority in the Legislature. This is an unserious party filled with unserious people. Even when putting their minds to work to shape something that is on its face exceedingly crafty, what they produce in the end is a hollow work, easily collapsed, and entirely forgettable to history.