Americans for Prosperity has launched an initiative directed at informing Floridians about the threat of judicial activism in the state. They’re aiming their campaign specifically at telling Floridians about their right to vote on Florida Supreme Court justices via a process called merit retention. Floridians don’t get to elect their judges, but they do get the opportunity to vote on whether to retain justices once every six years.
AFP’s newest ad highlights the Florida Supreme Court’s bizarre decision to remove an amendment from the state ballot that would have allowed citizens to vote on whether they wanted Obamacare implemented in the state, particularly the individual mandate. The Court said that they’d have to place the full text of the amendment on the ballot, because the summary was “misleading” – and they said they couldn’t allow that to happen. Chief Justice Canady called out the Court for its judicial activism:
The courts should act with restraint when we are asked to interpose judicial power to bar the people from voting on a proposal submitted to them by their elected representatives. Here, we could and should demonstrate appropriate restraint by placing on the ballot the “actual text of the amendment itself and not the proposed ballot summary.”
AFP’s campaign against judicial activism is vital at this point in time. State and federal judges have been taking the law into their own hands for decades, deliberately misreading law to reach their preferred political conclusions. AFP is standing up against that, and informing the public in Florida of their right to stand up, too.