Ron DeSantis Says He'll Fine Anyone Who Complies With Federal Vaccine Mandates

Republican Florida governor Ron DeSantis plans to issue fines of $5,000 to any public entity in Florida - whether it is schools, counties, or government offices - who comply with the federal vaccine mandate. This is a brazen violation of federal law, and that law actually takes precedence over anything DeSantis can do in Florida, and he knows that - he's just counting on his followers to not understand that he's intentionally trying to lose. Farron Cousins explains what's happening.

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*This transcript was auto-generated. Please excuse any typos.

Republican Florida, governor Ron DeSantis announced this week that any city, any county, any government office here in the state of Florida, that actually complies with the executive order coming from the Biden administration about vaccine mandates, anybody who complies is going to be charged a fine of $5,000 per offense. So if you have 10 employees that are not vaccinated, and you say you have to go get vaccinated for these government offices where the mandate is, you know, there's no opt-out for testing. Uh, you would get charged $50,000, 5,000 per employee. Here's. What's so great about this order from Ron DeSantis, uh, it's 100% unconstitutional. See, I'm sure DeSantis a career politician is familiar with something called the United States constitution, but I'm sure he's not very familiar with what's actually in it. He just knows it exists. But inside the constitution written in those words is something called the supremacy clause.

And the supremacy clause basically says anything. Uh, any law coming from the federal government supersedes state law, the U S constitution and the federal government both supersede state law. So what he is doing proposing these fines saying, we're going to charge you money. If you comply with the Biden administration's order that's unconstitutional. And when it gets challenged in court, which it will get challenged in court, he has pretty much a 0% chance of winning because of that supremacy clause. It doesn't matter that his little state law, where he gave himself the authority to put the fines in place, doesn't matter that that came along first. Okay. That's a non-issue the supremacy clause is very clear about what powers the federal government has and what powers the state governments have. So there is nothing Ron DeSantis can actually do to punish these individuals, these government offices, these cities, these counties, whoever it is when they comply with this executive order.

The problem is how many of them know that, right? How many of these offices, how many of the people running these offices understand that they have to comply with the federal law and they do not have to listen to what Ron DeSantis is saying. See, therein lies the problem, because if they're not aware, which let's be honest, there's a good chance. They're not, if they're not aware of that, especially with the governor, breathing down their necks saying, if you do this, you're going to pay me $5,000 per person. They're more likely to comply with DeSantis than Biden. And then of course, that's going to get them in a whole heap of trouble with the federal government. But here's the thing about DeSantis. Whether or not he's scared. These people into submission is one thing. The other thing is that he knows there's no way he doesn't know what he's doing is illegal unconstitutional.

And he knows he's going to lose when this eventually goes to court. If he attempts to find anyone, this thing's going to court and he knows he's going to lose, but as always, that's the plan. See he wants to lose. He wants to lose. So he can go back to his idiotic. Brain-dead constituents that still follow him and say, look, what big government did to me? Look what the swamp did to me. I'm out here trying to protect you. And they keep swatting me down. Well, I'll never stop fighting for you. They can do whatever they want. They can have their swamp creatures try to S uh, smack us down, but it's not going to happen. And that's exactly what DeSantis is going to do. He designed this thing to fail so that he can sell it even harder to his base. That's the point of all of this, because he knows it's not going to stand up in court, but his base doesn't understand how the constitution actually works. So they will eat up whatever he says.