Judge Smacks Down Ron DeSantis For Trying To Ban Vaccine Passports For Cruise Industry

Florida governor Ron DeSantis suffered a major legal blow this week when a judge ruled that his decision to ban vaccine passports for the cruise industry isn't legal. The judge ruled that the ban on passports - signed by DeSantis in May of this year - likely violated the First Amendment in addition to running contrary to the public's best interest. This is Republicans watching their own actions over the last few decades come back to bite them, as Ring of Fire's Farron Cousins explains.

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*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.

Florida governor Ron DeSantis suffered a major legal setback on Sunday when a judge in the state of Florida ruled that Norwegian cruise lines could, in fact, enforce vaccine passports, a direct blow to Ron DeSantis' executive order that he signed saying, you can't have vaccine passports here in the state of Florida. Now this showdown between DeSantis and the cruise industry has been going on for many months now, the cruise ships want to get back in action. They want to go continue polluting our oceans and become giant incubators for even newer diseases. But they want to make sure that everybody that gets onboard the cruise ship has the COVID-19 vaccines. Oh, and by the way, and I had reported on this a couple of months ago when they actually moved the cruise ships back down here to Florida with just the crew, they had massive COVID outbreaks. So yeah, there's really no safe way to do this. But hell, at least the cruise ships wanted to do what they could to get back in action by having these vaccine passports.

DeSantis was furious about this, signed the executive order saying, no, you cannot do this. And then the judge this week said, yeah, um, we're pretty sure that's unconstitutional. It's likely a violation of the first amendment and of course it goes against all the public health guidelines that we're seeing throughout the country right now, especially as Florida explodes with new COVID cases. Here's the thing about this ruling. It's likely the judge says a violation of the first amendment of the cruise line. Now, why is that important? Well, let's see, if you go back, go back a couple of years, there was this baker, right, and this baker didn't want to make a wedding cake for a same-sex couple arguing that it violated his religious beliefs, which was a first amendment argument. Takes the case all the way to the Supreme Court, Republicans across the country rallied around this case and they won. The baker won and the court ruled, yeah, hey corporation, company, business, whatever you are, you don't have to violate your first amendment rights to serve people. And we can't force you to.

You as a business and this, by the way, also hits on Citizens United as well, as a business, as a company, as an organization, as a whatever, you have first amendment protections. And now fast forward back again this week, that's basically what the judge said in this ruling against DeSantis. So what's happening is you have these Republican chickens coming home to roost. Y'all did this to yourself, spending years and years and years, going to court arguing that corporations were people, that they should have the same rights as an individual. They should be able to turn away whoever they want from their business no questions asked and now that corporations are doing it with unvaccinated and unmasked people, Republicans are throwing a hissy fit. But if they truly wanted to be off at somebody, they need to go look in the mirror because they did this to themselves. And not one of them has enough sense or courage to actually admit that.