The 1st District Court of Appeal has reinstated Governor Ron DeSantis’ mask mandate ban while the case continues to move through the courts. The court did this by re-imposing a stay on Judge John C. Cooper’s order that halted the mandate ban. The ruling will also allow DeSantis to “continue to punish school officials who impose mask mandates without a parent opt-out,” “at least until the appeals judge rules on the mandates’ legality.”
“Upon our review of the trial court’s final judgment and the operative pleadings, we have serious doubts about standing, jurisdiction, and other threshold matters,” court documents said. “These doubts significantly militate against the likelihood of the appellees’ ultimate success in this appeal. Given the presumption against vacating the automatic stay, the stay should have been left in place pending appellate review.”
“There’s no harm to the defendants if the stay is set aside,” the judge who previously vacated the stay said earlier this week. “That the legislatures already said certain policies can be adopted if they comply with the requirements of the statutes. There’s nothing in my judgment from enforcing the full bill of rights. I’m just saying you can’t enforce part of it, which is what the evidence shows.”
But in a separate ruling, U.S. District Judge Mark Walker in Tallahassee found that Florida’s ‘Anti-Riot’ law admired by all other like-minded fascists “amounted to an assault on First Amendment rights of free speech and assembly as well as the Constitution’s due process protections.”
