Government

After Taking One On The Chin From The Mouse, DeSantis Struggles To Land A Punch

"DeSanctimonious" vows to lay siege to the Magic Kingdom.

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Walt Disney World Resort Reopening

(Photo by Olga Thompson/Walt Disney World Resort via Getty Images)

After getting spanked by Mickey Mouse and his merry band of lawyers, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has set about proving that he’s exactly the petty tyrant we’ve all accused him of being.

In March of 2022, when it was too late to do anything about it, Disney’s then-CEO Bob Chapek criticized the “Don’t Say Gay” bill, which largely bans mention of LGBTQ+ people in elementary schools and forces educators to out kids to their parents. DeSantis immediately vowed revenge, with his allies vowing to boycott Disney for being “pro-pedophilia.”

First DeSantis threatened to dissolve the special tax zone known as the Reedy Creek Improvement District (RCID), which functionally allows the theme park to act as an independent government over 25,000 acres in Osceola and Orange Counties. But upon discovering that such a move would cause upwards of a billion dollars in bond debt to devolve onto the counties, the governor settled instead on renaming it the Central Florida Tourism Oversight District and stocking the board with his own appointees. Those included Bridget Zeigler, a co-founder of the reactionary group Moms for Liberty whose husband is chair of the Florida GOP and a major DeSantis donor, and Pastor Ron Peri, who once wondered if tap water might be making people gay. 

The plan was to use the board’s extensive powers under the 1967 RCID charter to allow the governor’s buddies to control the Magic Kingdom and put the kibosh on any more ideas about challenging the Lord High Emperor of Florida.

Or as DeSantis put it when he signed the bill, “When you lose your way, you gotta have people that are going to tell you the truth. All these board members very much would like to see the type of entertainment that all families can appreciate.”

But last week, a mere two months after the fact, the incoming board members discovered that they’d been kneecapped by the Mouse. Because DeSantis and his appointees were so busy slapping themselves on the back after their victory against Big Woke that they failed to see the two public notices in the Orlando Sentinel of a public RCID meeting on February 8. So no one was there to watch the outgoing board members approve a Declaration ceding more or less their entire authority to Walt Disney Parks and Resorts Inc.

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And in case DeSantis and his pals in the legislature got any bright ideas about changing Florida’s 1,000-year Rule Against Perpetuities law — say a special amendment that only applies to amusement parks incorporated in 1967 — Disney’s lawyers inserted a Royal Lives Clause in the declaration. To the delight of lawyers everywhere, the document names King Charles’s now-living descendants as the measuring lives. This means that Princess Lilibet, the youngest of his grandchildren and the only one born in America, is likely to be the yardstick for this document — a terrific joke, and a giant middle finger to the governor.

Channeling his best Sheriff of Nottingham, DeSantis vowed to avenge his honor, huffing, “Rest assured — you ain’t seen nothing yet. There’s more to come in that regard.”

First he dispatched a battallion of lawyers to poke holes in the document.

“The lack of consideration, the delegation of legislative authority to a private corporation, restriction of the Board’s ability to make legislative decisions, and giving away public rights without compensation for a private purpose, among other issues, warrant the new Board’s actions and direction to evaluate these overreaching documents and determine how best the new Board can protect the public’s interest in compliance with Florida Law,” said Fishback Dominick LLP, Cooper & Kirk PLLC, Lawson Huck Gonzalez PLLC, Waugh Grant PLLC and Nardella & Nardella PLLC in a statement reported by CNN.

Then he set the state’s top lawyer, Attorney General Ashley Moody, on the company. Her office immediately fired off a freedom of information request to the board:

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Please provide copies of all emails, text messages, and other correspondence from or to employees, board members, or other affiliates of the Reedy Creek Improvement District regarding the following topic: Documents discussing agreements, covenants, of similar documents approved or considered by the Board of Supervisors on February 8, 2023. Please limit your search to documents discussing an intention or goal of circumventing, avoiding, frustrating, mitigating, of otherwise attempting to avoid the effects of anticipated actions by the Florida Governor and Florida Legislature.

And he followed up by asking Florida’s Chief Inspector General Melinda Miguel to investigate the “collusive and self-dealing arrangements aiming to nullify the recently passed legislation, undercut Florida’s legislative process, and defy the will of Floridians.”

Disney, which tried to downplay the conflict for a year, seems to have realized that they’re in for a hell of a fight. CEO Bob Iger, who came out of retirement to replace Chapek, recently criticized the governor for violating the First Amendment.

“The governor got very angry about the position Disney took, and it seems like he’s decided to retaliate against us, including the naming of a new board to oversee the property and the business,” he said at a recent shareholder meeting reported by the Wall Street Journal. “In effect, it seems, to punish a company for its exercise of a constitutional right. And that just seems really wrong to me.”

Then he added an even sharper barb: “Any action that thwarts those efforts, simply to retaliate for a position the company took, sounds not just antibusiness, but it sounds anti-Florida.”

Oh, it’s on. But considering how the first round went, our money’s on the Mouse.

Liz Dye lives in Baltimore where she writes about law and politics and appears on the Opening Arguments podcast.

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