Florida Is Mad Scientist DeSantis’ Project 2025 Laboratory

Gov. Ron DeSantis in his Tallahassee laboratory. (Pensito Illustration)

Over the past several years, Gov. Ron DeSantis and the stacked GOP Florida Legislature have been conducting an experiment with Floridians as their lab rats. The hypotheses and methodologies are straight out of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 playbook.

The Tallahassee Democrat (an ironic name for a newspaper in the capital of a rapidly reddening state) has a pretty good explanation on the topic here:

Project 2025 proposes a dramatic overhaul of the federal government, replacing thousands of civil employees with political hires, expanding the power of the president, abolishing the Department of Education, enacting a flurry of tax cuts, banning pornography and halting sales of the abortion pill.

For Floridians, the document’s themes and policies may sound familiar. After all, Gov. Ron DeSantis advanced many of the same ideas, pushed along by hard-right think tanks in his first six years as governor.

“You guys in Florida are living in the future,” said Nick Beauchamp, a political scientist at Northeastern University. He has written on Project 2025 and its proposals, powered by Heritage and a host of other conservative, billionaire-funded think tanks.

See also WNMF’s piece, “Florida Is the Laboratory for Project 2025.”

Obama: ACA Was the GOP’s Plan ‘Based on Conservative, Market-Based Principles Developed by the Heritage Foundation’

chart-uninsured-rate-drops

Five years after passage of the Affordable Care Act, the metrics point to success: the percentage of Americans who are uninsured has fallen dramatically, the runaway growth of healthcare costs has slowed, family budgets are more secure and, most importantly, lives are being saved. At an event on Wednesday marking the ACA’s fifth anniversary, Pres. Obama addressed these and the ACA’s other successes — and even pointed out the fundamental paradox of the GOP’s contrived opposition to it: The ACA was based on their own plan.

photo-obama-aca-fifth“[The] Affordable Care Act pretty much was their plan before I adopted it,” the president said, “based on conservative, market-based principles developed by the Heritage Foundation and supported by Republicans in Congress, and deployed by a guy named Mitt Romney in Massachusetts to great effect. If they want to take credit for this law, they can. I’m happy to share it.”

[…]

How the Conservative Heritage Foundation Defines Liberalism

Give up your economic freedom, give up your political freedom, and you will be rewarded with license. It’s all sex all the time. It’s not just the sex itself — it’s the permission to indulge.

— David Azerrad of The Heritage Foundation — “which prides itself as being the intellectual backbone of the conservative movement” — describing the philosophy of the left at a Heritage conference on the future of liberalism, MSNBC reports.

For Tea Partyists Who Still Don’t Believe Obamacare Is a Republican Invention, Here Is Ultimate Proof

Transcript:

MITT ROMNEY: When [the uninsured] show up at the hospital, they get care. They get free care, paid for by you and me. If that’s not a form of socialism, I don’t know what is. So my plan [Romneycare] did something quite different. It said, you know what?, if people can afford to buy insurance, if they can afford to buy insurance, or if they can pay their own way, then they either buy that insurance or pay their own way, but they no longer look to government to hand out free care. And that, in my opinion, is the ultimate conservatism.

That’s why the Heritage Foundation worked with us and was at the celebration of the signing — the Heritage Foundation, as you know, a quintessentially conservative group, recognized that the principles of free enterprise and personal responsibility were at work. You know, I’m proud to talk about what we did. We did not need to raise taxes. We did not need to have the government take over healthcare. Instead we rely on private market dynamics to get people in our state insured and for individuals to finally take responsibility for some portion of their healthcare rather than expecting government to give ’em a free ride.

From a report by Michael Issikoff, NBC News, on Oct. 11, 2011:

[…]