By Jim Saunders ©2024 The News Service of Florida
TALLAHASSEE — Though a state panel this week revamped a “financial impact statement” that will appear on the November ballot with a proposed constitutional amendment on abortion rights, Attorney General Ashley Moody’s office argued Thursday that a legal battle about an earlier version of the statement should continue.
Lawyers for the state went to the 1st District Court of Appeal last month after Leon County Circuit Judge John Cooper sided with abortion rights supporters who said the statement needed to be rewritten. In the appeal, the state argued that Cooper did not have legal authority to order that the statement be redrafted.
Amid the appeal, legislative leaders directed a state panel known as the Financial Impact Estimating Conference to revamp the statement. The panel finished late Monday, but its new version drew heavy criticism from Floridians Protecting Freedom, a political committee that is sponsoring the proposed amendment.
After the statement was revised, the appeals court ordered attorneys for the state and Floridians Protecting Freedom to file briefs about whether the pending appeal was moot. In a brief Thursday, the state’s lawyers said the case was not moot because the legal questions about Cooper’s authority are likely to recur — including in a potential challenge by Floridians Protecting Freedom to the revamped statement.
“Here, it is a virtual certainty that the issue of the circuit court’s authority will recur,” the brief said. “The sponsor has already made clear it believes the revised statement ‘remains in violation of Florida law’ and has vowed to challenge it as soon as this (appeals) court permits the sponsor to do so. And although the question need not be one that is likely to recur between the same parties, that is no doubt true here.”
As an indication of a potential fight about the revamped statement, Floridians Protecting Freedom asked the appeals court Wednesday to temporarily send the case back to Cooper so he could rule on the legality of the new wording. The appeals court quickly rejected the request.
Floridians Protecting Freedom faces a noon Friday deadline for filing a brief on the mootness issue.
Financial impact statements, which usually receive little attention, provide estimated effects of proposed constitutional amendments on government revenues and the state budget. But the disputes about the abortion impact statement come amid a fierce — and growing — political battle about the proposed constitutional amendment, which seeks to enshrine abortion rights in the state Constitution.
Gov. Ron DeSantis, Moody and other state leaders oppose the measure, which will appear on the November ballot as Amendment 4. Representatives of DeSantis and the Florida House on the Financial Impact Estimating Conference spearheaded the controversial changes this week to the financial impact statement.
Floridians Protecting Freedom and its Yes on 4 campaign blasted the revised statement as politicized and inaccurate.
“What should have been an easy administrative fix on outdated (financial impact statement) language has become a dirty trick to mislead voters.” Lauren Brenzel, campaigns director for Yes on 4, said in a prepared statement.
The proposed constitutional amendment says, in part, that no “law shall prohibit, penalize, delay, or restrict abortion before viability or when necessary to protect the patient’s health, as determined by the patient’s healthcare provider.”
In part, the revised financial impact statement says there is “uncertainty about whether the amendment will require the state to subsidize abortions with public funds. Litigation to resolve those and other uncertainties will result in additional costs to the state government and state courts that will negatively impact the state budget. An increase in abortions may negatively affect the growth of state and local revenues over time. Because the fiscal impact of increased abortions on state and local revenues and costs cannot be estimated with precision, the total impact of the proposed amendment is indeterminate.”
The Financial Impact Estimating Conference released an initial statement for the proposed amendment in November 2023. But on April 1, the Florida Supreme Court issued a ruling that allowed a six-week abortion limit to take effect.
Floridians Protecting Freedom filed a lawsuit in April arguing that the November financial impact statement needed to be revised because it was outdated after the Supreme Court ruling. Cooper agreed, writing in June that the initial statement violated the Florida Constitution and state law “because it presents largely outdated information about the legality of abortion under statutes and litigation unrelated to Amendment 4 (the abortion amendment).”
But the state’s attorneys have argued in court documents that Cooper “unlawfully injected” himself into the ballot-initiative process and that only the Florida Supreme Court could legally review the financial impact statement. What’s more, they have argued the Supreme Court in 2019 decided against issuing what are known as “advisory” opinions about financial impact statements.
