Courage is Contagious
DeSantis' success gave courage to elected Republicans in Washington. Within hours of Biden announcing his illegal, unconstitutional vaccine mandate, conservatives in the House of Representatives and Senate announced plans to defund and rescind it.
Then this week, DeSantis went a step further. It's not enough, he argued, to refuse a statewide vaccine mandate. So he championed, and just signed, a law prohibiting private companies from imposing mandates on their own workers. In doing so, DeSantis took on not only leftists in Washington, Tallahassee and Twitter. He took on the real source of progressive power today—corporate boardrooms, where without passing any laws or winning any elections woke millionaires and billionaires leverage their economic power to tell everyone else what to do.
In Florida, of course, that means Disney—one of the richest, most influential corporations on earth. It is the economic engine of the Orlando area, and one of the biggest employers in the state. It is also increasingly "woke." Like all good progressive plutocrats, Disney executives had already ordered their employees to get the jab or be fired.
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By pushing his new law, DeSantis called Disney's bluff. And sure enough, the mouse didn't roar. Instead, it fell into line with the law, the public, the science and behind a conservative governor. The Left expected a vaccine showdown in the Sunshine State, but Disney surrendered without a peep.
DeSantis deserves credit for his courage and wisdom. But the American people need more of it. It's not enough for Republican governors to commend DeSantis—they should be emulating him.
If the governor of Florida, with the national political media scrutinizing his every move, can take on Disney and win, other Republican governors have no excuse to shy away from fights of their own. Nothing in the Constitution allows vaccine mandates. GOP governors and state legislators—including Republicans in Congress—should lean into this fight relentlessly, defiantly and publicly.
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https://www.newsweek.com/courage-contagious-opinion-1652552