Nate Monroe: Ashley Moody, Florida's far-right attorney general, strikes out

COMMENTARY | The once-normal, supposed-to-be-reasonable, maybe-at-one-time-halfway-decent-lawyer Ashley Moody, Florida's attorney general, really whiffed this one. If there were any conceivable way to force Republicans to defend their otherwise favorable home turf in America's strangest state, placing abortion and recreational marijuana on the ballot would just about do it.

Sure, Moody tried her level best to keep those questions off the November ballot, when voters will also be picking a president. The problem is her best effort somehow moved one of the most far-right state supreme courts in the country to rule against her — a court in which five of the seven members were appointed by one of the most far-right governors in the country, Ron DeSantis.

The court's conservative jurists are so repulsed by abortion that the same day it handed down its dual, humiliating rulings against Moody, it also allowed a draconian six-week abortion ban to take effect in a matter of weeks, justifying their move by willfully misreading the history of the right to privacy Floridians enshrined in the constitution in 1980.

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This should have been, needless to say, a friendly audience — a home game when your dad's drinking buddies are the refs. How do you blow that?

In her bad-faith effort to keep abortion off the ballot, Moody and a host of nutty allies raised a number of technical objections to the language of the amendment pro-choice advocates want to put before voters, disguising their politics-driven campaign in legalistic terms. The court, in a 4-3 decision, thoroughly repudiated those "concerns," like arguing the summary and title of the amendment were too vague to place in front of voters.

"That the proposed amendment’s principal goal and chief purpose is to limit government interference with abortion is plainly stated in terms that clearly and unambiguously reflect the text of the proposed amendment. And the broad sweep of this proposed amendment is obvious in the language of the summary," the majority wrote.

"Denying this requires a flight from reality."

Ouch.

Moody boarded her flight from reality years ago. Back in 2018, running against a Pensacola lawyer eager to embrace the fringe-bordering-on-frightening lane, Moody, a former federal prosecutor and judge, looked like the reasonable choice. She was well-respected by the state's legal community. She'd once accused Donald Trump of fraud in court. Editorial boards reluctantly backed her. For those sins, her opponents attacked her as a liberal.

Would Ashley Moody as attorney general do some unsavory stuff? Probably. This is Florida, after all. But there seemed some glimmer of hope she wasn't poised to become the kind of impish elected official Floridians saw in, say, Jimmy Patronis, the state's "chief financial officer," a title that makes the job — which, as Patronis practices it, seems to involve little more than gallivanting across Florida sampling BBQ joints and ranting about China or whatever else — appear far more important and necessary than it actually is.

Moody's full-blown transformation instead into a Patronisian, reckless, right-wing lawyer-for-hire should have been more predictable, given the downward trajectory of so many like her in the modern Republican Party. The supposed-to-be-sensible Moody didn't waste much time: Back in 2020, she signed Florida onto a multi-state challenge that unsuccessfully asked the United State Supreme Court to effectively toss the results of the presidential election Trump lost fair and square. There was no turning back from there.

Now, any far-right cause with even a vague connection to Florida or federalism can find a friend in Moody's office, eager to waste resources fighting culture wars. The actual functions and duties of her office seem, at best, an afterthought. The attorney general, a kind of keeper of the state's open-government laws, has done nothing as the state has made a mockery of them, forcing citizens to pay exorbitant fees and wait months for basic public records.

Even the most strident MAGA loon couldn't fault Moody for her lack of sycophancy or devotion. Moody is full-on crackpot. And now she can fully identify with that most Trumpian quality of all: Ashley Moody is a loser.

Nate Monroe is a metro columnist whose work regularly appears every Thursday and Sunday. Follow him on Twitter @NateMonroeTU.

This article originally appeared on Florida Times-Union: Florida's Ashley Moody suffered humiliating dual Supreme Court defeats