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Opinion
Israel Decided the War, But Trump's America Fights and Pays the Bill
More than two decades ago, the illegal war against Iraq was cooked in the dens of the Pentagon by Israel-first ideologues and sold to the American public through mass propaganda. The current war is, in some ways, even more brazen.
Mar 10, 2026
American taxpayers are still hemorrhaging from the made-for-Israel war in Iraq, a war audaciously offered as one that would “pay for itself.” Instead, it was paid in Iraqi and American blood, ruins and financed by American debt. The promised democracy was a broken state, regional chaos, and the afterbirth of terror and resistance that continues to metastasize across the Arab world. Marketed as a short, decisive campaign, Iraq became a two-decade-long disaster with no exit in sight. Trillions were burned on lies manufactured by Israel-first Zionists in Washington, while generations of Americans—many not even born when the invasion began—were conscripted into inheriting the debt, the interest, and the moral stain.
The real balance sheet of that war is etched into nearly 5,000 American tombstones and the endless corridors of veterans’ hospitals. Before that blood-soaked bill is even paid, the very same architect, using the same lies, has succeeded again in dragging the U. S. into another made-for-Israel war, this time against Iran. Iraq was not an aberration; it was a rehearsal. Yet, Iran doesn’t appear to be the final act on the Israeli menu. In recent weeks, former Israeli prime minister Naftali Bennett declared that Turkey is next. And it is the U.S., not Israel, that is expected to keep paying for wars, America neither needed nor chose.
The evidence of who set the clock of this war is unmistakable. The most revealing admission did not come from Tehran, Moscow, or Beijing, but from the U.S. State Department. In an unguarded moment, the U.S. Secretary of State admitted that the timing of this war was not an American choice. This became painfully clear when the State Department was caught unprepared to help evacuate tens of thousands of Americans from the war zone. As U.S. ambassadors hurried to evacuate their staff and families, desperate citizens were told their government could not assist and were advised to arrange their own departures, after airports had already closed.
This is not a minor detail. It’s a government that is willing to sacrifice the well-being and security of its citizens by joining a war decided by someone else. It goes to the heart of sovereignty and democratic accountability. A nation that chooses to go to war prepares its people, its diplomacy, and its logistics. A nation that is dragged into war improvises and hopes for the best.
Iran, for its part, is not the caricature often presented by the American Secretary of War and Donald Trump. It is a country prepared for drawn-out conflict and strategic patience. During the nearly eight-year Iran-Iraq War, Tehran fought a grinding, no-win war against a better-armed adversary. Against the expectations of Western military analysts, Iran endured. In a grim irony, it even committed the greatest of all sins: purchasing weapons from Israel, falling into Tel Aviv’s cynical strategy to weaken both Baghdad and Tehran simultaneously. Israel was willing to arm its supposed arch-enemy as part of its broader calculus of exhaustion and division.
That history matters today. Iran has demonstrated, repeatedly, a willingness to absorb punishment, and extend conflicts over time. At the end of the day, and by all means necessary, Iran is unlikely to surrender. In a protracted war of attrition to bleed the world economy, Tehran could move to close the Strait of Hormuz, an oil blood line for world economies. Iran may be economically battered, and it has been for decades under severe sanctions, but that very weakness reduces its restraint. A country with little left to lose is more inclined to impose pain on others, including Western and neighboring welfare oil economies dependent on uninterrupted energy exports. Meanwhile, regional instability in the Gulf and prolonged American entanglement create the perfect symbiosis for Israel: a state that flourishes in the shadows of regional chaos like a scavenger thriving on the scrap of a landfill.
President Trump has suggested escorting oil shipments in the Strait to keep the oil flowing. The macho bravado may play well on television or for the stock market, but history, old and recent, offers daunting realities. The same was attempted during the Iraq-Iran war in the 1980s but failed. More recently, the U.S., the EU, and Israel combined failed to force a much smaller and poorer country—Yemen—to open the Red Sea. After months of bombardment, siege and naval pressure, Washington was forced into negotiations, and even then, Yemeni forces continued to block vessels linked to Israel until Gaza ceasefire.
The comparison is useful. The shorelines area under the Houthi control of the Red Sea (green map in the link) in the north of Yemen, is a much wider maritime passage. The Strait of Hormuz, by contrast, is so narrow in a clear day each shore is visible from the other. To borrow a simple image, in the Houthi area the width of the Red Sea is an Amazon River and where Hormuz is a stream. The narrowness of the Hormuz Strait makes control easier for Iran and exposes the vulnerability of U.S. naval ships. Before promising to escort commercial shipping, a responsible administration should ask a basic question: if a small, impoverished Yemen could not be subdued by the world’s most powerful militaries, how exactly will American warships be safer under the reach of fire in the narrower Strait?
There is another question Washington refuses to entertain: How will Americans feel when they realize they are risking lives, ships, and economic stability largely to advance Israel’s sole strategic objectives? This is not an abstract question. It is a political and economic reckoning, purposefully delayed. Especially since Americans are still reeling from the cost of previous Israeli wars, and now, they are asked to take on a new national debt—$200 billion—to bankroll yet another war, especially made for Israel.
The made-for-Israel wars may have begun in Iraq but will not end with Iran. Israeli false flags are poised to provoke further escalations designed to entrap even states traditionally friendly to Tehran, such as Oman. For Israel, victory remains incomplete unless it drags Gulf Arab states into open confrontation with Iran, hardening divisions that may last generations. Iranian mistrust of the Gulf Arabs would likely endure even in the event of regime change. In this calculus, Israel “wins” not only on the battlefield, but by entrenching lasting hostility between Iran and the Arab world, ensuring a permanently fragmented region.
More than two decades ago, the illegal war against Iraq was cooked in the dens of the Pentagon by Israel-first ideologues and sold to the American public through the managed media, ruse and weapons of mass deception. The current war is, in some ways, even more brazen. It was exclusively designed in the war ministry offices of Tel Aviv, and Trump obliged.
This is not America’s war. The decision was made elsewhere, and timed elsewhere, fought on behalf of someone else to serve the strategic objectives of a foreign country. Washington has subordinated the American national interest to the tribal agenda of Israeli-firsters inside the Beltway. Simply put: Tel Aviv chooses the war, and Washington pays the bill.
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The Military-Industrial Complex 2.0: Big Tech's War of All Against All
Silicon Valley wants us to believe that the only way to “win” a future war is by handing the keys to our political world to a clique of self-defined superior beings.
Mar 10, 2026
“I love the idea of getting a drone and having light fentanyl-laced urine spraying on analysts that tried to screw us,” said Alex Karp, the CEO of the emerging military tech firm Palantir. Far from an offhand outburst, his statement reflects a broader ethos taking hold in Silicon Valley’s military-tech sector, one that treats coercion as innovation, cruelty as candor, and the unchecked application of technological power as both inevitable and desirable.
Karp loves verbal combat as much as he likes running a firm that makes high-tech weaponry. His company has helped Israel increase the pace at which it has bombed and slaughtered Palestinians in Gaza, and its technology has helped Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) accelerate deportations, while also helping locate and identify demonstrators in Minneapolis. Not only is Karp unapologetic about the damage done by his company’s products, he openly revels in it.
This February, he told a CNBC interviewer that, “if you are critical of ICE, you should be out there protesting for more Palantir. Our product actually, in its core, requires people to conform with Fourth Amendment data protections.” (That amendment being the one that protects citizens from “unreasonable searches and seizures.”) Yet Karp’s speculation hasn’t led him to ask ICE to stop using his software in its war on peaceful dissent, nor has it dissuaded him from accepting an open-ended, $1 billion contract with ICE’s parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
In keeping with his full-throated support for repression at home and abroad, at the height of the Gaza war, Karp held a Palantir board meeting in Tel Aviv, proclaiming that “our work in the region has never been more vital. And it will continue.”
Peter Thiel and Alex Karp clearly feel that what’s good for Palantir is good for America, but the vision of America they are promoting is both dangerous and dehumanizing.
In an interview with Maureen Dowd of the New York Times, he summed up his philosophy this way: “I actually am a progressive. I want less war. You only stop war by having the best technology and by scaring the bejabers—I’m trying to be nice here—out of our adversaries. If they are not scared, they don’t wake up scared, they don’t go to bed scared, they don’t fear that the wrath of America will come down on them, they will attack us. They will attack us everywhere.”
Reality, however, is anything but that simple. Palantir’s technology has been used to kill tens of thousands of people in Gaza and beyond, including many who had nothing to do with Hamas, had no control over its actions, and often weren’t even alive when it won local elections in 2006 and began to administer Gaza.
There should be no question that Hamas’ attack on Israel on October 7, 2023 was unconscionable. Still, for Israel to react by killing more than 70,000 Palestinians in Gaza, a relatively conservative figure that even the Israeli government now acknowledges, constitutes a grossly disproportionate response that most independent experts define as genocide. The idea that such mass slaughter can be justified as a way of scaring the bad guys and reducing violence is intellectually unsupportable and morally obscene.
So, welcome to the world of Alex Karp, one of the leaders of the new wave of techno-militarists in Silicon Valley.
Militarizing AI, or Techno-Optimism Run Amok
This is not your father’s military-industrial complex (MIC). The current stewards of the MIC—executives running industrial giants like Lockheed Martin, RTX (formerly Raytheon), Boeing, General Dynamics, and Northrop Grumman—are far more circumspect in what they have to say than Karp. Their leaders may occasionally make a statement about how increased tensions in the Middle East or Asia could generate demands for their products among US allies in those regions, but they would never engage in the sort of nakedly Orwellian rhetoric Karp seems to specialize in.
Still, the MIC of the future augurs not just a change in technology or business practices, but—as Karp suggests—a potential culture shift in which militarism is openly celebrated, without the need for any cover language about promoting global stability or defending a “rules-based international order.” Think of the new MIC as a rugged individualist, high-tech version of philosopher Thomas Hobbes’s “war of all against all.” And those running it want us to believe that the only way to “win” a future war is by handing the keys to our political world to a clique of self-defined superior beings headed up by the likes of Alex Karp, Palantir Founder Peter Thiel, Anduril head Palmer Luckey, and the inimitable Elon Musk.
Alex Karp has co-authored a book, The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West, in which he articulates his vision of what it will supposedly take to make America globally dominant again. The book is a long lament about how most Americans have lost their sense of purpose and patriotism, frittering away their time in trivial pursuits like reality TV and video games. He and co-author Nicholas W. Zamiska call for a new unifying national mission to whip this nation of slackers into shape and restore the United States to its rightful place as the world’s unrivaled political and military power.
Karp’s answer to what’s needed: a new Manhattan Project (which, in case you don’t remember, produced the atomic bomb to end World War II). This time, the focus would not be on developing nuclear weapons but on accelerating the military applications of artificial intelligence (AI) and giving the United States a permanent technological advantage over China. It’s hard to imagine a more impoverished or misguided vision of America’s future, or one more drained of basic humanity.
Hawks, traditional realists, and techno-militarists will, of course, deride any humanity-first approach to foreign and domestic policy as naive, but in reality, it’s the new wave militarists who are the truly naive ones. After squandering trillions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of lives on the wars of this century—wars that failed to reach their advertised objectives by a long shot (just as the most recent one in Iran is sure to do), while making the world a significantly more dangerous place—they still mouth platitudes about pursuing “peace through strength” and using US military power to undergird a “rules-based international order.” Given the American losses in this century to far more poorly funded and less technologically sophisticated adversaries in Iraq and Afghanistan, such tired rhetoric is beginning to sound like a cruel joke, or indeed the gasps of the representatives of a declining empire.
Will Technowar Be Cheaper, and Will It Protect Us?
Putting ideology aside for a moment, there is the narrower question of whether the emerging tech firms can truly produce better systems of war making for less money. Palmer Luckey of Anduril—a protégé of Palantir founder Peter Thiel—made headlines recently when he told an interviewer from CNBC that the US could spend perhaps half of the current $1 trillion Pentagon budget and still have a more effective defense system if it simply stopped buying the “wrong things.”
The idea that a weapons contractor would offer to do more for less seems almost revolutionary in an age where greed and corruption in the MIC continue to run rampant. The philosophy behind Luckey’s statement to CNBC is, in fact, encapsulated in a remarkable Anduril document entitled “Rebooting the Arsenal of Democracy,” a scathing critique of the current business practices of the Pentagon and mammoth military contractors like Lockheed Martin.
Luckey’s manifesto should be considered an assault on the top five arms conglomerates—led by Lockheed Martin and RTX (formerly Raytheon)—that now receive 1 out of every 3 contract dollars doled out by the Pentagon. Those huge firms have had their day, the essay suggests, doing necessary and useful work in the long-gone Cold War years of the last century. “Why can’t the existing defense companies simply do better?” it asks. “…These companies work slowly, while the best engineers relish working at speed…These companies built the tools that kept us safe in the past, but they are not the future of our defense.”
What this country needs is anything but a new priesthood of billionaire engineers to tell us that war is unavoidable, fear is the only path to peace, and democracy must bend a knee to the superior wisdom of those who code algorithms and build weaponry.
The document all but suggests that companies like Lockheed Martin should be given a lifetime achievement award and then shoved out of the way, so the likes of Thiel, Karp, Luckey, and Musk can take the helm of the arms industry.
But spending less on weapons—as useful as it would be given other urgent national priorities—can’t be the only goal of defense policy. The most important question is whether purportedly cheaper, more nimble, more accurate AI-driven systems can, in fact, be deployed in a way that would promote peace and stability rather than yet more war. In reality, there is a danger that, if the United States thinks it can use such systems to intervene militarily on a routine basis while suffering fewer casualties, the temptation to go to war might actually increase.
Even given all of the above, the idea of breaking the stranglehold of the big contractors on the development and production of the US arsenal is an attractive one. But the tech sector’s claims that it can do the job better for less remains to be proven. A drone is cheaper than an F-35 jet fighter for sure, but what about swarms of drones that are used in waves and replenished rapidly in the midst of a war, or unpiloted ships and armored vehicles that run on complex, unproven software that could well fail at crucial moments? And what if, as the tech sector and its growing cadre of lobbyists would prefer, the new age militarists are allowed to operate with little or no scrutiny, with a weakening of safeguards like independent testing and curbs on price gouging—safeguards that are already too weak to fully get the job done?
When President Ronald Reagan negotiated arms control agreements with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in the last century, his motto was “trust but verify.” In the case of Palantir and its ilk, perhaps the motto should be “mistrust and verify.” We need to get beyond their marketing slogans and make them prove that their new tech can work as advertised and is indeed better than what came before. If so, then Palantir and Anduril should be treated as vendors and paid for their services, but with no right to attempt to shape our military budget or foreign policy, much less the fundamental workings of our already stumbling democracy.
The Military Tech Lobby: Disruptors on Steroids
Before the current surge of weapons development in the tech sector, there was a time when some Silicon Valley firms acted as if their products were so superior and affordable that they didn’t need to dirty their hands with traditional lobbying. Unrealistic as that might have been, Silicon Valley has now gone all-in on legalized corruption—from carefully targeted campaign contributions to hiring former government officials to do their bidding. Example number one is, of course, Vice President JD Vance, who was employed, mentored, and financed by—yes!—Palantir founder Peter Thiel during his rise to the Senate and then to the vice presidency. When he was selected for Donald Trump’s ticket in 2024, a flood of new money came into the campaign from the military-tech sector, including tens of billions of dollars from Elon Musk. Once on the ticket, one of Vance’s main jobs proved to be extracting even more donations from the Silicon Valley militarists.
Then came Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), the organization that gave efficiency a dreadful name by cutting federal programs and personnel seemingly at random and gutting essential tools like the Agency for International Development (USAID) while leaving the Pentagon virtually untouched. Although USAID had its problems, it also funded essential development and public health efforts globally that sustained millions of people. An actual efficiency drive would have looked at what worked and what didn’t at that agency. Instead, Musk’s acolytes, who knew nothing about economic assistance, simply dismantled it.
There are now significant numbers of Silicon Valley executives in key positions in the Trump administration, led by Vance but including dozens of others in key posts in the military, the top leadership of the Pentagon, and across a range of domestic and foreign-policy agencies.
Peter Thiel and Alex Karp clearly feel that what’s good for Palantir is good for America, but the vision of America they are promoting is both dangerous and dehumanizing.
Coming Down to Earth (and Reining in the Technophiles)
The problem with the new techno-militarists isn’t that they’re mistaken about technology’s power, but that they’re dangerously wrong about who should wield it, to what ends, and under what constraints. Power without restraint is not innovation. It is recklessness dressed up as inevitability. A growing share of the tools that shape American foreign and domestic security policy is being designed, deployed, and promoted by a small group of private actors whose incentives are aggressively financial, whose worldviews are profoundly militarized, and whose accountability to the public is minimal at best.
What this country needs is anything but a new priesthood of billionaire engineers to tell us that war is unavoidable, fear is the only path to peace, and democracy must bend a knee to the superior wisdom of those who code algorithms and build weaponry. In reality, we’ve heard this story before—from Cold War nuclear strategists, Vietnam-era body-count enthusiasts, and the architects of the “shock and awe” doctrine that helped destroy Iraq. Each generation is promised that this technology (whatever it might be) will finally make war, American-style, clean, precise, and decisive. Each time, the bodies pile up anyway.
What makes today’s moment especially dangerous is the speed and opacity with which such systems are being developed and deployed. AI-enabled targeting tools, predictive surveillance platforms, autonomous weaponry, and data-fusion systems are all being integrated into the military and domestic policing structures with minimal public debate, weak oversight, and virtually no meaningful consent from the people who will live with—and die from—the consequences. The rhetoric of AI-driven disruption has become a convenient excuse for bypassing democratic processes altogether.
If technology is to shape the future of war (and it will), then society must shape the rules under which it operates.
The underlying premise of the techno-militarists is that permanent war is the natural state of our world and our only choice is how efficiently we decide to wage it. In reality, security is never produced by terrifying the rest of the planet into submission. It’s produced by diplomacy; restraint; adhering to international law and economic justice; and the slow, unglamorous work of building institutions that make mass violence less likely rather than more automated.
Alex Karp and his peers may see themselves as realists, bravely saying what others don’t dare to say. In truth, theirs is a brittle, nihilistic worldview that mistakes domination for strength and innovation for wisdom. Humanity deserves more than an endless arms race run by men (and they are almost all men!) who believe that they alone are fit to decide whose lives are expendable. The brave new war machine’s version of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World should frighten us all.
If technology is to shape the future of war (and it will), then society must shape the rules under which it operates. The alternative is to surrender our moral agency to a handful of self-anointed visionaries and hope they get it right. History suggests that is a gamble we can’t afford to take.
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No More Gambling With The Lives Of Iranians: We Must Ban the War Prediction Market
Prediction markets represent a further commodification of war, violence, and death—one that risks manufacturing consent for more violence by providing people with a financial incentive for it.
Mar 10, 2026
On February 27, more than 150 accounts placed bets on Polymarket accurately predicting that the US would strike Iran by the following day. Of these accounts, at least 16 made a profit of over $100,000, and at least 109 made over $10,000. The New York Times found one anonymous account that had spent $60,000 in the days before the strikes and made nearly half a million dollars.
Given the timing of these bets, this has raised concerns about insider trading. Bubblemaps, an analytics platform that turns blockchain data into interactive visuals, found a cluster of linked accounts that made $1.2 million by making very specific bets with near-perfect accuracy. This includes betting that the US and Israel would attack Iran on February 28.
What’s more, their analysis found that this was not an isolated incident. For instance, in June 2025, two of these accounts bet $10,000 and $100,000 that Israel would launch military strikes against Iran just days before they did. Those strikes were part of a surprise attack that Israel had been covertly planning for months.
This is a serious issue, but let’s be clear: The idea that this kind of insider trading is not happening under the most overtly corrupt presidential administration in US history is quite frankly laughable. Indeed, the Trump administration is actively supporting Polymarket and Kalshi against ongoing efforts by states to ban them. Coincidentally, Donald Trump Jr. has invested in Polymarket through his venture capital firm and is a strategic advisor for Kalshi. Any decision that benefits those companies would likewise benefit Trump’s family.
An outright ban won’t change the fact that we are a nation where millions of people believe it is completely fine to gamble on death.
But the problem here is larger than the Trump fraud network. Prediction markets represent a further commodification of war, violence, and death—one that distracts from the injustices of war and the suffering of its victims. It is a commodification that risks manufacturing consent for more violence by providing people with a financial incentive for it. While it stopped amid public backlash, Polymarket was allowing people to place bets on whether a nuclear bomb would be detonated by the end of 2026 or 2027. Over $800,000 worth of bets had been placed before the market was taken down.
Betting on such grotesque violence is not only morally repugnant in itself, it risks desensitizing us to the true human cost of that destruction. What’s happening in Iran is not a just war being waged against a legitimate threat. America is not freeing the Iranian people—it is murdering children and destroying a nation without any regard for who will pick up the pieces. This is senseless carnage carried out by two morally bankrupt countries against a nation that, regardless of one’s feeling toward it, did everything it could to prevent this war.
None of these deaths had to happen. And yet, companies like Kalshi and Polymarket were fueling people’s desires for violence. In January, Kalshi began taking bets on whether Ayatollah Ali Khamenei would be “out as Supreme Leader” before February 1, March 1, April 1, July 1, or September 1, 2026. This was a lucrative market that attracted more than $54 million in trades. When his assassination was confirmed on February 28, those who had put money on “before March 1” thought they had "won" big.
Instead, Kalshi invoked a “death carveout” clause to avoid paying customers their "winnings." A Kalshi spokesperson said that the company “included every precaution on this market to make sure people could not trade on the outcome of death.”
Their consumers disagree. They filed a lawsuit against Kalshi alleging that they were drawn to the “Khamenei Market” because they understood “with an American naval armada amassed on Iran’s doorstep and military conflict not merely foreseeable but widely anticipated,” Khamenei would “most likely” be removed from office “through his death.”
In other words, these people were intentionally betting that the US would kill Khamenei and are upset because their earnings were denied. This is true regardless of what Kalshi intended or whatever precautions it took. The market itself created the possibility—the perverse hope—that Khamenei’s death might enrich their own.
For those bettors, Khamenei’s assassination was a personal victory; the injustice was that Kalshi denied them their rightful spoils. A business executive in New York told the Washington Post that he had placed two bets totaling $3,460 that Khamenei would be “out” by March 1 and was expecting to "win" $63,000. He remarked: “I was booking my trip to Courchevel. Then they changed the rules… and everybody got screwed.”
Except not everyone got screwed: the Iranian people did. They are the ones who lost everything. That business executive—almost assuredly overpaid—will not miss those "winnings." But Iranians will miss the loved ones they lost. Those deaths are an absolute loss. They can never be recovered, replaced, or recuperated.
These markets should be banned, and there is some congressional momentum on that issue. But an outright ban won’t change the fact that we are a nation where millions of people believe it is completely fine to gamble on death. We are a nation whose government actively posts inane memes and jokes about the illegal war it is conducting in clear violation of international law.
Things must change: We cannot allow ourselves to be driven to moral depravity by a conman and his lackeys. We must end this illegal war. We must help the Iranian people rebuild their country. We must become, in short, a nation that condemns deaths and cherishes life.
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No Ballot Measures Qualified in Florida This Year; That Was Not an Accident
If and when other states replicate Florida’s hardball tactics against ballot measures, it would represent the greatest threat to direct democracy in years.
Mar 10, 2026
In February, the Florida Department of State determined that no citizen-initiated measures qualified for the Florida 2026 general election ballot. This was not an accident. This outcome is the culmination of a multi-year, multi-pronged attack on the ballot measure process in Florida, with the most draconian blow coming last May.
On May 2, 2025, the Florida legislature passed House Bill 1205, a law that restricts, criminalizes, and penalizes ballot initiative efforts in Florida. HB 1205 is a direct assault on Florida’s citizen-led constitutional amendment process—imposing vague, burdensome, and punitive restrictions that threaten to chill core political speech and discourage civic participation. Although there are several insidious provisions in this law—severe petition-related fines and penalties, restrictive circulation periods, and burdensome petition circulation training obligations, including for volunteers—one of the most damaging provisions only revealed its true nature weeks after the law went into effect.
Unique to the Florida ballot measure process, statewide initiative proponents are obligated to pay a verification fee for each petition they submit. Prior to HB 1205, the cost averaged about 87 cents per petition. On its face, this obligation was already unconstitutional. However, HB 1205 went even further, redefining the “actual cost” of signature verification and authorizing county supervisors to calculate the new per-petition cost, and begin collecting it from statewide ballot initiatives.
Starting on June 30, 2025, the county supervisors began posting their increased signature verification rates. Many newly posted fees are dramatically higher. For example, Lee County raised fees from $0.95 to $4.40 per petition, a 363% increase, while Gilchrist County raised fees from $0.10 to $2.77 per petition, a 2,670% increase. On average, Florida’s three largest counties increased fees to more than $3.77 per signature. As a result, it will now cost sponsors millions of dollars to verify enough petitions to qualify for the ballot. By comparison, no other state even comes close—the largest filing fee we are aware of is Montana’s fee of $3,700, which a court promptly struck down as unconstitutional under state law.
If the regressive policies of HB 1205 are left unchecked, other states will immediately adopt the same types of policies.
There is no question that Florida has been a breeding ground for bad legislation in recent years. Just to name a few—in 2005, Florida passed the first “stand your ground” law. Florida was one of the first states to ban “critical race theory” from its classrooms and was the first state to ban the AP African American studies course. Attacks on the ballot measure process have escalated in recent years, and there is no question that state legislatures look to one another for novel ideas to make the ballot measure process more restrictive. Once a restrictive policy is seen as permissible in one state, other states move quickly to adopt it for themselves. For instance, several states have tried to increase their ballot measure passage thresholds after Florida increased its threshold to 60%. Likewise, geographic circulation requirements, circulator registration and reporting obligations, and circulator payment restrictions have spread like wildfire across Republican-controlled states. Without a doubt, if the regressive policies of HB 1205 are left unchecked, other states will immediately adopt the same types of policies.
And yet, there is still hope. After HB 1205 passed last year, Florida Decides Healthcare, the Medicaid expansion initiative campaign, immediately filed a lawsuit in federal court arguing that HB 1205 is a direct assault on Florida’s citizen-led ballot measure process. That case went to trial on February 9, where the State attempted to defend its restrictions. If HB 1205 is allowed to stand, it will be prohibitively expensive for any initiative to get on the ballot in Florida. If and when other states replicate Florida’s hardball tactics against ballot measures, it would represent the greatest threat to direct democracy in years. Democracy advocates around the country should watch this trial closely, and we should all applaud Florida Decides Healthcare for standing up for their direct democracy rights.
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