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Sunspot Syzygy

@sunspot-syzygy

Previously AgentsWolfieandOmega
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[ID: A Peanuts comic. Snoopy is happily dancing by himself, spinning in circles with music note speech bubbles around him. Charlie Brown sees him and looks curious, and Snoopy looks startled when he turns around and ends up facing him.

Snoopy walks away, face flushed and wavy lines of embarrassment floating around him. Charlie Brown says, "People shouldn't be embarrassed just because they get caught acting a little silly." End ID]

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Oops it turns out Disney’s lawsuit against the Florida governor is based on a constitutional clause which says that states can’t pass laws to interfere with private contracts. Historically this is something courts have used to strike down basic labour protections like minimum wages. So if the Supreme Court decides to give Disney a win here by saying “um actually any contact betwen private individuals is completely fine and beyond any kind of state regulation” (which would be wildly broad but also that’s how this Supreme Court sometimes behaves) then stay tuned for a lot of terrible lawsuits eroding a lot of basic protections for workers and renters and anyone else who’s signed a contract with a vastly more powerful entity.

This is wrong. Disney is not trying to make it so that it can just go back on any and all contracts and if they won this case that wouldn’t be the outcome. Disney itself has already been in a case about the contract clause.

What will actually be happening is the court will be looking to see if Florida’s new law qualifies as a targeted attack on Disney. The contract clause makes it so the federal government can’t create laws that are designed to ruin the contracts of specific businesses.

I.e. if I’m the governor of a state, and a company does something to make me mad, I can’t just , out of spite, craft a law that goes out of its way to invalidate my contract specifically.

And wouldn’t you know it, that’s what DeSantis did. The Florida legislature created a law to ruin and void “all contracts made by the state within [a certain time period]”. The only contract that had been made during that time period with the state being Disney’s. It was a direct attack on their contract specifically.

That’s why they’re bringing up free speech so much. Their argument in court is that the government did this specifically to curtail Disney’s free speech rights.

Please reblog this version for emphasis and clarity.