Ron DeSantis’s dumb attempt at smart sanctions

Ron DeSantis’s dumb attempt at smart sanctions

DeSantis wants to try targeted sanctions to enforce his ban on mask mandates. Good luck with that.

By Daniel W. Drezner

Daniel W. Drezner is a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and a regular contributor to PostEverything.

Yesterday at 3:34 p.m. EDT

Ordinarily the hard-working staff here at Spoiler Alerts tries to focus on U.S. foreign policy and international relations. The politics of federalism are beyond my area of expertise. However, when governors and their press secretaries start talking like foreign policy wonks, it means we have arrived at my punditry comfort zone.

Consider Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s quixotic attempt to ban mask mandates in his state. On Monday, the governor’s office released a statement explaining how it would respond to any schools superintendent who defied DeSantis’s edict. It said, in part, that “it would be the goal of the State Board of Education to narrowly tailor any financial consequences to the offense committed. For example, the State Board of Education could move to withhold the salary of the district superintendent or school board members.”

On Tuesday, my Washington Post colleague Greg Sargent chronicled how this has already escalated in Alachua County, where the superintendent has decided to go ahead with the mask mandate and the state commissioner of education responding with a plan to dock the county a sum equivalent to the salaries of the superintendent and the board of education.

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This has prompted some hue and cry, which led to Christina Pushaw, DeSantis’s press secretary, offering up the analogy of targeted sanctions on her personal Twitter account:

Think of it like targeted sanctions, you say? Okay! Welcome to my sandbox, Ron DeSantis and staff! I know something about this topic, and might I suggest to Pushaw that if she really wants to ride with this analogy, I doubt it will end well for the governor.

To be fair, there are valid reasons DeSantis might think targeted sanctions would work. They are likelier to yield concessions if the demand is well-defined and the targeted actor feels the pain. These sanctions would appear to meet those criteria. Whatever one thinks of DeSantis’s demands, they are well-defined. The economic pain is also real; as Sargent notes in his column, this puts school superintendents in a terrible position.

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That said, it’s noteworthy that multiple counties have indicated that they will proceed with mask mandates. It suggests that the targeted sanctions are working about as well as the Trump administration’s ham-handed efforts at economic statecraft.

A few things can undercut targeted sanctions, and it would appear that the DeSantis administration had not considered these contingencies. The first problem comes when target leaders experience a “rally round the flag” phenomenon in response to sanctions. That appears to be happening in Florida. Vaccinated Americans’ anger toward the unvaccinated continues to climb, and that appears to extend to Florida’s parents of school-age children, which means they will probably back up their local school officials.

The National Journal’s Josh Kraushaar notes, “With coronavirus cases now at all-time highs in the state and the Delta strain potentially having a greater impact on children, [DeSantis is] pressing his luck … [he] is overreaching if he thinks that preventing COVID hot spots from requiring masks in schools will be popular with Florida swing voters.”

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Another major way to stymie targeted sanctions is if a “black knight” steps in to assist the sanctioned actor. And, hey, what do you know, it looks like the Biden administration is interested in playing that part. At least that was the message from White House press secretary Jen Psaki:

It is very much an open question whether the Biden administration has the legal authority to rescue individual school districts in Florida. But the signal that President Biden is sending to the actors facing the sanction threat is quite clear, and it blunts the effect of DeSantis’s sanctions.

So, to sum up: DeSantis’s attempt at smart sanctions will not yield much in the way of concessions and is likely to anger a fair number of Floridians. It is possible that these actions will motivate DeSantis’s base as well, but, at best, this ends as well as the myriad other examples of U.S. targeted sanctions — which is to say, poorly.