A federal judge set to preside over Disney’s lawsuit against Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has recused himself from the case, citing a relative who owns stocks in the company, according to an order filed on 2 June.
US District Judge Mark E Walker, who was appointed to the federal judiciary by Barack Obama, responded to a motion from Mr DeSantis’s legal team seeking his removal from the case.
Lawyers for the DeSantis administration claimed that Judge Walker’s comments referencing Disney in unrelated cases involving the governor’s so-called “Stop WOKE Act” raise “substantial doubts” about the judge’s impartiality. The judge said that argument is “without merit”.
“Defendants seek to disqualify me from presiding over this case because, in their view, questions I have asked in previous, related cases raise substantial doubts about my impartiality,” Judge Walker wrote.
That argument is “based on a misapprehension of the law and a misstatement of the facts,” wrote Mr Walker, adding that the motion from the DeSantis team cited the previous cases “for their convenient language without acknowledging the chasm between my statements in this case and the conduct at issue in those cases.”
“I find the motion is nothing more than rank judge-shopping,” wrote Mr Walker, referring to the practice of parties in a case seeking ideologically aligned court venues that would more likely produce a favourable outcome. “Sadly, this practice has become all too common in this district.”
The case has been reassigned to US District Judge Allen C Winsor, who was appointed by then-President Donald Trump in 2019. He was confirmed by a US Senate vote of 54-44.
A lawsuit from Walt Disney Parks and Resorts argues that state officials and the DeSantis administration pursued a “targeted campaign of government retaliation” by dissolving a decades-old municipal board responsible for Disney World and the company’s sprawling park campus, now under state control with a DeSantis-appointed panel.
“At the governor’s bidding, the state’s oversight board has purported to ‘void’ publicly noticed and duly agreed development contracts, which had laid the foundation for billions of Disney’s investment dollars and thousands of jobs,” the complaint alleges. “This government action was patently retaliatory, patently anti-business, and patently unconstitutional.”
The DeSantis administration called the lawsuit an “unfortunate example of their hope to undermine the will of the Florida voters and operate outside the bounds of the law.”
Florida’s feud with the company is entangled with a volatile, right-wing campaign targeting LGBT+ people and advocates with a flurry of legislation across the country within the last two years.
Last year, Mr DeSantis endorsed a broadly written bill from Republican lawmakers – the “Parental Rights in Education Act”, derided by opponents as the “Don’t Say Gay” bill – that prohibits instruction of “sexual orientation or gender identity” from kindergarten through the third grade and any such discussion “that is not age-appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students” in other grades. He expanded the law to all grade levels this year.
After pressure from employees, LGBT+ advocates and civil rights groups, Disney publicly objected to the legislation, fuelling a pressure campaign from the DeSantis administration and Republican lawmakers taking aim at the company’s long-standing control of its Orlando-area business.
