Lawyers for Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) filed a motion on Friday to have the judge presiding over the lawsuit filed against him by Disney disqualified from the case.
In the court filing, DeSantis’s team argues Judge Mark Walker should be moved off of the case due to prior comments he made about DeSantis’s actions against Disney being “an example of state retaliation.”
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“Those remarks—each derived from extrajudicial sources—were on the record, in open court, and could reasonably imply that the Court has prejudged the retaliation question here. Because that question is now before this Court, and because that question involves highly publicized matters of great interest to Florida’s citizens, the Court should disqualify itself to prevent even the appearance of impropriety,” the filing said.
The lawyers provided examples of Walker allegedly calling the Florida governor’s actions against Disney retaliation in comments he made in Link v. Corcoran and Falls v. DeSantis.
In Link, lawyers for the governor allege Walker “used the State’s contemplated dissolution of Disney’s special district as an example of retaliatory conduct.”
“What’s in the record, for example — is there anything in the record that says we are now going to take away Disney’s special status because they’re woke? Is there anything in the record that says — that you put in the record that says we are going to slash the funding? We did, in fact, take away millions of dollars from school boards because they had the audacity to require their students to wear masks during a pandemic,” Walker said at a preliminary injunction hearing in the case in April 2022.
In Falls, DeSantis’s lawyers allege Walker listed Disney losing “its status” as an example of one of several “punitive actions” taken by the state.
“And then Disney is going to lose its status because — arguably because they made a statement that … ran afoul of state policy of the controlling party. At what point do you stack so many examples where punitive actions are taken if you don’t do what you are told that suddenly it no longer becomes conjectural and you pass that threshold so you can establish standing? It’s no longer fanciful or conjectural,” Walker said in the preliminary injunction hearing in the case in June 2022.
Walker was appointed to the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Florida by President Barack Obama in 2012 and has served as the chief judge for the district court since 2018.
DeSantis has previously criticized where Disney filed its lawsuit, saying in April that he believes the company is “trying to generate some district court decision.”
“I don’t think the suit has merit. I think it’s political,” DeSantis said last month. “I think they filed in Tallahassee for a reason because they are trying to generate some district court decision, but we’re very confident in the law.”
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Disney filed the lawsuit in April, arguing DeSantis and other Sunshine State officials had pursued a “relentless campaign to weaponize government power against Disney in retaliation for expressing a political viewpoint unpopular with certain State officials.”
The feud between DeSantis and the company, which led to Disney’s central Florida district being restructured, stemmed from Disney denouncing the Parental Rights in Education Act, which DeSantis signed into law last year. Disney had previously maintained full autonomy over the district since its creation in 1967.
