If you want to see what freedom looks like in Gov. Ron DeSantis’ “Free State of Florida,” look at two remarkable events last week.

First, a federal judge in Florida ruled March 4 that DeSantis violated the U.S. Constitution by unilaterally designating the Council on American-Islamic Relations as a foreign terrorist organization. U.S. District Judge Mark Walker wrote that the First Amendment bars the governor from continuing “the troubling trend of using an executive office to make a political statement at the expense of others’ constitutional rights.”

DeSantis issued an executive order in December designating CAIR, one of the nation’s largest Muslim advocacy and civil rights groups, as a terrorist organization, barring CAIR and “any person” who provided support or resources to CAIR from receiving any state contract, employment funds or other benefits. One week later, CAIR filed a lawsuit against DeSantis, arguing that the governor had usurped his authority and penalized the group in violation of its constitutionally protected free speech rights.

Walker granted the preliminary injunction sought by CAIR, halting enforcement of the governor’s order while the lawsuit moves forward.

Securing an injunction against the government is no small thing. Courts give wide deference to the executive branch, and judges don’t hand out injunctions without believing that a plaintiff will likely prevail at trial.

Still, everyone should have seen the court’s rebuke coming. As the judge wrote, DeSantis violated even a governor’s own expansive power, declaring CAIR a terrorist group “with no substantive explanation of his authority to do so, no legislative involvement and no mechanism for judicial review.” Walker noted that CAIR “continues to suffer” its public standing from DeSantis’ use of the bully pulpit,” noting — in an extraordinary footnote — that the governor “is choosing to be a bully.”

“The Supreme Court has drawn a line between permissible persuasion and unconstitutionalcoercion,” the judge wrote. DeSantis “has crossed that line.”

Nobody should have been surprised by the governor’s behavior. DeSantis did a similar thing in 2022, removing then-Hillsborough State Attorney Andrew Warren from office after the Democratic prosecutor voiced policy disagreements with the governor. In that case, another federal judge found that DeSantis had ginned the facts, leveling “false” allegations as a “pretext” to violate Warren’s free speech rights. A three-judge federal appeals panel later upheld that finding, though the federal courts dragged their feet and effectively denied Warren any recourse.

“Once again,” Judge Walker wrote last week in siding with CAIR, “Florida chooses political posturing over the First Amendment.” Dismissing the governor’s attacks as “political grandstanding,” Walker added: “It should be lost on no one that (DeSantis’ order) targets one of America’s largest Muslim civil rights organizations for indirect suppression of speech.”

“As we all know,” the ruling continued, “it is easy for those in power to target minority groups with little pushback.” In another remarkable footnote, the judge went further: “It also pains this Court to have to point out that not all Muslims are terrorists.”

The judge’s ruling and the stark language directed at DeSantis should have paused Florida’s campaign against protected speech. But in a second remarkable move last week, the Republican-led Legislature moved to upend the court’s decision by giving DeSantis the very censorship authority the judge denied.

The Florida Senate approved a bill Thursday allowing the governor to label groups as “terrorist organizations,” in a move that could target college students and Islamic schools that receive public money. Under the legislation, which passed mostly on partisan lines, groups dubbed as a terrorist organization could lose public funding, and students who support them could be expelled. The sanctions would be initiated by the governor’s chosen head of the Florida Department of Law Enforcement under a process in which the factual basis for a terrorist determination could be kept secret.

This is nothing more than a legalized star chamber that would enable the governor to continue trafficking in Islamophobia or whatever bigotry of the day. It shows again the Legislature’s utter failure to serve as a check on a runaway governor and the fragile state of liberties in the so-called Free State of Florida.