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I personally wouldn't want crowds of strangers gathering near my house during a coronavirus pandemic...but then again, I'm not a selfish crybaby repug.
Mike Huckabee Just Sued the County Because It Closed His Beach – Mother Jones
Apparently his 10,000-square-foot mansion with a pool isn’t enough space for a quarantine.
Mike Huckabee has been trying for years to keep people off the beach in front of his $6 million McMansion on the Gulf Coast of Florida. Since he bought the house in 2011, he has complained that the 115-foot spit of sugar-sand beach in front of his Walton County property has been fouled by pot-smoking kids and pooping dogs. Most shocking of all, he once saw a young couple strip naked and have sex on a YOLO board there at two in the afternoon. But now that the county has finally closed the beach and kicked out all the spring breakers as part of its pandemic response, Huckabee has sued the county because he can’t go out there either.
On Monday, the former Arkansas governor and presidential candidate joined with a bunch of his rich neighbors to sue Walton County, Florida, in federal court, alleging that the county’s beach closing order has left them faced with “threats of criminal prosecution for doing no more than setting foot in their own backyards that they own.” They told the court that the beach closure order constitutes an illegal taking of property without compensation and violates their constitutionally guaranteed property and due process rights. “The county’s ordinance forces family members into a confined space within their house rather than allow them to social distance and recreate in their sandy backyard,” the plaintiffs complained in a court document. (There has been an ongoing and heated legal fight over whether Huckabee really does technically “own” the beach in front of his house, which had been used by the public for centuries before he moved there.)
Undeterred, three days later, Huckabee filed his lawsuit, asking for an emergency injunction that would reopen his little patch of sand. A judge will hear the arguments on Monday. “I don’t know how he sleeps at night,” Daniel Uhlfelder, a Walton County attorney who has tangled with Huckabee before over public access to the beach near his house, told me. “This is a temporary attempt to protect the public. We’re in a pandemic. People are dying. And he’s suing the sheriff in federal court.”
Mike Huckabee Just Sued the County Because It Closed His Beach – Mother Jones