He Wrote a Biting Post About Charlie Kirk. The Fury Came Fast.

One by one, the angry residents who had packed the council chambers on Monday night in Palmetto Bay, Fla., stepped to the podium to express their disgust over online comments that a councilman, Stephen Cody, had made about Charlie Kirk.

One man called Mr. Cody’s comments “vile.” Another called them “abnormal and dangerous.” A third man said that the councilman’s Facebook post, which went up a few hours after Mr. Kirk was fatally shot in Utah, “smells like it came out of the pit of hell.”

All three wanted Mr. Cody to resign from office. If that did not happen, a fourth speaker said, “We’ll come after him.” While he did not intend to harm Mr. Cody, he added, “He’s not going to have a very nice life while he’s living here.”

The most contentious civic matters anyone had anticipated this month in Palmetto Bay, a prosperous Miami suburb of 25,000, involved the tax rate and the details of a contract to manage a municipal pickleball facility. But in the last few days, Palmetto Bay, like many communities around the country, has been consumed by the wave of ferocious indignation directed at people who declared their lack of remorse about Mr. Kirk’s death or merely took issue with things he had said or believed.

There have been higher-profile subjects as well. On Wednesday, ABC announced that it was pulling Jimmy Kimmel’s late night comedy show “indefinitely” amid conservative criticism of his on-air comments related to Tyler Robinson, the suspect charged with Mr. Kirk’s killing on Sept. 10.

In a monologue on Monday, Mr. Kimmel said that “the MAGA gang was desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them.”

A charging document filed by prosecutors this week said that Mr. Robinson’s mother told investigators that her son had grown more political recently, and that his political views had moved to the left.

ABC’s announcement came shortly after Brendan Carr, the Trump appointee in charge of the Federal Communications Commission, suggested that local stations carrying Mr. Kimmel’s program could be punished.

In the case of Mr. Cody, a 68-year-old Democrat, some prominent Florida Republicans are calling on Gov. Ron DeSantis to suspend him from office.

“In multiple instances, you have exercised your constitutional authority to suspend local officials whose actions or behavior undermined the confidence Floridians have in their government,” two members of Congress, Randy Fine and Carlos Gimenez of Florida, wrote to the Republican governor on Tuesday. “This is one of those moments where such decisive action is necessary.”

Mr. Cody is a former lawyer with a disputatious streak and a record of suing and quarreling with political opponents. But even some of his enemies think removing him from office for his post on Mr. Kirk would be wrong.

The post included a meme with a well-known quote from Mr. Kirk, in which the conservative star said, “It’s worth it to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God given rights.”

Mr. Cody, in his own words, added: “Charlie Kirk is a fitting sacrifice to our Lords: Smith & Wesson. Hallowed be their names.”

Mr. Cody said he was trying to make a point about gun violence. “I don’t support violence,” he said. “But I just thought it was incredibly ironic.”

Mr. Cody added that he was disturbed by the broader efforts to fire people, especially public employees, who made comments critical of Mr. Kirk.

“The government shouldn’t be in the job of saying, ‘If you’re going to say something nice, we allow it,’” he said, “‘but if you say something that will upset someone, you can be fired.’”

He said he had no plans to resign.

The five-member Village Council, which is nonpartisan, met on Monday night for a previously scheduled zoning meeting; at the last minute, the group had expanded the agenda to include a discussion of Mr. Cody’s post. The council was greeted with a capacity crowd. The mayor, Karyn Cunningham, had already released a statement urging Mr. Cody, who was elected in 2020, to step down.

“As a mother and your mayor, I am both saddened and disturbed,” she said of Mr. Cody’s post in her statement. “Violence has no place in our community or in our nation, and words that seek to diminish or make light of such tragedy are equally harmful.”

The people of Palmetto Bay, she added, “deserve leadership that reflects compassion, responsibility and dignity in moments of crisis.”

After members of the public spoke, the council voted 4-1 to pass a resolution censuring Mr. Cody. He was the sole no vote, and he had remained largely silent amid the impassioned pleas that he step down. The mayor told the crowd that the council did not have the legal authority to remove Mr. Cody.

“He mocked sacred values, the respect we owe the dead, the respect we show to religion, the respect we give to grieving families,” said Councilwoman Marsha Matson, adding: “In just a few words, he managed to denigrate faith, civic engagement and basic human compassion.”

Mr. Cody acknowledges that he is not “your typical politician,” and that his style is not for everyone.

The style can be irreverent: Mr. Cody has diabetes and sight problems, and wears a prosthetic after a leg amputation. He sends a newsletter around called “Observations of a Half-Blind, One-Legged Council Member.” An illustrator, he has been known to post online caricatures of residents around town — a practice that critics say is unbecoming of an elected official.

According to the Florida Bar, Mr. Cody’s law license was suspended in 2013 after he was accused of passing a bad check and failing to adequately communicate with a client. Court records show he has filed for numerous bankruptcies.

Mr. Cody has also been accused of trying to extort a political opponent, former Councilman David Singer, when Mr. Cody first ran for the council in 2020. In a pending defamation lawsuit filed by Mr. Singer, he alleges that Mr. Cody threatened “to make false statements and disclosures” about Mr. Singer “unless he resigned his public office and withdrew from running.”

Mr. Cody says that it was Mr. Singer who defamed him, “and I said that, instead of suing him for that, I would be happy not to sue him on the condition that he resign from office.”

Mr. Singer and others have also criticized Mr. Cody for posting what they considered inappropriate illustrations he has made of girls and women in bathing suits. Mr. Cody defended the illustrations. “It wasn’t lascivious,” he said.

Mr. Cody is currently suing Mark Merwitzer, the vice mayor, and the Village of Palmetto Bay, arguing that Mr. Merwitzer was not appropriately sworn into office in 2024.

Mr. Merwitzer does not believe the governor should remove Mr. Cody from office because of his Facebook post. “That would be a huge First Amendment problem,” he said in an interview.

Still, he is hoping that the state will take up the request to investigate Mr. Cody, and find that some of his actions while in office — including what Mr. Merwitzer calls the “baseless” lawsuit against him — are reason enough for suspension.

Dr. Matson, the councilwoman, thinks the Facebook post alone is sufficient grounds for the governor to remove Mr. Cody. “I will defend the First Amendment to the end,” said Dr. Matson, a retired lecturer in American government at the University of Miami. “But as a public officer and elected representative of our community, there’s a higher standard for him than a private citizen. And that is to be constrained, to be responsible and not pop off with his cockamamie ideas.”

A number of residents said that they would try to remove Mr. Cody with a recall effort, but under state law, such an effort could not begin until December.

For now, the ball is in Mr. DeSantis’s court. The governor removed two progressive elected prosecutors, in 2022 and 2023, a move that critics have characterized as politicized abuses of power.

Florida law gives the governor the power to suspend local elected or appointed office holders for a number of reasons, including “malfeasance,” “misfeasance” and “neglect of duty.”

Asked what Mr. DeSantis might do, his deputy press secretary, Sierra Dean, directed a reporter to comments the governor made during the unveiling of a statue of Benjamin Franklin in the Florida Panhandle on Wednesday.

Mr. DeSantis said that while the government was not “going to put you in jail” for exercising free speech rights, there were different rules for people in certain jobs.

“When you’re in these positions of trust — when you’re in education, when you’re in government service, when you’re in health care, where other people are impacted by what you’re doing,” he said, “there’s a higher standard of conduct that we have a right to insist upon.”

Anthony V. Alfieri, a law professor at the University of Miami and director of the school’s Center for Ethics and Public Service, said that the governor most likely has the power to remove Mr. Cody over the Facebook post, though he called it “a highly controversial and dramatic use — or, rather, alarming use — of the governor’s suspension powers under the statute.”

James Uthmeier, the state’s Republican attorney general and Mr. DeSantis’s former chief of staff, has already called on Mr. Cody to resign over his online comments.

Mr. Cody earns $1,000 per month as a councilman, and is provided with health insurance and a car allowance, which he said were helpful given his medical issues.

He said he was prepared to fight any removal effort in court.

“If every politician were instantly disqualified for doing something stupid,” he said, “nobody would be allowed to serve at any level of government.”