The Sunshine (Reactionary) State

MIAMI – Let me define my terms at the outset. What I call reactionary is anybody who has no respect for the basic principles of democracy. The Florida GOP is reactionary because, among other things, it repeatedly overrides the will of the people as expressed in citizen initiatives. Things like diverting to other purposes money intended by voters to be used to buy land to restore the Everglades. Like trying to work around the will of the supermajority that voted last November to allow felons who had served their sentence to reclaim the franchise.

The Florida legislature is getting ready to conclude this year’s session and not a second too soon. Legislators this year have been busy crafting a sensational agenda—sensationally bad, especially when it comes to making this a safer, healthier, kinder state.

Since the Republican takeover decades ago, the legislature’s program has been simple. Lowering the taxes of those who can afford to pay (in a state that always has been paradise for the rich because there is no income tax). Cutting aid to those who really need it. Riding roughshod over any law or regulation that might cut into the profits of big business, mainly by blocking or undoing any environmental protection measure, bill or voter initiative.

Even by the standards of recent GOP legislatures, this has been a year of mad, bad ideas. The state’s answer to the Parkland massacre and the demands of students for stricter gun control is arming teachers. The response to deadly gun violence is more guns.

Florida’s response to the fact that this state fails to provide affordable health insurance to more of its citizens than many other state (because Florida perversely refused to accept essentially free federal dollars to expand Medicaid) is cutting Medicaid.

Seeing that this state, for decades, has been a magnet for immigrants and asylum seekers, and that these people have enriched the state economically and culturally and even helped the Republican Party, Florida’s response is to ban “sanctuary cities.”

There are no sanctuary cities in Florida. Even Miami, with the highest percentage of first-and-second generation immigrants in the nation, is not a sanctuary city. Why ban non-existing sanctuary cities? The base thinks there are sanctuary cities here, or they fear that in the future some liberal city like Gainesville may become one. In the meantime, it’s never a bad thing for Republicans to look like they are being tough against the plague of immigrants (and Latino U.S. citizens like Puerto Ricans who many of the xenophobes think are immigrants) who live in cities like Miami and Orlando.

Arming Teachers

Who in his right mind could think that a teacher, in the middle of a geography or history lesson, armed with a hand gun, caught by surprise, can stop a lunatic with a semiautomatic rifle? It’s a formula for predictable disasters, like “collateral damage” as students get caught in the crossfire. For the GOP, such lunacy is better than confronting the gun lobby.

Cutting Medicaid

Denying Medicaid to those sick people who depend on it for life-saving treatment, is more lethal than anything the felons (who Florida wants to cut out of the democratic process) ever did. The number of people who will die unnecessarily as a result of this measure will be larger than the toll extracted by the worst serial killer.

Denying Sanctuary

The GOP in Florida has managed to attract more naturalized or U.S.-born Latino voters than in any other state in the nation. But that will change soon. After Hurricane Maria, the Trump administration treated Puerto Rico not as a part of the U.S. but as another ‘shithole’ country. With the bill to ban sanctuary cities, the Republican leadership accomplished the feat of dividing their lockstep party and pissing off at least one Latina senator, Maritere Flores, who was the only Republican who voted no.

Predictably, my least favorite Martian, Rick Scott, from his perch in the U.S. Senate, spoke out in favor of the ban. Said something about everybody must follow the law. That’s gall. For a man who used Medicare as his personal cash cow and who supports Donald Trump, who has contempt for the rule of law and who hates every law enforcement agency unwilling to look the other way regarding his many misdeeds. That’s chutzpah.

Non-random act of unkindness

Among the other unconscionable measures adopted this year by the Florida legislature is the effort to disenfranchise felons who have served their sentences. The state has been doing that forever, but this year they had a problem, the wishes of the state’s voters. In the 2018 election, citizens approved, by a super-majority, ending that practice. Most people assumed that voters have the final say and that was the end of that. But no. Voter disenfranchisement benefits Republicans and so they rapidly set about maneuvering to find a way to undercut the verdict of the voters. And they think they found it: forcing the people who would benefit from last year’s referendum to pay through the nose for getting their vote back.

This one deserves an award for most anti-democratic. Legislators want to continue to deny the franchise to a significant number of voters. They want to do that by undemocratically negating the clear desire of the voters. That’s doubly anti-democratic.

But the GOP legislature was not through afflicting the afflicted. “Florida may raise requirements for Bright Futures,” reads the headline in the April 24 edition of The Miami Herald. Whose Futures would be dimmed by this brilliant proposal? As the Herald reported, “every time eligibility requirements are raised minority and-low income students bear the brunt…. Sixty-three percent of black students and 46 percent of Hispanic students who currently qualify for that scholarship would lose eligibility.” Somehow, I suspect this is not a bug in the proposed new system but a design feature.

As long as Republicans have a stranglehold on the state legislature, the future for the common people of this state, the average person or family that struggles to make ends meet, lives paycheck to paycheck and would be unable to pay for an unexpected medical emergency, will not be bright.