Florida Legislature at mid-term: If you're not scared, you're not paying attention
Commentary from Florida Phoenix columnist Diane Roberts
By Diane Roberts
It’s just past midway through Florida’s legislative session, and things appear to be going at a slow, but not remotely stately, pace.
What have the people’s representatives accomplished, you ask?
Well, let’s see: Out of 1,800 bills filed, at least two have passed. Might be some more sneaking in by the time you read this.
Come on, legislators can’t be expected to spend their valuable time on frivolities such as improving the lives of Floridians.
Not in the face of urgent matters such as renaming the Palm Beach International Airport for the Current Occupant of the White House.
It’ll cost $5.5 million, and county residents aren’t necessarily thrilled to bits, but who cares? It’s all about the branding.
As ever, the Legislature is laser-focused on education — mostly how to keep kids from reading books and thinking for themselves.
According to House Republicans, school libraries teem with smut, material “harmful to minors.”
They mean “sexual content,” which is apparently the same thing as “pornography.”
The House has passed such nonsense before and would have gotten away with it if those pesky free-speech advocates and their co-conspirators in the judiciary hadn’t thrown the First Amendment at them and claimed works by Toni Morrison (slavery!), Shakespeare (cross dressing!), James Baldwin (gay!), and Kurt Vonnegut (anti-American! Anti-war!) are actually “great works of art.”
Well, HB 1119‘s sponsors, annoyed the law from last year (and the year before that) was “improperly bypassed,” have declared “artistic merit” irrelevant.
Frightened school boards across the state have responded by yanking many of the literary glories of Western Civilization (which I thought we liked) off library shelves, including Milton’s mighty Christian epic, “Paradise Lost.”
Adam and Eve have sex in Eden. Filth!
Naming rights
Another big bill on the horizon is SB 420, which mandates all schools display portraits of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln in a “conspicuous place,” along with “In God We Trust.”
This is part of a “patriotic education” initiative to instill in children reverence for the United States, whether they like it or not.
As George Bernard Shaw (probably) said, “Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all others because you were born in it.”
At the same level of significance to the well-being of the citizenry: What to call the illegally occupied territory, the heart of a future Palestinian state, on the western side of the River Jordan?
The Florida House does not want you to call it the “West Bank.”
They want you to call it “Judea and Samaria,” like in the Bible.
They even have a bipartisan bill to, as Rep. Mike Gottlieb, D-Davie, says, “right a wrong,” claiming not calling it Judea and Samaria is “a ban on Jewish heritage,” and the Florida Legislature must “restore the history and dignity of the people who are indigenous to the region.”
There are a couple of problems with this, problems which could have been avoided if only somebody in the Florida Legislature actually bothered to learn something:
“The people indigenous to the region” include Palestinians, descendants of the Canaanites who established cities there 4,000 years ago.
Palestinians and Israelis are not divided by ethnicity or genetics, but culture. While many Israeli Jews also have European ancestry, they are more closely linked to the people their government keeps bombing.
In a now-retracted 2001 article available on the National Institutes of Health site, scholars point out that “archaeologic and genetic data support that both Jews and Palestinians came from the ancient Canaanites, who extensively mixed with Egyptians, Mesopotamian, and Anatolian peoples in ancient times.”
Birds and pistols
Never mind. We have plenty of other big issues here in Florida, such as who will win the coveted title of state avian?
The House has approved a measure to replace the mockingbird with the American Flamingo.
It’s now up to the Senate.
Very dramatic. We await the vote with anticipation and excitement.
Almost as dramatic, a passionate effort to protect our cruelly oppressed firearm manufacturing friends.
Sig Sauer needs relief from careless cops and others objecting to the way their P320 pistol fires without them touching the trigger or even removing the gun from their holsters.
Zachary Seldes, an Indian River County sheriff’s deputy, was badly injured by his P320, which went off just as he removed his body armor.
He’s suing Sig Sauer.
Lots of people are suing Sig Sauer.
But Florida lawmakers would rather they didn’t. You can’t go dragging decent gun makers into court just because their pistol doesn’t include an external safety and a loaded chamber indicator.
Bill sponsor Jay Turnbull, R-Panama City, said such fripperies are merely “a matter of consumer preference, not product safety defects.”
Indian River County Sheriff Eric Flowers (along with the many law enforcement departments who no longer use Sig Sauer products) begs to differ, saying it’s “scary” that “there are guns going off without manipulation.”
The Senate Judiciary Committee doesn’t care: The bill passed on a bipartisan vote, sending it along its merry way through the process.
At this point, you may be saying SURELY the Legislature is looking at the high cost of insurance in Florida, the lack of affordable housing, polluted water, diminishing wildlife habitat, school funding, climate change, and healthcare.
We poor, naive voters think such things are “important.”
Clearly, we don’t understand what’s important is increasing the government’s ability to use our money to undermine our rights.
No succor for sojourners
Take the $5 billion slush, er, “emergency fund,” the Legislature granted the governor in 2022.
They were largely thinking of hurricanes, fires, floods. DeSantis is largely thinking of rounding up anyone and everyone who looks “wrong,” including legally present asylum seekers, people accused of traffic infractions, even some American citizens, and building detention camps such as the so-called “Alligator Alcatraz,” now polluting the Everglades.
The fund was also used for private jets. And vitamins. And tacos.
You, taxpayer, coughed up for a $2,170 bill at Pedro’s Tacos and Tequila Bar, paid $479,000 for private jet flights to and from the Everglades, and shelled out nearly $93 million to Doodie Calls, a port-a-potty company.
DeSantis, naturally, wants another $500 million to play with.
The Senate is happy to shovel another $250 million at him; the House balked at first, wanting to restrict how the governor can use the money. The chamber backed down, but still wants to review his declarations of “manmade” or “technological” disasters (like immigration).
We’ll see who wins.
Even worse — assuming you take seriously being a citizen of a representative democracy — the Legislature wants to make it harder for you to vote.
Sen. Erin Grall, R-Vero Beach, is sponsoring a bill that would demand proof of citizenship to register, although it’s already illegal for non-citizens to vote.
You’d need a REAL ID driver’s license, a birth certificate, or a valid passport; you’d need to prove residency in Florida, too.
For starters, non-citizens do not vote. Between 1999 and 2023, only 77 even tried.
That’s nationwide, not just Florida: 77 out of about 150 million.
(By the way, that number comes from the Heritage Foundation’s Election Fraud Database.)
Illegal opinions
But Grall wants to gin up hysteria over illegals stealing our elections, never mind — say it with me — that THAT DOES NOT HAPPEN.
A cynical person might say this bill is designed to make it hard for the poor and the old, those who may not have a driver’s license or passport and can’t afford or otherwise can’t access a copy of their birth certificate.
Or those who live in Florida as students.
The law says students don’t need a permanent address in Florida: They can use a campus address and register to vote here.
Maybe the real problem is that students don’t vote “correctly.”
Sen. Grall is not crazy about students. Her SB 1632, “Ideologies Inconsistent with American Principles,” allows FDLE to define groups as “domestic terrorist organizations” and mandates that if a student gets involved in one of these organizations, the student will be expelled.
This is the state of our state, y’all: The Legislature wastes your time and money on nonsense such as what to call airports or debatable land thousands of miles away, which bird represents us best, or which books should be banned — stupid stuff that would be funny if only our government wasn’t attacking our liberties.
Which brings us to the worst bill so far, a truly sinister measure to create a secret surveillance agency to spy on Floridians.
HB 945 and its companion SB 1712 would “criminalize dissent,” instituting a counterintelligence outfit within FDLE, dedicated to clamping down on anyone “whose demonstrated actions, views, or opinions are a threat or are inimical to the interests of this state and the United States of America.”
Look carefully at that wording. It’s not just “threatening” actions: Everyone wants to be protected from terrorism.
It’s also “views and opinions.”
Creepily Nixonian
Who decides what “views and opinions” are unacceptable here in the not-so-free, not-so-sunshiny State of Florida?
Who decides what “ideologies” are inimical to “American principles” (whatever those may be)?
If I say we should have universal healthcare, or that the United States is not the best country on earth — all protected speech — will the state Stasi come knocking on my door?
Who decides what the “interests” of the state and the nation might be?
Erin Grall? Ron DeSantis? Donald Trump?
By the way, this isn’t the usual D versus R divide — many Democrats support these bills.
The Florida Trident reports that Florida has been spending a lot of taxpayer dollars on an Israeli outfit called Cellebrite, which, the Trident says, employs “veterans of the country’s elite cyberwarfare unit,” agents who specialize “in data extraction of cell phones and accessing data without the user’s knowledge.”
Perhaps I’m old-fashioned, but this creepily Nixonian business strikes me as profoundly “inconsistent with American principles,” not to mention unconstitutional.
We’re in trouble. And if you’re not scared, you’re not paying attention.
Diane Roberts is an 8th-generation Floridian, born and bred in Tallahassee, which probably explains her unhealthy fascination with Florida politics. Educated at Florida State University and Oxford University in England, she has been writing for newspapers since 1983. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, the Times of London, the Guardian, the Washington Post, the Oxford American, and Flamingo.
Florida Phoenix is part of States Newsroom, the nation’s largest state-focused nonprofit news organization. This story is republished with their permission. To support Florida Phoenix, click here:
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Thanks Diane for your report. I'm one who protests and sends letters by the hundreds to our deep red reps to no avail. Now Sen. Ashley Moody is putting forth legislation saying that it is ok to kill protesters. I don't mind saying that I'm deeply afraid to even go out and am embarrassed for our country, our relationships with our world allies, the survival of our democracy which today is in the toilet,. and now doubts of whether or not we will be able to vote. The post-WWI rules based world order was developed with world peace in mind. Yeah, it has not always gone so well what with the civil rights issues in the 60's, Viet Nam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. But on the whole it has gone reasonably well. Now all that is being torn down, and for what? One man's ego? Shame on us for letting this happen.
Excellent reporting and work you do. Thank you...from this overworked, underpaid, FL public school teacher...58 years in the state of FL.
I'm aghast and do what I can