Sorehead DeSANTIS is soooo unhappy. Ivy League, demagogic, retaliatory, rebarbative retromingent baby-taking, behaving badly, always whining, kvetching and looking for a fight. How gauche and louche. From Jacksonville, Florida Times-Union:
New laws make DeSantis' simmering Florida meaner and more dangerous | Commentary
The 2024 Florida legislative session reached its bleak denouement this week, when nearly 180 new laws took effect, many with sweeping, pernicious and — with enduring right-wing majorities locked in place — virtually irreversible changes to the state's quality of life. The upshot is a Florida less safe for workers, less culturally rich, more corrupt, and less free, a sunbaked place where kids can work long hours and local governments can't protect workers from record-setting heat, where the cops get to police their own conduct, where the sea reclaims cities while the state airbrushes "climate change" out of its statutes. And, for reasons known only to the hayseed legislator who proposed it, residents can now shoot black bears on impulse.
Nature has failed to cooperate with Tallahassee's designs. While climate change terminology has now been officially scrubbed out of Florida's policy books, South Florida is still recovering from a record, monsoon-like series of June rains and the frightening Hurricane Beryl — the earliest Atlantic Category 5 in recorded history — serves as a haunting opening act for the storms to come.
These phenomena are not, as Gov. Ron DeSantis' flacks have argued, ordinary rainy season inconveniences. They are harbingers of the hotter, more dangerous world we are simultaneously creating and inheriting. No one is asking DeSantis or his legislative allies to change the weather — the Capitol is no place for miracles — but their denialism, their reactive posture and their obsession with culture-war catnip at the expense of solving real-world problems, like the state's failed private insurance market, cost us all.
And when they're not solving real-world problems, they're deep in the business of inventing new ones: Legislators and the governor snapped into action to block local governments from mandating that private employers offer heat-exposure protections and water breaks to their employees — because why, in a humid, agrarian state like Florida, parts of which have experienced record heat this summer, would any local government want to do that?
Eroding home rule — that is, the idea that local communities should have the power of self-governance, a concept that helped move Florida into modernity — has been a long-running project of the state's right-wing government, always seeking to expand its size and reach into ideologically diverse counties and cities. This centralization of power is the connective tissue throughout much of the most noxious pieces of legislation that became law this week, or will become law later this year.
So the heat-protection ban, for example, worked for legislators on two levels: craven corporate fealty (read: political donations) and taking away local autonomy. They liked it so much they did it twice: Another new law prevents cities from using their influence through public contracts to encourage private businesses to adopt higher minimum wages, a ban that will cost real people real money.
But don't worry: If heat-stroked parents can't make ends meet, their teenage kids can now work longer hours to help support the household — Florida's nod to the Gilded Age ambitions of its elected officials.
Maybe some local communities want citizen police review boards and some don't. Them's the breaks in a free society. Now, however, it doesn't matter: Only the cops can organize such boards and select its members.
Local ethics watchdogs will also be neutered. That law, which DeSantis recently signed, won't take effect until October, so public officials have some runway to plan out their fabulous misdeeds.
Public school teachers must now instruct students on the "increasing threat" of communism while Florida's elected leaders run interference on behalf of the criminally inclined, insurrection-forward Donald Trump. And teachers at so-called classical academies — charter schools with a marked conservative bent — can get watered-down certificates to qualify as Florida educators.
Chaplains can now volunteer to provide services to students in public schools, an eye-rolling idea that predictably drew heaping praise from the fine folks at The Satanic Temple who are eager to offer their services to help Florida's youth. "That is not a religion," King DeSantis inveighed, perhaps unaware of the temple's rather churchy IRS status.
DeSantis, of course, co-authored this sad chapter with his legislative allies. Where lawmakers failed to maximize their cruelty, DeSantis rushed in to fill the void. His first-of-its-kind, across-the-board veto of arts and culture funding — about $32 million in all — feels of a piece with his ongoing battle with the modern world. Curiously, DeSantis sees sex everywhere: in books, art, movies, parties. A spurious fear some tiny fraction of this arts funding might have gone to a prurient enterprise apparently prompted DeSantis' veto, in his telling.
Florida is hotter, meaner, and more dangerous. It takes more money than ever to live here, and Florida provides fewer resources than ever to those without it. Florida's diversity, once a great strength, is now forsaken as a tool of Marxism or Faucism or technofacistvaccinism or some other kind of ism. Florida's elected leaders once built coalitions; now they build walls and dig divisions between us. This once-New South state is now Deep South to the core, Mississippi with more coast, Louisiana with less spice.
That is the place Florida's leaders are willing into existence one crushing legislative session after the next. For Floridians, it's a tragedy. For the politicians, it's mission accomplished.
Nate Monroe is a Florida columnist for the USA Today Network. Follow him on Twitter @NateMonroeTU. Email him at nmonroe@gannett.com.
Nate Monroe
Just don't forget where the nut job came from. So much for Republicanism being about protecting localities from state and federal government. They get in there and wield the hammer after they talk that nonsense.
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