Daniel TilsonLike a crew of clumsy card sharks armed with trick decks, Gov. Rick Scott and Republican legislators have turned the final days of the 2014 session into a rigged political poker tournament. Bankrolled by our tax dollars, they keep betting, raising and bluffing with bravado. But we’re the ones with most of the skin in the game.
Scott won his 2010 election playing a Tea Party-pandering hand, stacked against immigration reform. He stuck with it in vetoing 2013 legislation that would have let undocumented immigrants get driver licenses.
Then came 2014 and a re-election campaign stained by the resignation of a top Hispanic official, who said he was offended by campaign staffers’ ethnic slurs and an atmosphere of “paranoia” and “insensitivity.” So, Scott folds the anti-reform hand and plays a wild card, publicly proclaiming support for legislation granting in-state college tuition rates to undocumented immigrants, insisting it get a Senate floor vote after easy, early passage in the House.
But two of the state’s most powerful Republican senators are stuck in a five-card-stud game over the bill. Sponsor Jack Latvala is playing one procedural card after another trying to force it to a floor vote. But Joe Negron won’t even let it come to the table in the Senate Appropriations Committee he’s chairman of.
Negron’s blockade bluff is about “ascertaining the present and future fiscal impact” of the bill. And oh, by the way… Latvala is Negron’s big rival for Senate President in 2016.
In another corner of this Tallahassee poker hall, House Speaker Will Weatherford banks on a Latvala win. He made passage of an in-state tuition bill a 2014 priority, and got it smoothly through the House. Seeing it fold in the Senate would be an embarrassing loss.
Weatherford holds the right card — tuition equity for innocent youngsters who want to go to college and get good jobs. But he’s dealing from a trick deck, gambling that doing something good “for the kids” will make people forget the damage he’s done as House leader.
Top of that list would have to be the terrible hand he dealt Florida by leading the House in its rejection of $52 billion in federal funding for upwards of 800,000 working-poor Floridians to get health insurance. From saving lives, to saving taxes, to creating jobs, this was such an obvious win-win-win — even Gov. Scott claimed he supported it.
But Weatherford wouldn’t fold. So, uninsured people keep getting sick and needlessly dying, middle-class taxes are still being used to pay for the very expensive emergency room care the uninsured receive, and good jobs are still hard to come by.
While the governor mouthed words of support last year for accepting the Medicaid expansion dollars, he has failed for two legislative sessions in a row to force Weatherford’s hand in the House.
Then came news in recent days that Scott’s considering calling the Legislature back into special session in May — not to force them to keep past promises and find a way to expand access to health care, but rather, to approve a new gaming deal he’s almost done cutting with Florida’s Seminole gambling bigwigs.
You can’t make this stuff up. Unfortunately, our Republican governor and legislators do.
These double-dealers talk a good game on public education. But they focus their energies on pushing for-profit charter and voucher privatization schemes.
They keep bluffing us about protecting personal freedom and “choice,” about wanting smaller, less intrusive government. But they just passed an anti-choice bill sticking state government between pregnant women and their physicians.
Forget sleight of hand. It’s sleight of mouth that’s the name of the game in this closing week of the Capitol casino.
Daniel Tilson has a Boca Raton-based communications firm called Full Cup Media, specializing in online video and written content for non-profits, political candidates and organizations, and small businesses. Column courtesy of Context Florida.
