Martin Dyckman
It was one of those “There IS a God” moments when Gov. Rick Scott had to cancel a $10,000 per person fundraiser this month because his co-host was to be a convicted tax-evader who couldn’t legally vote for him.
With all the lawyers and law-enforcement agencies at his command, how could Scott not know that James Batmasian, a wealthy real estate developer, had served time for tax evasion? Why did he need “Mother Jones” magazine to find out?
Or perhaps he did know, but figured that nobody would catch on.
The serendipity is that it recalls how one of Scott’s first acts in office three years ago was to make it much more difficult for nonviolent offenders like Batmasian to regain their civil rights.
In that, Scott had the eager complicity of Attorney General Pam Bondi, Agriculture Secretary Adam Putnam and Chief Financial Officer Jeff Atwater.
They required ex-offenders to wait from five to seven years after being released from prison or supervision. That seems to leave Batmasian with at least three more years to go before he can even apply to get on the hugely backlogged waiting list. He won’t be able to vote for Scott in November. Pity.
Had Scott left well enough alone, the streamlined process he inherited from Charlie Crist would have restored Batmasian’s voting rights by now. He pleaded guilty in federal court six years ago to failing to pay the government $253,513 in taxes for his employees and was sentenced to eight months in prison and two years of supervised release.
But even though felons can’t vote until their rights are restored, they’re free to contribute as much money as other laws allow to any candidates of their choice.
Am I the only one who sees an inconsistency in that?
(In Batmasian’s case, it seems beside the point. His wife, Marta, is the big donor in the household, including $50,000 to Mitt Romney two years ago and $50,000 to the Florida Republican Party this year. She can even vote for Scott.)
It’s impossible to read what was in the minds of Scott and the Cabinet, but it’s a well-known fact that of the 1.5-million Floridians left in second-class citizenship even after their debts to society are paid, more than half are black. Florida leads the nation in both shameful statistics.
It is possible, of course, to believe that the Scott waiting periods have nothing to do with the Republican Party’s master voter suppression strategy.
It is at least as possible as the existence of the Great Pumpkin.
During what is wistfully remembered as the Golden Age of Florida Politics, the Legislature in 1974 passed a prison reform bill that, among many other things, called for the automatic reinstatement of civil rights upon a person’s discharge from prison or parole. North Carolina has a similar law.
Florida’s was the work of the late Sen. Kenneth Myers of Miami, an extraordinary human being who did everything he could to help Florida’s less fortunate citizens. He believed disenfranchisement was an enormous and unfair barrier to rehabilitation.
Gov. Reubin Askew signed the bill but asked the Florida Supreme Court for an advisory opinion on the provision’s constitutionality.
By a vote of 6-1, the court said automatic restoration infringed on the sole power of the governor and Cabinet.
“(W)here the Constitution expressly provides the manner of doing a thing, it impliedly forbids its being done in a substantially different manner,” the majority said.
Retiring Justice Richard Ervin, in the last of his many great dissents, said the court got it backward. He said the majority had confused the power of pardon, which erases a crime, with voting and other civil rights guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution. Moreover, he said, the rule ought to be that the Legislature can do anything that the state constitution does not forbid.
“After a citizen who was convicted of crime has paid his debt to society, I think it lies within the inherent reserved power of the Legislature as a constitutional responsibility to formally restore his civil rights. It should be done speedily, automatically, and routinely,” Ervin wrote.
As attorney general, Ervin had helped put people in prison and keep them there. As a justice, he understood the importance to society of helping them after they’re out.
He was right.
Martin Dyckman is a retired associate editor of the St. Petersburg Times. He lives near Waynesville, North Carolina. Column courtesy of Context Florida.
