Daniel Tilson: 2015 Florida Legislature begins preparing for more of the same

Like the excitement baseball fans feel every February when they hear the first crack of the bats in Spring Training, the creaking noises coming from Tallahassee this week are putting smiles on the faces of many a Sunshine State politico.

Not so much everybody else, with good reasons.

Yes, the new edition of the Florida Legislature is whirring into prep mode with a series of organizational meetings and procedural moves that serve as a blueprint for the 60-day 2015 legislative sausage-making session starting March 3.

Beyond the insiders, pundits and columnists like me, the nearly 19 million people who call Florida home will mostly be oblivious to a process that for the next two years — and given the long reach of laws once they’re passed, far longer — will have huge impact on how their lives will unfold.

For example; if you’re one of almost a half-million men and women working two or three low-wage jobs and have no health insurance because the Republican Party of Florida (RPOF) chose anti-Obama partisan politics over common-sense public policy, you’ll have to keep praying for no life-threatening conditions, illnesses and accidents.

If you’re one of millions of middle-class taxpayers forced by the RPOF to cover the crazy-high costs of caring for those uninsured men and women when they turn up at emergency rooms with advanced stages of long-untreated illnesses, you’ll have to keep paying that price for their gamesmanship.

You’ll also keep paying for the upside-down economic “recovery” being engineered by Gov. Rick Scott, his Cabinet and the rest of the RPOF. Facts show that on their watch most new jobs created have been low-wage, no-benefits ones. Also, big corporations keep racking up record profits and the rich keep getting infinitely richer. Meanwhile, statewide poverty ranks keep growing, and the vast middle class is left, at best, warily treading water — and perhaps at worst, so fearful of sinking lower that it accepts the lack of economic fairness as the “new normal”.

If your children attend public schools, you’re going to want to stash away extra dough for basic supplies and fundraisers, as the RPOF keeps using Orwellian “doublespeak” such as “school choice” and “parent empowerment” to expand the transfer of tax money to privately run, for-profit and religious schools.

If you want music and art to be a part of your children’s education, you’ll want to figure out how, as public schools will be forced to cut back on any curriculum considered “non-essential” — which means anything not covered by the overwhelming standardized testing favored by the RPOF.

You also may want to focus on plans to keep your family safe if dangerous weather related to climate change erupts as expected. You will not be getting help from the RPOF, which rejects the evidence of climate change and embraces dirty, damaging energy sources.

Now, after writing about the upcoming legislative session, that smile of mine has turned upside down.

Yet it’s a determined frown.

Sure, this is the government you get when voter disengagement and apathy among lower and middle-income people with the most to lose becomes an epidemic.

But you know what?

Even though the RPOF totally controls our government, we do have what is supposed to be a genuine alternative, a contrarian counterbalance, an opposition party…and hopefully, much more.

Time now to see just how much more the Florida Democratic Party can be.

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.