Some proposed amendments
to Florida’s Constitution pair some needed changes with real stinkers, Scott Maxwell writes.
If I offered you a lump of cat poo, you’d probably say: Um, no thanks.
But what if I offered you a lump of cat poo wrapped in a hundreddollar bill? Maybe, right? That’s essentially the deal that a bunch of political appointees are offering you this fall.
They want you to change the Florida Constitution. And to get you to approve all the stinkers they want stuffed in there, they’re throwing in sweeteners as well.
Take civics classes, for instance. Many people probably think it’s a swell idea for school students to take civics classes. So the state’s Constitution Revision Commission drafted an amendment that calls for “the promotion of civic literacy.”
Sounds good (if nebulous), right?
Except the only way you can vote for “civic literacy” is if you also agree to exempt some publicly funded charter schools from local regulations and accountability.
One thing has nothing to do with the other. Honest brokers would let citizens vote on each issue separately. That way, you could vote for the civics classes (the C-note) and against the antiaccountability policy (the poo).
But not here. As a result, people who actually like civics lessons may vote against them — people such as former Gov. Bob Graham, who has spent most of his life encouraging civic engagement. “I’m going to end up voting against an amendment that I feel strongly about because it’s surrounded by what I think is bad policy,” Graham recently told the Sarasota HeraldTribune.
And that’s just one of several bad examples.
Another amendment asks you to guarantee benefits to the families of firefighters killed in the line of duty — but only if you also agree to change voting policies at college boards of trustees.
Those two things have about as much in common as black holes and alfalfa sprouts.
Yet another seeks to ban nearshore drilling — but only if voters also agree to ban vaping in places where one or more people work. (I love that detail — that it only covers businesses where “one or more persons engages in work.” So if you happen to own a “workplace” where no one actually works, you’d be exempted.)
Your ballot is going to look like a bunch of sampler platters where other people chose all the samples. Sure, one has wings and tater tots. But it also has pickled tripe. Your only choice is to take or leave the whole dish.
The commission’s work has been widely derided — by watchdogs, editorial boards and even the special interests involved. (Oil and gas lobbyists now must figure out how to run a campaign in favor of vaping rights … which, Lord help me, has me sympathetic to oil and gas lobbyists.)
Now, the people who did all this — mainly appointees of the governor, House speaker and Senate president — are quite defensive
about the work they did.
In one missive, member Brecht Heuchan lectured critics that he and his peers simply “grouped” some items together, putting the word “grouped” in quotes, as if that made it extra official and undeniably acceptable. It did not. It’s still “shady.”
Heuchan went on to declare: “Grouping is not new and not controversial.”
Take a moment to appreciate that sentence. He penned an op-ed in response to widespread controversy and declared it not controversial.
It’s like looking at a boll weevil and declaring: “That is not a boll weevil.”
Now, I’m sure the group did some solid work and that some members offered up their service of more than a year with noble intentions.
Members say they combined issues simply to prevent the ballot from running on too long with too many separate questions.
But attempting to do something briefly isn’t a good excuse for doing it poorly. And it’s just poor public policy to bundle together unrelated items in a bunch of take-it-or-leave-it offers.
There are a few straightforward, single-issue amendments — like a proposal to ban greyhound racing. And voters will also get to vote on a clear-cut amendment that more than 800,000 Floridians (not political appointees) got on the ballot to end Florida’s archaic system of stripping many people convicted of felonies of civil rights for the rest of their lives.
My inclination is to vote against everything that has unrelated topics lumped together. I don’t want to encourage anyone to do this again 20 years from now.
My other conclusion is that asking a bunch of political appointees to go mess around with the constitution every 20 years is an inherently flawed idea.