■ Florida Democrats
blast president and their party’s Iowa caucuses ahead of Trump’s speech.
Florida Democrats criticized both President Donald Trump and their own party’s Iowa caucuses in a conference call with reporters Tuesday before the State of the Union address.
U.S. Rep. Darren Soto, DKissimmee, said Trump “has led one of the most untruthful, corrupt administrations in our country. He’s divided our nation and he has continued to break his promises for the sunshine state. And I expect to hear more of the same tonight.”
Soto said Florida has the largest federal health care exchange, with nearly 2 million Floridians getting their health care through the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare.
“Yet Trump is still suing to try to eliminate Obamacare and eliminate protections for pre-existing conditions,” Soto said.
He also criticized Trump for pulling out of the Paris Climate Accord, when “we see from Miami Beach all the way through to the Panhandle, whether it’s high tide or hurricane, Florida’s vulnerable.”
Puerto Ricans, Soto added, “suffered from one of the worst disaster relief recovery efforts in the history of our nation after Hurricane Maria [in 2017], with nearly 3000 of my fellow Boricuas dying because of the failed efforts of the Trump administration. And to make matters worse, to date, they have received less than half the money we allocated.”
In 2019, Trump falsely inflated the amount of federal disaster Puerto Rico has received since Hurricane Maria, saying the island “should be very happy” about the federal response.
But Democrats also had harsh words for the Iowa Democratic Party’s slowness in releasing results from Monday’s caucuses.
U.S. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Aventura, the former chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee, said it was long past the time to end Iowa’s early outsized role in picking presidential candidates.
The mess in collecting and releasing accurate results from Monday night’s Democratic presidential caucuses would probably hasten the demise, something she said is a good outcome.
“Iowa’s probably on its last breath of remaining as the first state using the caucus system,” Wasserman Schultz said on a conference call with reporters.
Caucuses aren’t a fair way to run elections, she said. Making it worse, she said, Iowa is a poor choice for culling presidential candidates because it so unrepresentative of what America looks like.
Wasserman Schultz — who as national party chairwoman trekked several times to the Iowa State Fair — said Tuesday she had “tremendous respect” for Iowans and “the pride that they take in going first and their role in being a proving ground for presidential candidates.”
But that doesn’t overcome problems with the caucus system, which she called an “un-democratic” way of running an election. She said the party has been inching away from caucuses, and they should be completely eliminated.
Participation in caucuses requires people to go to a caucus location for a lengthy gathering, and publicly move to an area in which their choice is open to everyone to see.
Then there’s movement in which supporters of the worst-performing candidates can join up with the better-performing candidates.
In most primary states, such as Florida, voters can go to neighborhood polling stations on primary day, go to centralized early-voting locations in advance, or vote by mail.
“Caucuses are not a fair way to run elections. We need to make sure that we retain the principle of one person one vote, which is the commitment that we make in this country and you can see the complexity that has played out over the course of the last day or so that makes it clear as mud at the end of the day about who is going to come out of Iowa in the top couple or three slots,” she said.
Iowa has many more white residents and far fewer black and Hispanic residents than the rest of the country.
“Honestly, it would be a more significant test of the staying power of candidates if they had an opportunity to begin a presidential candidate with more diverse states and a variety,” she said.