Needless ‘forced injection’ session all about reelection

The emasculation of the Florida Legislature is nearly complete.

Gov. Ron DeSantis will finish the job next week at an unnecessary special session he called to make legislators ram through his agenda on his terms. The Capitol will become a Fox News stage so he can attack the Biden administration’s COVID-19 vaccine mandates and eclipse Texas Gov. Greg Abbott as undisputed leader of the anti-vaxxer “personal freedom” crowd.

If you thought this pre-Thanksgiving gathering was about saving lives or improving the lives of Floridians, you’re as misguided as the Republicans that Florida sends to Tallahassee. This is an expensive publicity stunt that will further polarize Floridians and put many Florida businesses in an awkward box: They’ll have to choose whether to obey a federal vaccine mandate and violate state law or play by DeSantis’ rules and face the wrath of Washington. The silence you hear is from a cowering business community, forced to play along.

DeSantis caught legislative leaders by surprise on Oct. 21 when he called for a special session to fight a federal requirement that workers be vaccinated with what he calls “forced injections” — even though it’s still the surest way to slow or stop a highly transmissible deadly disease. Two-thirds of all Americans have received at least one shot of vaccine.

The strident rhetoric of the session proclamation lays bare DeSantis’ true motivation.

“Whereas,” it reads, “under pressure from the Biden administration and corporate media, some companies and government entities have begun mandating that their employees receive injections of the COVID-19 vaccine as a condition of employment ... “

Tramples on home rule

This is not how it’s supposed to work. Special sessions are reserved for crises that demand quick, undivided attention from a governor and a Legislature, hopefully building a bipartisan consensus on a real problem, like climate change, property insurance or a broken unemployment system.

But the Legislature is the peanut gallery for The Ron DeSantis Show. This is all about his re-election. Legislators are there to watch, push their green “yes” buttons and ask as few questions as possible. Democrats will do their job, but they are vastly outnumbered.

The governor wants to ban student mask mandates and allow parents to sue and collect attorneys’ fees for successfully suing school boards on that issue, even though the last three holdout districts in the state lifted mask orders, including Broward and Miami-Dade. It is one more excuse to trample on home rule power of local elected officials and creates a new avenue for nuisance lawsuits at taxpayers’ expense.

DeSantis will also ask lawmakers to sever Florida’s ties with the federal workplace safety agency and replace it with state regulatory oversight, which requires federal approval and will likely take years. In a state where lax regulation and oversight create all kinds of problems, this is yet another wretched idea.

If you liked how the state risked an environmental catastrophe by ignoring red flags at the former Piney Point phosphate plant near Tampa, then you’ll love Florida as an occupational safety cop, policing exploitative and dangerous farm labor, for example.

It’s a well-known fact that most legislators don’t bother to closely read bills before they vote, and a comprehensive analysis of all four pieces of legislation offered in the upcoming special session would help. But on the Friday before the Monday start of the session, the staff analyses that ordinarily accompany proposed legislation were still not available. This is not how it’s supposed to work.

Public’s right to ‘no’

No get-together of Florida lawmakers would be complete without another assault on the public’s right to know, or “no,” as it has become in Tallahassee. Another bill being considered would keep secret all employee complaints of violations of vaccine rules that would be in the exclusive control of one official, the attorney general, who runs an agency with no expertise in regulating private workplaces.

The public records exemption bills (HB 3B, SB 4B) claim that disclosure of complaints could be used to “harass, embarrass or humiliate.”

The First Amendment Foundation, a watchdog group, calls this exemption overly broad and says it fails to meet the constitutional standard that an exemption be no broader than necessary to accomplish its stated purpose. Giving a single elected official the power to investigate workplace complaints while stripping away public oversight creates a giant loophole and removes accountability. What happens if several workers file complaints against a politically well-connected business and the state ignores them? We would never know.

A new public records exemption requires a two-thirds vote by both houses. A unified Democratic caucus and a nudge from an enlightened Republican here and there is all it would take to defeat this dangerous idea.

It’s all so much bad policy. But from DeSantis’ point of view, if it plays well with the Trump base, gets the attention of Fox News, makes the White House angry and creates new fundraising opportunities, it’s well worth it.

The Sun Sentinel Editorial Board consists of Editorial Page Editor Steve Bousquet, Deputy Editorial Page Editor Dan Sweeney, and Editor-in-Chief Julie Anderson. Editorials are the opinion of the Board and written by one of its members or a designee. To contact us, email at letters @sun-sentinel.com.