Mobilizing people to improve state? Tallahassee says ‘zip it.’
It is not entirely true that Florida legislators don’t want the people they represent telling them what to do.
It depends on who’s doing the telling. Corporate lobbyists? By all means, Sirs. How can we help you?
Campaign contributors? can we thank you?
But when it comes to amending Florida’s Constitution, which among other things controls how the Legislature operates and governs the state, the less democracy the better.
In Tallahassee at the moment, a full head of steam is propelling legislation that would make it practically impossible for there to be any more successful voter initiatives like the 1992 amendment imposing term limits on the Legislature or the one voters approved last year to raise Florida’s minimum wage in stages to $15 an hour.
The legislation does that by allowing sponsoring committees to accept no more than $3,000 from any one donor while they’re trying to collect enough voter signatures to put their proposals on a statewide ballot.
That’s the same limit that theoretically applies to individual donations to a statewide candidate’s campaign but is widely circumvented through contributions to dark-money political committees.
The House bill is a committee product. Sen. Ray Rodriguez, R-Naples, hatched the Senate version. The usual lobbyist suspects appear to have inspired this monstrosity.
To tell by the votes in House and Senate committees so far, every Republican legislator is okay with it. Every Democrat is voting no. Since Republicans control both houses, the only remaining question seems to be how many Florida Chamber of Commerce lobbyists will be invited to watch Republican Gov.
We’re all ears. How
Ron DeSantis sign it into law.
A lobbyist from the Chamber, which bitterly opposed the minimum wage amendment, spoke for the bill as the House Public Integrity and Elections Committee amended it Tuesday to match the Senate version. Appearing against it were people from the League of Women Voters, Florida Rising, the Florida Immigrant Coalition Inc., the Sierra Club, the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida, the Southern Poverty Law Center Action Fund, the Florida State Conference of NAACP Branches, and the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. The committee voted for it, 11-5, reflecting how far the Legislature has been tilted toward corporate interests. Meanwhile, the Senate has voted 27 to 12 for a constitutional amendment that would abolish the Constitution Revision Commission before it next meets in 2037, and it’s considering another to raise the voter approval threshold for all constitutional amendments from 60% to 66 ⅔ of those voting on it. Those, at least, would need voter approval at the present threshold, which isn’t likely.
Last year, voters turned down an initiative with secret sponsors that would have required two referendums to approve any future amendment.
But the Legislature, which hobbled initiatives in several ways during its last term, could effectively dispose of them altogether if it gets away with enacting the committee substitutes for HB 699 and SB 1890.
Initiative petition drives are increasingly costly as the minimum number of valid signatures rises each time more Floridians vote in presidential elections. Any sponsor needing to make next year’s ballot would need 891,589 confirmed signatures statewide, based on the 2020 election, as well as 8 percent in each of at least half the congressional districts.
No initiative has made the ballot with only volunteer solicitors since Gov. Reubin Askew’s “Sunshine Amendment” dealing with public ethics in 1976. But the requirement now is more than four times greater than the 210,537 Askew needed. Paid solicitors are essential.
No initiative has made the ballot in recent years without major cash support from wealthy individuals or highly motivated interest groups. Some are referring to the pending legislation as the “anti-John Morgan bill,” a reference to the Orlando lawyer who personally or through his firm bankrolled most of the $5.3 million cost of the minimum wage amendment last year. The successful amendment to restore voting rights to some ex-felons depended on major funding from the American Civil Liberties Union. The 2010 initiatives that imposed anti-gerrymandering standards on a Legislature that did not welcome them had $250,000 from Michael Bloomberg, as well as more than $1 million from the National Education Association and the Florida Education Association.
There is a long history of federal courts striking down contribution restrictions on ballot issues. One knocked out Florida’s previous $3,000 limit when a committee proposing casino gambling (which failed) took it to the old Fifth Circuit Court of Appeal.
“Campaign contributions implicate important first amendment rights,” the court held. “Florida has shown no sufficiently important interest to justify restricting the contributions in a referendum election.”
The following year, the Supreme Court set nationwide policy in an 8-1 decision disallowing a $250 limit set by Berkeley, California.
“There is no significant state or public interest in curtailing debate and discussion of a ballot measure, and the integrity of the political system will be adequately protected if contributors are identified in a public filing revealing the amounts contributed,” said Chief Justice Warren Burger’s majority opinion. In 1988, the court unanimously struck down a Colorado law prohibiting paid petition circulators.
In approving the Senate bill 5-4, the Ethics and Elections Committee had in hand a staff report warning that the restriction on donations would likely fail under those precedents.
The sponsors may be counting on a different outcome following the Trump administration’s successes in expanding conservative majorities at the Supreme Court and some of the circuit courts of appeals. If so, they may be misjudging the high court’s appetite for rescinding precedents that had broad support among conservatives when they were announced. Yet similar anti-initiative efforts are reported underway in 23 other states under Republican control, according to the Ballot Initiative Strategy Center. As with the larger issue of voting rights, democracy is very much on defense.
The bias of the Florida bills is evident on its face, as they apply only to committees that sponsor citizen initiatives. Those such as the Chamber that oppose them could bankroll funds without limit.
In a superficial attempt to pretty up what’s ugly, the bills now propose to remove the $3,000 limit once an initiative has made the ballot. That, of course, is the costly part of the process, so the change accomplishes nothing except to highlight the intent of keeping initiatives off the ballot altogether.