To GOP, we’re mushrooms — keep us in the dark

For Republicans who control Tallahassee and Washington, the playbook on unpopular legislation is the same: Work in secret and spring it on the public.

In Florida, political dark arts created the House Bill 7069, the first step toward the rightwing goal of privatizing public education, now that Gov. Rick Scott has signed it. For the first time, private charter school operators will get a share of property tax revenue for construction and maintenance. Yet the public would not own those charter schools built with public money.

Over 10 years, that portion of HB 7069 could cost the Broward and Palm Beach school districts $500 million. The legislation also would allocate $140 million for private charter school companies to supposedly rescue underperforming traditional public schools. Yet there would be little, if any, oversight of that money.

On their own, such controversial changes likely could have passed the House, where charter school profiteers drive the bus. They would have had trouble in the sometimes more reasonable Senate.

So supporters packaged the lousy ideas with about 50 others into a budget bill that the Legislature had to pass. In secret, a few people turned a six-page bill about teacher bonuses into a 278-page bill. It passed the Senate by two votes in the evening of the last day of the extended regular session. There had been no debate on what could be transformational education policy.

It gets worse. House Speaker Richard Corcoran, R-Land O’Lakes, and his henchmen behind HB 7069 have ties to the charter school industry. None of them consulted with school superintendents or school board members because the charter school profiteers consider traditional public schools to be competition. What’s bad for the schools that 2.1 million students attend is good for the schools that roughly 200,000 students attend. Charter school operators covet that construction money because private charters also can be real estate plays.

In response to “gossip and rumors,” the House has posted a video to “explain” HB 7069. The video claims that money was not “diverted” to charters by noting the tiny bump in public school spending and the teacher bonuses. The video ignores the shift of construction money.

Meanwhile in Washington, where most attention is focused on all things Donald Trump, James Comey and Robert Mueller, Senate Republicans are trying to sneak through a health care bill that only 21 percent of Americans support.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., has invoked a rule that would allow the bill to bypass all committees. Thirteen white, male, GOP senators are crafting legislation for a country that is majority female and where most serious health problems disproportionately affect minorities.

McConnell wants the bill through the Senate by the July 4 recess. Like House Speaker Paul Ryan-R-Wis., McConnell wants to hold a vote before the Congressional Budget Office can analyze his chamber’s version of the American Health Care Act. After House Republicans — by four votes — passed their second version of the bill, the CBO found that 23 million Americans would lose coverage over a decade. But, hey, it would have been 24 million under the first version.

Contrast the GOP’s approach with that of Democrats. It took nine months to pass the Affordable Care Act. There were 79 hearings just in the House. Democratic House leaders held briefings for their members.

It is understandable why McConnell wants to avoid scrutiny. Massive Medicaid cuts would hurt working-class Americans in states that President Trump won. In states like Ohio and West Virginia, where opioid overdoses have created a public health crisis, Medicaid is the only drug treatment option for those without private insurance. While the working poor suffered, the rich would get tax breaks.

So McConnell is seeking to buy off senators by phasing in those Medicaid cutbacks over seven years — after re-election campaigns of Trump and Republican senators. The Charleston Gazette-Mail noted that Sen. Shelley Moore had said she “didn’t want to push fellow West Virginians with Medicaid off a cliff, so she would do so on the installment plan — around 25,000 per year for seven years.”

With their talk of repeal, Republicans are driving insurers from the ACA marketplace. Polls, however, show that most Americans blame the GOP. So for Republicans, the less public talk, the better. They can’t defend their health care plan any more than Republicans in Tallahassee can defend their education bill.