Will new governor slam brakes on Amendment 4?

Nothing like a nice constitutional crisis to get Florida’s New Year rolling.

The tussle begins Tuesday, when Amendment 4 is supposed to take effect, mandating the automatic restoration of voting rights for Florida’s convicted felons (with the exception of murderers and sex offenders) “upon completion of all terms of sentence including parole or probation.”

Except, “automatic” has become a synonym for “maybe.” Or “maybe not.”

Tuesday is also the day Gov.-elect Ron DeSantis, who received a million fewer votes than Amendment 4, assumes office. DeSantis, who had dissed the measure before the election, told a reporter with Gatehouse Media last month that restoration of voting rights must wait until the state legislature gets around to approving “implementing language.” That can’t happen before the legislative session opens March 5, which means as many as 1.2 million newly enfranchised voters will be shut out of Florida’s March 12 municipal elections.

“They’re going to be able to do it in March,” DeSantis insisted. “There’s no way you can go through this session without implementing it.”

But you can. Florida legislators have demonstrated time and again that they regard constitutional mandates as frivolous inconveniences that can be ignored, postponed or outright flouted. Especially when unruly voters approve an initiative not to their liking. It` d`oesn’t matter what the people passed,” environmental lawyer Thom Rumberger told me back in 2002. “Legislators will just sayW,`e don’t like it.’ ”

Rumberger, who died in 2011, was referring to the “polluter pays” initiative that required the sugar industry to pay the cost of cleaning up its mess in the Everglades. Sixty-five percent of Florida voters said yes to polluter pays. That was 1996. It ain’t happened yet.

Lawmakers simply ignored the amendment. Implementing legislation was never passed. Big Sugar’s bill never came due.

Legislators have been slightly more artful in devising ways around voter intent in the 2002 class size amendment. The most imaginative circumvention came in 2013, with legislation allowing so-called “schools of choice” to cram more students into certain classes. Some school districts, of course, simply designated all their schools “of choice.”

Nor did it matter that 75 percent of the voters approved an amendment four years ago that required the state to spend a third of the taxes collected from real estate transactions “to acquire, restore, improve, and manage conservation lands.” Last June, Leon County Circuit Judge Charles Dodson found that, instead, the legislators were allocating the money according to their own whims.

In October, the same judge ruled that legislators similarly ignored the voter intent expressed by the 71 percent majority who approved a medical marijuana amendment in 2016. The enabling legislation piled on so many restrictions that it became cheaper for patients to buy pot from the black market.

“The court is concerned the Constitution is being treated as just a recommendation,” Dodson wrote. “It cannot be,” the judge said. “The Constitution is the law of the land — the supreme law of our government, which we must all live by. The medical marijuana amendment of the Constitution is specific. Much of that specificity is being ignored.”

Republicans who control the governor’s office and both chambers of the legislature have been even less enthused about the voting rights restoration amendment. Not out of any great philosophical allegiance to felon disenfranchisement, a Jim Crow-era policy originally conceived to tamp down black votes. Republicans, who just won the gubernatorial and U.S. Senate elections by miniscule margins, worry that most of those newly registered felons — 415,000 of whom are black (according to Vox) — will vote for Democrats.

Republicans had also worried about the imagined flood of long-haired young liberals tipping the political balance when the voting age was lowered from 21 to 18 back in 1971.

Well, I’ve seen the pathetic turnout figures among young voters. If newly enfranchised felons vote like the kids, Republicans need not worry. They can lay off the Constitution.

Voting right activists insist that there’s no need to wait for the legislature to act; that Amendment 4 was fashioned precisely to protect it from meddling politicians. After days of silence, the Florida Department of State has apparently concurred.

On Thursday, answering my inquiry, DOS emailed a passage from the state constitution stating, “. . . if the proposed amendment or revision is approved by vote of at least sixty percent of the electors voting on the measure, it shall be effective as an amendment to or revision of the constitution of the state on the first Tuesday after the first Monday in January following the election.”

Pete Antonacci, who was appointed by

Rick Scott last month to replace ousted Broward Elections Supervisor Brenda Snipes, had expressed his own reservations. But on Thursday, his website announced that, come Tuesday, it would accept felon registrations.

So it’s left to Gov.-elect DeSantis to decide whether to delay Amendment 4 until the legislature passes “implementing language.” Which, in Florida, might never happen.