Very bad ideas at the Capitol, one after another

Think of the Florida Legislature as a garden where the flowers struggle for survival amid the weeds. It often seems as if the weeds crowd them out. So it goes again.

Good seeds, too, are planted in this year’s legislative session, and we’ll write about them later. For now, we alert the public to some noxious weeds, sprouting like sandspurs on a vacant lot.

Some of the worst legislation would legalize round-the-clock child labor (HB 49) and prod Congress to call a constitutional convention for the first time since 1787 (HCRs 693, 703). They’re wrong and reckless, promoted by venal employers and the far right.

It’s hard to recall a worse idea in any session than to allow counties to handcount ballots rather than purchase electronic scanning machines (HB 359), and to require police officers to transfer ballot transport containers from the election supervisor’s office until it returns from the precinct (HB 671). Tellingly, supervisors did not request either proposal, and they don’t like them.

That makes bad policy out of the greatest damage any single person ever deliberately did to the nation: Donald Trump’s colossal lie that the 2020 election was stolen from him. He has poisoned the people’s faith in what is truly the world’s cleanest, fairest and safest democratic process. Polls show that a third of Republicans now do not believe that even their primaries will be counted correctly. Among them, apparently, are the 10 GOP House members sponsoring this stupendously bad bill.

Insulting election workers

Hand counts are notoriously prone to human error and can delay overall election results by hours, even days. Machine counts are foolproof and come with multiple fail-safes, double-checks and audit trails.

This bill insults the thousands of election workers, mostly volunteers, who staff Florida’s 4,400 polling places. It implies they can’t be trusted to safeguard the ballots before or after voters cast them.

It is of little help that the counties could choose between methods. For just one of 67 counties to use the wrong one could foul up an entire statewide count. There’s more important work for Florida law enforcement officers than to make

4,400 of them babysit ballot transport containers.

Racism and anti-gay bigotry are alive and well in Tallahassee. One bill (HB 599) forbids public employers and nonprofits from requiring sensitivity and equity training or even asking about preferred pronouns. Another (SJR 582) asks voters to pass a constitutional amendment forbidding reparations payments to any descendant of a slave.

There’s no clamor for either topic except among Republican politicians who trade on hate and fear.

Moreover, it’s highly unlikely that any level of government would opt for monetary compensation except to people whose ex-slave ancestors were swindled out of their farms and homes through government action. That was frequent, the source of much poverty, and one reason why politicians who play the race card prohibit teaching critical race theory.

Squandering tax dollars

Florida has no business squandering tax money to promote the virtual currency industry, but that’s what HB 369 and SB 352 do. They call for a month-long sales tax holiday in 2025 for purchases paid for with cryptocurrency at gas stations, food and convenience stores, beauty salons, bars and nightclubs.

Whenever the Legislature claims it’s protecting workers, it probably does the opposite. A bill (HB 433) forbids local governments from taking any steps to protect workers from dangerous heat, as Miami-Dade County has been trying to do. It preempts that regulation to the state, which has done nothing about it.

The bill calls for Florida to copy whatever the federal government eventually does, and if nothing has happened by July

2028, the state must act. That’s five more years of peril for Florida farm laborers, roofers and others who routinely endure life-threatening conditions without guaranteed breaks or access to shade and water.

As if the First Amendment no longer existed, county school boards could put volunteer chaplains in schools. They stipulate only background checks but no qualifications. The bills (HB 931, SB 1044) would set off political firestorms statewide by requiring each school board and charter school board to decide by next Jan. 1 whether to participate.

Chaplains would not be barred from trying to convert children or from acting as counselors, even if untrained. The only check on that would be parental consent. This is not what public schools are for. The bills are modeled on a new Texas law, promoted by Mission Generation, an organization that boasts “20 years of bringing Jesus to the classrooms of public schools.” Republican legislators in Ohio and Oklahoma have filed similar proposals. They are being actively opposed by, among others, the Baptist Joint Committee, a religious liberty advocacy group in Washington, D.C.

The Sun Sentinel Editorial Board consists of Opinion Editor Steve Bousquet, Deputy Opinion Editor Dan Sweeney, opinion writer Martin Dyckman 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@sunsentinel.com.