Dems united against a right-wing onslaught

Much of the action surrounding this year’s legislative session concerned deeply upsetting and completely unnecessary GOP-driven culture wars that sought to divide rather the unite us or make our state a better place to live.

Despite being outnumbered and outgunned, the Democratic lawmakers of the Florida Legislature nonetheless mounted a brave and aggressive fight in defense of women’s rights, the LGBTQ community, free speech and more. The united Democratic caucuses in both chambers not only stood firm in our opposition to the offensive attacks on children, teachers, voters and the less fortunate among us, our unified Democrats found opportunities to stop or mitigate bad ideas from becoming law while notching a few victories in the process.

For starters, the attack on our state’s charter document, the Florida Constitution, was stymied by this united front. Some Republican lawmakers wanted to put on the November ballot an item that, if passed, would have forever closed the opportunity for citizens to amend their own document, our Constitution. It would have taken a supermajority vote to put it on the ballot, but the Democratic Caucus did not blink. Instead, Democrats held firm and remained unified in the belief that (as stated in that very document) “all political power resides with the people” (Article 1, section 1).

We also held off further attempts to take even more public dollars and redirect them to private, for-profit schools — and instead of even more tax cuts for wealthy, out-of-state corporations, we were able to pass one of my longstanding priories: the removal of the sales tax on diapers. While this will truly help families across the state, the powers that be limited us in only providing this relief for infant diapers, for one year. You can bet I will continue to advocate for a permanent exemption on all diapers, including adult incontinence products, next session.

And as hard as it is to believe, many of the anti-freedom measures being pushed by the extreme right wing of the Republican party were also watered down by a unified Senate Democratic Caucus. While Republican extremists succeeded in passing bad laws to allow for the removal of books in schools, as hard as it is to believe, they wanted even stronger means of banning books, legalizing frivolous, taxpayer-funded lawsuits, and to put even more restrictions on voting. We stood firm and we stopped these extreme positions.

It was not easy and it was often ugly, but on these matters, freedom won the day as a direct result of a strong and unified front of Democratic lawmakers. Further, we were then able to reach and work across the aisle for the benefit of our communities, securing more funding for our teachers and professional education staff, expanding funding for mental health, and raising pay for our hard-working state employees.

But there were defeats — and make no mistake, these will hurt Floridians, take away their personal freedoms and punish those who stray from a strict, state-sponsored ideology. I am, of course, talking about the unconstitutional attack on a woman’s right to choose — even, unbelievably, in cases involving rape, incest and human trafficking — and other items as well. We lost the fight to restrict the state from imposing a punitive (and antifree speech) restriction on discussing LGBTQ+ issues in the classroom. To be clear, this was not about the state-approved curriculum or even sex education; this was (as admitted by the bill sponsor) an attempt to stop any discussions about any LGBTQ+ issues out of fears of “social engineering.” Finally, and perhaps equally shocking, was the new “anti-woke” law that will essentially ban diversity training while also encouraging the erasure of history in our schools. Instead of our professionally trained teachers being able to teach both the good and bad of our nation’s founding, they are now to be treated like characters straight out of George Orwell’s “1984,” with the thought police lurking around every corner.

On each one of these vital issues, every Democrat — every single one — stood firm against attacks on our personal freedoms and severe restrictions on the individual rights of average everyday Floridians.

As we head into election season, I only hope voters will remember which party led the charge to remove these freedoms and which party stood unified and fought as one to protect them.

By Lauren Book