Florida ballot proposals bundled with disparate subjects and deceptive wording
Nov. 6 will be a time for magical thinking. That’s the day Florida voters must come to regard indoor vaping and offshore drilling as one.
Nov. 6 will be the day Floridians, in one fell swoop, can finally ban this scourge called indoor vaping/offshore drilling. (Or is it offshore vaping/indoor drilling?)
Our Constitution Revision Commission has similarly discovered a close cosmic relationship between the expansion of civic education in Florida public schools and the subversion of local say-so over new charter schools.
Because, you know, there’s so little difference between teaching kids civics and sabotaging local elected school boards. If you like those items — or rather, by the curious reckoning of the CRC, that singular item — you’d just naturally approve of term limits for school board members. Term limits, civics, and charter schools will be featured on the fall ballot as a single proposal. We shall call this Prop 6003, little Grasshopper. Marijuana might explain the unhinged logic behind the amalgamated ballot proposals crafted by the Florida CRC — more than 20 distinct proposals have been crammed into eight amendments — except the commission refused to allow voters to consider whether to legalize pot.
But the commissioners must have been smoking something to imagine voters would find symbiotic relationship between a constitution provision expanding victims rights and another raising the retirement age for judges.
If you favor waiving college tuition for the survivors of cops, firemen, jailers, and soldiers killed in the line of duty, the CRC presumes you prefer a supermajority approval before the university system’s board of governors can raise student fees.
Who among us opposes the creation of a state department of veteran affairs or an office devoted to counterterrorism? No one, except those proposals have been combined with a constitutional amendment that nobody, other than a few political has-beens, supports.
Anyone favoring a state VA must simultaneously vote to force the reluctant citizens of Broward County to convert their county tax collection operation into an elected office. And, as a bonus, require Miami-Dade County to forget about a professional police chief and transform the police department into a political dominion overseen by an elected sheriff. (Miami-Dade would likewise be compelled to elect a supervisor of elections and a tax collector.)
Not that folks in Broward and Miami-Dade have been clamoring for more politicians to gum up the works at county hall. They know that this slyly worded ballot proposal has nothing to do with government efficiency and everything to do with extending the careers of a few term-limited state legislators in desperate need of another elected office.
Their buddies on the CRC decided (or were told to decide) that the particulars of our local governance should be left to the whims of the statewide electorate. Because the commissioners knew that voters up in Podunk, Florida, would surely say yes to anything that includes the word “veteran.” To hell with how actual South Floridians prefer to govern themselves.
Jamming utterly disparate issues into single ballot propositions has been dubbed bundling, a variation on the dark legislative art of logrolling. Dissenting CRC Commissioner Roberto Martinez, the former U.S. attorney for South Florida, accused the commission majority of misleading voters. “I submit to you that by grouping — what we have done by bundling different proposals together — we have undermined the work we have undertaken.”
The state constitution bars both the Legislature and purveyors of citizen-led initiatives from muddling amendment proposals with unrelated issues. But Chairman Carlos Beruff has apparently discovered a loophole for the CRC, which meets every 20 years to update the state constitution.
Damn, Carlos, I thought we were done with you.
Sen. Marco Rubio struck a mighty blow for civility in Florida politics back in 2016 when he abandoned his faltering presidential campaign and decided to run for re-election. That decision essentially knocked Beruff out of the race.
Until Rubio jumped into the race, polls had indicated that the Manatee County developer was the leading contender for the Republican nomination. He got there by campaigning on the far right fringe. When he withdrew, Florida was spared more lowdown rhetoric from the candidate who had called President Obama “this animal we call president, because he is an animal.” Good riddance, I thought. Think again. Gov. Rick Scott appointed Beruff as chairman of a CRC teeming with political partisans. And Carlos and his cronies have debased the fall ballot with a bundle of outright deceptions.
Fred Grimm (@grimm_fred or leogrimm@gmail.com), a longtime resident of Fort Lauderdale, has worked as a reporter or columnist in South Florida since 1976.