Don’t let political revenge dictate budget decisons

Dissent is essential to democracy.

Punishing dissent is essential to the Ron DeSantis brand.

Just ask Disney, which faces the loss of the special district that allowed it to tax itself for municipal services. Ask state university faculty members who face tenure challenges. Or ask school board members in 12 counties including Orange and Brevard and elsewhere, who faced threats and retaliation for insisting on protecting students with COVID-19 mask mandates.

When he’s challenged, DeSantis lashes out. That’s what bullies do.

That’s what makes the governor’s use of line-item veto power in the new budget worth watching.

The Florida Legislature will soon send DeSantis a budget of $112.1 billion. That’s by far the largest in state history and represents a spending increase of about 20% in the past two years alone.

The budget headed to DeSantis’ desk is stuffed with a record number of projects tailored to individual lawmakers’ districts — more than 1,200 projects in all worth $2.8 billion, according to the annual report on budget “turkeys” by Florida TaxWatch. That’s about twice as many member projects as are in the current budget, and as much as all total projects in the past five budgets combined, TaxWatch found.

Every project has a legislator’s name attached to it, and scores of other projects subject to the line-item veto are championed by Democratic lawmakers who also voted against his priorities, like a 15-week abortion ban, the so-called “Don’t Say Gay” bill, a new elections police force, a pathway to censorship of textbooks and library books and a racially gerrymandered congressional redistricting map that eliminates two Black access districts.

The line-item veto is DeSantis’ weapon to get even with those Democratic dissenters by punishing them and their constituents in their pocketbooks.

There’s concern that local projects will be targeted. Several Democratic lawmakers, outraged over the congressional map, staged a sit-in in the House on April 21 that briefly delayed floor votes. Among the protesters: Representatives Tray McCurdy, Anna Eskamani, Carlos Guillermo-Smith and Daisy Morales, each of whom represents part of Orange County. Of the four, only one — Morales Ð managed to get any member projects in the budget. If either of her appropriations is vetoed, will anyone wonder why?

According to a detailed House staff spreadsheet provided to the Sun Sentinel, the overwhelming majority of member projects were sponsored by Republicans, with $457 million out of $483 million, or an astounding 95% of the House total.

That level of imbalance is wrong in a House chamber where more than a third of Florida’s population lives in districts represented by Democrats Ð and where each district includes roughly the same number of Floridians. But it’s not surprising in this era of hyper-partisan, topdown Tallahassee governance.

To be sure, there’s waste in this budget. DeSantis has a duty to remove it, especially projects that escaped careful review or were inserted by a single powerful lawmaker.

But every one of his lineitem rejects should be justified by sound policy, not politics. Dissent is essential in a democracy, especially with this governor.