Matt Gaetz Is From Florida-- Where Else Could He Be From?

Pudgy little frat boy neo-Nazi, Matthew Louis Gaetz II, was lucky. Matthew Louis Gaetz I represented a chunk of the backward Florida Panhandle in the state Senate starting in 2006, eventually rising to Senate president. In 2010, when Florida House Speaker, Ray Sansom (R), another corrupt career politico like Gaetz I, was kicked out of the legislature for taking massive bribes in return for directing millions of dollars in taxpayer money to the briber, his Okaloosa House seat opened up. Gaetz II managed to slither into the seat with 43% of the vote in the GOP primary (tantamount to election in a district where Democrats don't even try). Gaetz was primarily known for being a drunk (and a drunk driver with dozens of driving tickets but no loss of his license), being an advocate of death sentences being carried out quickly and being for unrestrictive gun laws.

More recently, after Gaetz publicly tried to intimidate and threaten Michael Cohen for testifying against Trump-- i.e., witness-tampering, which is illegal, even in Florida-- the Florida Bar opened an investigation to determine if they should revoke Gaetz's license to practice law in the state. Wednesday, Tampa Bay Times reporter Steve Contorno, wrote that so far, the process is going badly for Gaetz.

Yesterday I had three separate off-the-record conversations with three of Gaetz's Judiciary Committee colleagues. None of them said this but this is an amalgam of what the three of them told me:

Gaetz is a classic low-achiever, punching above his weight and looking for a way-- any way-- to be relevant and to seem important. He tries modeling himself on Trump, but doesn't quite have what it takes. Even people in his own caucus say he's a joke behind his back. He sits on his cell surreptitiously rubbing his crotch while looking at online photos of AOC.

And one of them said these words exactly: "Poor Matt; he's the Paris Hilton of the U.S. House of Representatives... Everyone is waiting for Rick Scott to get drunk and kick his ass. He really hates the guy... Republican politics in Florida isn't so much a swamp as a cesspool."

Also yesterday-- Kara Gross, a Senior Policy Counsel for the Florida ACLU, penned an essay about just what a cesspool the Republican-controlled state legislature is. It's that spawned Gaetz and it's probably worse than you'd expect anyway. "The just completed 2019 session of the Florida Legislature constitutes the most serious attack on civil liberties and the public interest in a decade," is how she started. It just gets gloomier and gloomier as you read more and more about the garbage politics of the Sunshine State! "Racial justice, voting rights, immigrant rights, due process, public education, school safety, citizens initiatives, freedom of speech, and access to basic health care were all diminished by the Republican majority in the legislature. Combine that with a failure to adopt sensible, decarceration proposals that would have reduced the populations of our overcrowded prisons, and you have a session in which legislators managed to do damage to countless Floridians of all ages that will be felt for generations. Here is an issue-by-issue report:

The Undermining of Amendment 4 and Voting Rights

After 64.55 percent of Floridians supported the Voting Restoration Amendment-- which would have returned to as many as 1.4 million individuals with felony convictions their ability to vote-- legislators dedicated themselves denying voting rights to thousands. By making voting rights contingent not just on completion of sentence including probation and parole-- as the amendment stated-- but on payment of all fines and inflated court costs, those legislators embraced the state’s Jim Crow past and conditioned individual’s eligibility vote on their ability to pay.  This legislation will likely deny many hundreds of thousands of Floridians the right to participate in elections solely because they don’t have enough money. Legislators undermined Amendment 4 even though 5.2 million Floridians approved the constitutional amendment in the November election.

An Attack on Florida's Immigrant Communities

Despite the fact that Florida has no sanctuary cities, legislators felt the need to outlaw them anyway. In the spirit of our immigrant-bashing president, and spurred on by newly-elected Gov. Ron DeSantis, legislators have now forced all Florida cities and counties to comply with all “detainer” arrest requests issued by federal immigration authorities against Florida residents. This despite the fact that a recent ACLU report documented how in Miami-Dade County alone Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), over the past two years, has erroneously issued 420 detainer orders against individuals listed as U.S. citizens, who are not subject to immigration detention.

Legislators have chosen to undermine the right to due process and equal treatment for Floridians by passing the anti-immigrant SB 168, which will create a statewide environment of fear and encourage racial profiling of immigrants and people of color, as well as separate immigrant families.

On Monday, ICE announced a new program to expand local law enforcement participation in its deportation agenda. With this program, ICE is asking local law enforcement to risk violating the Fourth Amendment and so far, at least one Florida jurisdiction has agreed to participate.

Arming Teachers and Zero-Tolerance Policies in Schools

Legislators voted to allow classroom teachers and other staff members to carry weapons in schools, despite opposition from the Florida Education Association, which represents 140,000 teachers and support staff. Also, in a recent poll by Quinnipiac University, 57 percent of Floridians opposed the idea, which many believe will only make schools more dangerous. The measure was supported by the National Rifle Association (NRA). Research shows that more guns on school campuses do not prevent violence. More guns on school campuses result in more violence, and such policies have a disparate impact on students of color, LGBTQ and gender non-conforming youth and children with disabilities. These policies will send more youth spiraling into the school-to-prison pipeline, which only ruins lives. Despite falling juvenile crime rates nationwide, arrests in schools have increased due to such zero tolerance policies.

Unconstititonal Public Financing of Religious Schools

Despite a 2006 Florida Supreme Court ruling that held a similar effort unconstitutional, legislators passed an expansion of the school voucher program that will allow Florida taxpayer dollars to flow to private schools, including those run by religious organizations. Passage of the bill means less money for already underfunded public schools.

While school voucher programs are often designed to expand the educational options available to many low-income families, they have also raised serious civil liberties and civil rights concerns. In addition to doing little to improve student performance and being vastly unpopular among voters, the measure erodes the constitutionally-mandated separation of church and state and will almost certainly be challenged again in the courts.

The Undermining of Citizens' Initiatives

Several extremely popular citizen movements in recent years that resulted in amendments to the Florida Constitution-- including the Amendment 4 Voting Restoration Amendment in 2018-- provoked Republican legislators to limit citizen initiatives in the state.

The new law will require that persons paid to gather signatures to put a citizens’ initiative on a ballot register with the state and provide their personal information, including their permanent and temporary addresses. They must also sign sworn statements that they will follow state rules, and it will become illegal to pay petition gatherers based on the number of petitions they collect.

The law also now threatens ballot initiative sponsors with fines if they are late delivering petitions to elections supervisors, including a potential $1,000 fine for any petition “willfully” not submitted on time.

Florida already has one of the most difficult ballot initiative processes in the country. All those requirements and potential penalties can only make it harder to recruit petition gatherers and make it more difficult for the public to be heard.

A Missed Opportunity to Embrace Real Criminal Justice Reform and Save Hundreds of Millions of Dollars

Lawmakers took baby steps in addressing a criminal justice system in Florida that is plagued by mass incarceration, racial disparities, and a school-to-prison pipeline which ruins more young lives every year-- especially the lives of children of color.

California and Texas have the two biggest congressional delegation, respectively 53 and 36. Florida and New York are tied with 27 House members each for 3rd place. California has some great great members-- Barbara Lee, Ted Lieu, Ro Khanna, Maxine Waters... and Texas has a couple who aren't that bad. New York sends mostly pretty mediocre members to Washington-- although they also have AOC, Jerry Nadler, José Serrano. Florida, on the other hand.. nothing. Not a single member worth reelecting since Alan Grayson. The Republicans are all like Gaetz and Ted Yoho... Posey, Webster... And the Democrats? Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Al Lawson, Alcee Hastings, Charlie Crist, Darren Soto, Stephanie Murphy... It's hard to imagine Grayson ever got elected there! Maybe it's hard to imagine because he was never "tempered" and pasteurized in one of the worst and most uselessly depressing state legislatures anywhere.