Florida’s Republicans sure have a way with words. LGBTQ residents are “groomers” out to subvert innocent children. Protesting peacefully can get you arrested in the “free” state of Florida.
And, Thursday, Democrats’ protest on the floor of the state House was an “insurrection.”
At least Republican lawmakers are on brand: They have made clear time and again that when it comes to living on equitable footing in Florida, gays, women and Blacks need not apply.
The so-called insurrection actually was Black lawmakers’ refusal to take their GOP colleagues’ blatant attempt to disenfranchise Black voters lying down.
Instead, some of them sat down — staging an old-fashioned sit-in right there in the floor of the House. Joined by white and Hispanic colleagues, they were making clear that Republicans had gone too far in their quest to disenfranchise Black Floridians.
House Speaker Chris Sprowls tried to cast the protest as an attempt by the Democrats to “hijack” the legislative process and interfere with their colleagues’ ability to “debate important legislation.” He insisted that those who continued to work their mischief were simply completing their “constitutional duty to pass a Congressional map.”
He said, “This group tried to drown out the voices of the other elected representatives and the 22 million Floridians they represent.”
No, it’s the GOP
Sprowls should look in the mirror. The ones hijacking the legislative process are the Republicans he leads. The ones who are drowning out the voices of other members of the Legislature? The GOP again.
And the Legislature’s job, as he well knows, is to pass a congressional map that represents the populace, not the governor’s hand-crafted, self-interested version.
One Republican had the gall to draw parallels between the Democratic legislators’ protest and the attempt on Jan. 6, 2021, to overturn the presidential election.
Rep. Randy Fine, from Brevard County, tweeted: “I hope the insurrection on the House floor is dealt with. #LockThemUP.”
But peaceful protest — and that’s what this was — isn’t even in the same universe as what happened at the U.S. Capitol last year: It was a deadly effort by pro-Trump mobs to violently overturn a generally squeaky-clean election, viciously assaulting police, vandalizing lawmakers’ officers and threatening the very life of the vice president.
What happened on the floor of the Florida House was what happens when U.S. citizens are denied the right of representation — when time and again, their right to vote is curtailed, when they are told, unequivocally, that the quality of their lives in this state doesn’t matter.
Rare show of force
Republican lawmakers, a few weeks ago, stood up to Gov. DeSantis — itself a shock and a surprise — as he sought to usurp their constitutional responsibility to draw up Florida’s decennial congressional maps. The governor’s version bolstered Republicans’ representation in Congress at the expense of Black Floridians’ voting power.
But the governor vetoed legislators’ fairer maps and called a special session to “revisit” the issue. In other words, to get what he wanted. And the members of his party, indeed, rolled over.
“I’ve been kicked. I’ve been talked about and I have been called names you don’t even put in the dictionary anymore,” Rep. Yvonne Hayes Hinson, an African-American lawmaker and Democrat from Gainesville, told her colleagues Thursday, before Republicans cut her off. “The Voting Rights Act of 1965, I fought for that. I’ve met Martin Luther King, I don’t just talk about him. He taught me peaceful protests, and here we are 2022 rolling back the tide.”
Of course, Hinson gave Republicans the very lesson in American history that they want to snuff out in school classrooms, claiming it is too uncomfortable to learn about our shared racist past.
Miami Rep. Dotie Joseph, a Haitian-American Democrat, said the protest was about more than redistricting maps.
“These people who are in charge do not care about the people of Florida. People have real needs right now,” Joseph told the Editorial Board.
“We all want to be safe. We want to be free. We believe in a modicum of equality and equity. We believe in meritocracy, in being a place where there is freedom and justice for all.
“But they are using culture wars to distract people from the things that unify us.”
As for the protest on the House floor, she said: “This is not unique to this time in history. When things are wrong, people speak up. But the radical right does not take kindly to protest.”
The DeSantis maps passed in the House, by the way. Done deal — and a dirty one.
No wonder lawmakers don’t want critical race theory to be taught anywhere. They are gleefully engaging in the same institutional racism that CRT exposes.
And these lawmakers know it.
