Analyze this: The dumbing down of key legislation | Editorial

The ink was still drying on the overnight release of a 98-page election law rewrite when Senate Ethics and Election Committee Chairman Danny Burgess, in a pretty fair imitation of Scarlett O’Hara, reassured critics they could all worry about the details tomorrow.

Welcome to the dumbing down of Florida legislation, and the apparent suppression of information Floridians need to keep an eye on their own elected representatives and understand legislation as it flies through the process. Proposed laws have always been accompanied by a legislative staff analysis, which is supposed to be a gimlet-eyed, section-by-section offset to political rhetoric.

How much will this law cost? Where will the money come from? Does it ride roughshod over counties and cities? What has happened with similar efforts in other states? Is it constitutional? How, exactly, will it work?

These are not footnote concerns.

Too many bills

Even the most studious lawmaker can’t be expected to wade through the details of every 100-page bill landing on their desks. Sometimes, the plain text of a bill isn’t plain at all, and devils always dance in the details.

Lawmakers depend on solid staff analysis reports. Floridians have a right to them.

In decades past, bill analyses crafted by Florida legislative committee staffers were hailed for their professionalism.

These days, they are more churned than crafted. Even worse, many bills carry an analysis that reads like an effort to shade the truth, distorting key facts and ignoring others.

Take the sprawling anti-ESG bill designed to solve the non-problem of private businesses choosing to adopt environment, social and governance policies.

How much would it cost?

There was already ample evidence it would be expensive. After Texas passed its version of an anti-ESG law, University of Pennsylvania researchers found it would cost Texas taxpayers up to half a billion dollars in extra borrowing costs in just eight months to pay for such local government services as roads and school roofs.

This was not mystery data. A casual Google search would have located it.

So what did the Florida staff analysis tell lawmakers and the public about the cost of Senate Bill 302 to taxpayers in towns and counties? “Insignificant.”

Analyzing an abortion ban

Then there’s the six-week abortion ban.

Staff analyses are expected to specifically address whether a bill might violate the U.S. or state constitutions. A lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the state’s 15-week abortion law is pending before the Florida Supreme Court.

But while an analysis of this year’s bill details the suit and other cases, its last words on constitutionality read more like a grammatical pretzel: “Because the provisions of the bill that might be challenged as unconstitutional do not become law unless specified criteria are met which would render such provisions constitutional, there are likely no constitutional issues.”

One can grudgingly admire this sleight of hand while still acknowledging this is an answer deliberately designed to help no one understand anything.

That’s the point: Instead of cold, hard explanations, lawmakers and the public are being spoon-fed political justifications.

No one is well served by that. Maybe Florida would still have wound up as the butt of late-night comic jokes even had there been a more robust staff summary of how a cluster of educational bills would play out. But a tougher look might have flagged that they would usurp county school districts’ authority, allow a single non-parent to take a book from thousands of students and force court battles.

It might even have foreshadowed that a biography of Roberto Clemente would be banned, although it could not have predicted a governor working overtime to convince people that the Clemente ban never happened; no, nothing like that ever happened at all.

And it might not have happened if lawmakers fully understood the bills’ weaknesses when they still had a chance to fix them.

Higher legal bills for taxpayers

Instead, there’s been chaos and costly litigation, all paid by Florida taxpayers.

More is likely coming. Democratic election lawyer Marc Elias has already indicated he may sue over a broad new elections bill dropped on unsuspecting lawmakers last week.

Unlike Burgess, skeptics started worrying the moment the bill was presented.

Will it keep college students from voting? Will it burden local supervisors of elections? Will it discourage groups from registering new voters?

And will a staff analysis address these questions in a meaningful way?

Keeping a bill vague can speed it through committees. It’s bad government, but politics is what politicians do. Telling lawmakers and their constituents how bills impact Floridians is what a staff analysis does. And we need more of it.

Raising hard questions inside the big red bubble that is Tallahassee is no one’s idea of a good time. But anything less is just shilling for a supermajority that needs to be kept in check.

The Orlando Sentinel Editorial Board includes Editor-in-Chief Julie Anderson, Opinion Page Editor Krys Fluker and Viewpoints Editor Jay Reddick. The Sun Sentinel Editorial Board consists of Editorial Page Editor Steve Bousquet, Deputy Editorial Page Editor Dan Sweeney, and Anderson. Send letters to insight@orlandosentinel.com.