Kill the constitution? A rewrite is Florida’s latest nutty idea | Commentary
Florida politicians hatch so many harebrained ideas that it’s sometimes hard to keep track. Seriously, this state cultivates quackery the way Idaho does potatoes.
So you may have missed the latest head-shaker to come out of the Florida Legislature — a proposal to do away with Florida’s current constitution.
No, I’m not kidding. If I were kidding, I’d say: I’m so bad at math that if I got 50 cents for every math test I failed, I’d have $1.63 by now.
This, my friends, is serious. State Rep. Spencer Roach — the same GOP House member who helped hatch the government plan to take over Disney World — recently said he was launching a crusade to scrap the current state constitution and replace it with a new one.
Because who needs things like due process and freedom of speech? Clunky and outdated ideals like that can get in the way of an authoritarian agenda.
Roach took to Twitter last month to declare: “We need a complete rewrite of the Florida Constitution.” He then hit the road to make his case.
Yeah, forget old-fashioned ideals like the right to assemble. Florida politicians will define “freedom” for you.
In some regards, I admire Roach’s candor. Most GOP leaders in this state act like they respect the state constitution but then treat it like toilet paper. They rip its principles to shreds and just laugh if a few pieces are left stuck to the bottom of their shoes.
Think about it: Can you even count how many times these guys have passed laws that were blatantly unconstitutional? Laws that courts have repeatedly blocked or thrown out because they violated the very documents these politicians swore to uphold.
In one ruling, a Trump-appointed judge struck down a GOP law that attempted to imprison Floridians who donated more than $3,000 to citizen-led amendment drives. Yes, they wanted to jail people who donated to political causes they disliked until a conservative federal jurist ruled the law was “wholly foreign to the First Amendment” of the U.S. Constitution. Stupid free speech.
In another, particularly embarrassing example, Gov. Ron DeSantis’ own Supreme Court appointees told him he wasn’t allowed to appoint a court justice with only nine years of legal experience when the Florida Constitution explicitly said all nominees must have 10. The justices were basically like: Governor, bruh, you know we wanna simp for you. But even we can’t act like 9 is greater than 10. We can’t just overrule math.
Florida pays lawyers $675/hour to defend unconstitutional legislation. They keep losing | Commentary
Now you’re starting to understand why some Florida politicians want to rewrite the state constitution. Judges won’t be able to rule their political schemes unconstitutional if the schemers are the ones who write the constitution in the first place. How brilliant.
Roach claims to have altruistic motives. Florida Politics reported the Fort Myers Republican told a group of real estate investors that his big concern was the high number of citizen-passed amendments, which Roach said “indicates a deeply flawed document that has served its purpose but is in desperate need of revision.”
Ah, those darn citizen-passed amendments. See, many Florida politicians hate it when you take democracy into your own hands. You vote for things like smaller class sizes, medical marijuana, Fair Districts, restored voting rights and environmental protection — and it really ticks them off. GOP leaders opposed every single one.
So now Roach just wants to strike the whole darn document and start over, telling WFLA: “We need to embrace a more modern document for a more modern Florida.”
Bedrock principles are so overrated.
It’s tempting to dismiss Roach’s idea as a fringe idea by a fringe player, except the last time Roach floated an idea many people viewed with skepticism, it was his pitch to punish Disney for having the audacity to speak up for LGBTQ rights.
Roach tweeted last spring that he wanted to make Disney pay for its “woke ideology,” and a few weeks later, the Legislature voted to do just that. (Their actions raised questions about the propriety of government trying to punish a company for its speech. See? There’s that pesky U.S. Constitution again.)
If there’s a saving grace, it’s that Florida politicians can’t just unilaterally decide to shred the state constitution or touch the U.S. Constitution at all. Instead, they must take any plan to rewrite the Florida Constitution to a statewide vote.
I’d like to think that vote would fail. But if the politicians get their deep-pocketed, chamber-of-commerce buddies to bankroll a misleading campaign, Floridians might think they were voting for one thing when they were really getting something else. (Remember the “Education Lottery”?)
Plus, Roach seems determined, telling Florida Politics: “Yes, it will be controversial, but we have a supermajority, and we need to act now.”
Yet another sign of a well-thought-out and legally defensible plan — when you need to rush it through before anyone has a chance to object. Just the kind of conscientious motivations anyone would want guiding a constitutional revision.
