Lawmakers’ Circus Returns to Tallahassee

By Diane Roberts

OCCUPIED TALLAHASSEE — The circus is coming to town.

Y’all might know it as the regular session of the Florida Legislature.

Don’t even begin to think this year can’t possibly be worse than last year, when lawmakers passed a dumpster full of bills to make Florida worse.




They include:

• Allowing underage kids to work 30-hour weeks when school is in session, teaching them the value of low-paid labor.
• Making sure businesses don’t have to give roofers, construction workers, etc., water breaks or shelter from the blazing sun and 100-degree temperatures. This is Florida: Suck it up, Buttercup!
• A law letting people shoot bears whenever they feel like it.
• Scrubbing references to climate change, but ensuring students learn communism is the worst thing in the universe, worse than having to eat your vegetables, worse than “Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey,” worse than syphilis.
• Cracking down on degenerate nekkidness by decreeing that all strippers must be over 21.
• Declared a part of Tyndall Airforce Base “Spaceport Territory,” perhaps to become the future home of Starfleet Academy.

Accomplishments to be proud of, indeed.

But 2025 promises even more landmark legislation.

Always focused on the critical issues, your elected representatives will make it a law that you call the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America.”

Of course, it’s not the “Gulf of America,” any more than Greenland is actually green or Bombay Duck is a waterfowl.




The Associated Press and the rest of the planet will continue to call it the Gulf of Mexico (as will rational Floridians), but since when does reality deter Trump-drunk legislators?

‘Chemtrails’

Case in point: SB56, sponsored by Sen. Ileana Garcia, R-Coral Gables, would forbid messing with the weather.

Seems she agrees with U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who hinted the sinister Biden administration was responsible for Hurricane Helene.

Well, we’re not putting up with people fooling around with storms and heatwaves and space lasers here in Florida, and while we’re outlawing cloud seeding to make it rain — which hasn’t been done for half a century — we need this bill to deal with those terrifying “chemtrails,” too.

You know: The white lines you see when an aircraft flies overhead?

They’re actually nothing but condensation, but Garcia reposted (and did not refute) loony conspiracy theories suggesting they’re chemicals that could facilitate mind control.

The nation’s new HHS Secretary, RFK Jr. agrees, often muttering dark conspiracy theories about some unknown cabal spraying “microscopic particulates from airplanes.”

You can’t be too careful with your precious bodily fluids.

To that end, Sen. Kevin Truenow and Rep. Kaylee Tuck have filed a bill to outlaw fluoride in public water systems, parroting the state surgeon general’s claim that studies show fluoride causes brain damage in children.

Indeed, there are a few studies that do suggest an extremely high level can affect kids’ IQs — in Ethiopia, China, Turkey, and Pakistan, where the water is loaded with fluoride at many times what’s allowed here.

Dentists and the CDC say community fluoridation reduces cavities and other painful mouth maladies by 25%, but what do a bunch of scientists know?

Clearly not as much as RFK Jr. (him again!), who supports banning fluoride, calling it cancer-causing “industrial waste.”

When your kids howl about all those coming encounters with the dentist and his great big drill, tell them to turn to the Almighty.

Compulsory piety

If Kimberly Daniels, D-Jacksonville, has her way, they won’t have much choice.

Rep. Daniels has filed a bill that would require Florida schools to plaster large signs declaring “In God We Trust” on everything that stands still long enough: offices, gyms, libraries, cafeterias, classrooms — who knows, maybe on the back of the school mascot.

And to remind the young ‘uns this is a free country, the measure mandates a “moment of silence” (AKA prayer) and demands students sing the national anthem and say the Pledge of Allegiance every blessed day.

Remember that bill passed last year allowing 16- and 17-year-olds to work 30 hours a week during the school year? Apparently, it’s too soft for Sen. Jay Collins of Hillsborough County.

Collins, a former Green Beret with a chest full of medals and a head full of sawdust, wants those whiny brats to toughen up.

Ditch the mandatory breaks for teen wage slaves; lose the waivers parents must sign; and allow the little punks to work earlier than 6 a.m. and after 11.30 p.m.

On school nights.

The ones who survive the toxic mix of mindless labor and chronic fatigue, managing to stay awake long enough to pass the SAT, and make it to college, might soon be able to pack heat on campus, just as God intended.

Sen. Randy Fine, R-Islamophobia Lakes, has authored a campus-carry bill because students need to protect themselves from “Muslim terror.”

Instances of “Muslim terror” apparently include college students occupying patches of university-maintained grass, sometimes with illicit tents, demonstrating against genocide in Gaza, and occasionally shouting stupid antisemitic slogans.

If those are acts of “terror” so are the rising instances of anti-Muslim “terror” on campus.

Toxicity

Fine seems to imagine Jewish students will get themselves guns.

So will Muslim students.




So will depressed students, alienated students, and anyone who might, at some time, get drunk, stoned, or angry.

What could possibly go wrong?

The combustible Fine is almost certainly on his way out of the Florida Senate, headed to Congress after a special election on April Fool’s Day.

Nevertheless, he’s determined to pass as many hate-fueled bills as possible before he moves up to apply his singular talent for destruction to the entire country.

He was an enthusiastic sponsor of the new law taking in-state tuition away from DACA recipients and other undocumented students. Now he wants to deny them admission to most Florida colleges.

Why? Why not?

Don’t pass up any opportunity to be gratuitously cruel.

In case you have been worried about our not-remotely-beleagured $12 billion+ phosphate industry, the Legislature is on the case, determined to ensure their ability to poison our environment.

The state has 450,000 acres of land where phosphate was, or is still being, mined.

You may have seen these places in west central Florida: huge tracts stripped of plants, animals, water, and soil, and those picturesque gypsum stacks, hundred of feet high and hundreds of acres wide.

Over the past 30 years, the gyp stacks have leaked arsenic, heavy metals, and other carcinogens into Tampa Bay, the Alafia River, and the aquifer.

A couple of citizens who lived on former phosphate land and say they were exposed to dangerous amounts of radiation are suing fertilizer behemoth Mosaic.

Phosphate is radioactive.

But the state may make these tiresome little people go away with bills to shield mining companies, most of which can be counted on to write fat checks come campaign time.

Power and profits trump drinking water.

So much for schools, roads, parks, and police

And while our elected representatives are about the business of wrecking Florida, the governor has decided he wants to abolish property taxes.

Voilà! A bill to “study” what that would mean has magically appeared in the Senate.

To save everybody time, here’s what that would mean: less money for police and firefighters, less money for critical local services (city parks? fixing potholes? running community clinics?), far less money for schools. To begin to make up for that deep revenue hole, Florida would need to generate $43 billion.

Where are we going to get that money? Sky high sales taxes.

Sales taxes are regressive, hitting those least able to pay.




Maybe that’s the idea: Demolish public education, wreck social programs, and create a permanent underclass dependent on low-wage, high-risk jobs.

Ron “Who are you calling irrelevant?” DeSantis is all-in. He’s now concocted a scheme he calls the “DOGE-ing” of Florida, set up to fire hundreds of state workers, root out what he imagines are secret practitioners of DEI, and “audit” (using AI) state universities lest some professor assigns a book on Jim Crow.

You think things at the DMV, the Department of Children and Families, DEP, DOT, etc., are bad now, just wait.

You think institutions of higher ed are sinking in the ratings and getting ridiculed across the country now, just wait.

You think these bills are outrageous and stupid, stay tuned.

These clowns are just getting started.

Diane Roberts is an 8th-generation Floridian, born and bred in Tallahassee. Educated at Florida State University and Oxford University in England, she has been writing for newspapers since 1983, when she began producing columns on the legislature for the Florida Flambeau. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, the Times of London, the Guardian, the Washington Post, the Oxford American, and Flamingo. She has been a member of the Editorial Board of the St. Petersburg Times–back when that was the Tampa Bay Times’s name–and a long-time columnist for the paper in both its iterations. She was a commentator on NPR for 22 years and continues to contribute radio essays and opinion pieces to the BBC. Roberts is also the author of four books.