Admit it: You want to know what the governor is smoking.
So do we all.
If I knew what the governor was smoking, I could find the farms where it was being grown. If I could find the farms where it was being grown, I could rent a crop duster and drench the fields in Clorox. If I could drench the fields in Clorox, I could kill these mystery plants, the governor might sober up, and democracy could sleep better at night.
Pat Beall is an editorial writer and columnist for the Sun Sentinel, focusing mainly on Palm Beach County issues.
For two years now, Gov. White Boots has been hell bent on making sure not a single spliff gets lit in his Sunshine State. He has worn out a closet’s worth of rubberized waders pacing the halls of the governor’s mansion to ensure — his words — no tourist ever smells pot in a hotel hallway.
He has fretted himself nearly to death over it. And when faced with the 2024 voter referendum allowing people 21 and older to use recreational marijuana, he leapt into action. To pay for his anti-pot propaganda campaign, DeSantis & Co. robbed Medicaid, the state health insurance for the poor and low income, of $10 million. It hoovered up $1.1 million from child welfare and $185,000 for a clinic to help children learn to swallow.
And he took lawsuit money intended to treat opioid addiction, which populates entire cemeteries, to spread jump-scares about marijuana, which does not. Students of history will know this as the day our governor killed irony.
Despite this, a majority of Floridians voted yes. But in Florida democracy, a majority is less than a whiff of a puff of a nonexistent chemtrail. The 56% in favor fell short of 60% needed to pass. So those millions of dollars in siphoned money from people in desperate need of health care or drug treatment, the hidden subcontracts and secretive payments, the millions stolen from child welfare? All worth it!
But now, there’s a new referendum drive to legalize recreational pot, and once again, the invisible hand of Ron DeSantis is cheerlessly throttling the life out of direct democracy.
Really, we should all live long enough to be loved as much as DeSantis loves his Florida hotel hallways.
To get on the ballot for a vote, the proposed constitutional amendment is gathering at least 880,062 signatures from registered voters. The state promptly and wrongly ordered 42,000 of them invalidated. Then the state began deluging local elections offices with 11th hour signature requirements, making it more likely that the petition effort will miss a Feb. 1 deadline.
Enter James Uthmeier. You wouldn’t want to get between a pardoned J6-er and their shiny new federal job, and you sure don’t want to get between Florida’s Attorney General and a performative legal stunt: Totally independent of his white-booted political BFF, the AG looked around and said, you know what this petition drive needs? Forty-six separate criminal investigations.
To try to squash a referendum using the persuasion of a bully pulpit is one thing. To do so by rigging an election before it even gets on the ballot is, well, Florida.
Alas, even a turbo-powered crop duster full of bleach can’t weed this out. There are too many fields, too many powerful people clearly hooked on whack-a-doodle, such as Tuesday in the Oval office, when Donald Trump could not tell the difference between Iceland and Greenland; or the next day in Davos, where he still couldn’t. Nor does anyone know what the theater owners of America were snorting when they decided screening “Melania” would be a sure-fire audience pleaser.
Minneapolis cineplexes, at least, will be thronged as Hotdish Brigade moms seek relief from clouds of pepper spray. Don’t expect them to stick around for the credits, though. They’re going to sneeze it out and head right back to manning the casserole-dish barricades.
Turns out freedom is addictive, too.
Pat Beall is a Sun Sentinel columnist and editorial writer. Contact her at beall.news@gmail.com.
