Legislators not listening to people

Leave it to our state Legislature to make sure that the wishes of the people of Florida are left on the cutting room floor while they play politics.

Last week, the state Legislature met in special session with but one goal. That goal was to discuss and possibly approve placing a constitutional amendment question on the ballot for Florida voters this November.

The question voters would have been asked was if they would like to enact a constitutional ban on off-shore drilling for oil in Florida state waters.

A couple of years ago, the issue may have been too close to call, with the extreme right-wingnuts constantly chanting “Drill, baby, drill” and touting the non-existent benefits to a Florida tourism-based economy of putting mostly foreign-owned drilling rigs 125 miles off shore where the workers would live in the tax-free island nations.

With the massive oil gusher that was the Deepwater Horizon pouring hundreds of thousands of gallons of crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico for the last three months, and thousands of Sunshine State residents watching the oil’s inexorable march across the water to impact our shores, that mind set had changed.

No amount of half-truths and error-by-omission spin was going to change the minds of Florida voters that keeping oil rigs and their potential spill impacts away from our hundred-billion-plus dollar beachfront was a very good idea whose time has come.

So our Governor did the right thing by the people. He called a special session to take up the question of allowing the people the opportunity to forever solidify our dissatisfaction with oil rigs drilling beneath our economic engine.

Our learned Legislators laughed at the notion.

The Senate made a show of showing up for work. The House didn’t even do that. The latter body simply adjourned without even bringing the matter to the floor for discussion, let alone a vote.

And the former body had to follow suit later that same day because such an endeavor requires approval from both houses of the Legislature.

The House leadership said it hoped to harm Gov. Charlie Crist, who had the audacity to ask comfortably ensconced running-for-reelection representatives to return to the Capitol to take up state business, in his run for US Senator.

What the move did was make a group of supposedly grown men look ridiculous, and proving that most are totally out of touch with the people they are elected to represent.

But we believe the move, as so many in the Republican Party are these days, was hiding a far more obscure reason.

Many of the seated representatives are running for reelection. Many of those have already accepted corporate oil money to finance that reelection campaign, and many more are hoping to receive corporate oil money to help finance that campaign.

Putting the issue out to voters, who at this point in our history would surely have enacted the ban, would have lost our politicians that lucrative source of campaign donations.

And it is a source they could never have gotten back if the voters were allowed to make the ban part of the state Constitution and take the decision out of the hands of elected politicians eager for oil money to finance campaigns.

As long as the decision on off-shore drilling rests with the elected politician, the money will have to continue to flow from corporate oil coffers so the international oil conglomerates have a hope of someday garnering enough support to allow drilling in some of the most sought-after commercial and recreational fishing waters in the world.

For once the Legislature failed to give the voter a chance to make the ban a permanent one, it left the eventual decision on whether to lift the current ban in the hands of the elected politicians—the very same politicians who have tried to lift the ban before, including this year just days before Deepwater Horizon went to the bottom and our shores became target three for the free-flowing oil.

But the politicians, fueled by corporate oil campaign contributions, will be back next year, or the year after, trying to lift the state’s ban again, and as of now, they won’t have to worry about that pesky voter-mandated ban that would have emerged had they actually allowed the voters to have a say on the issue.

Every State Representative who voted for the adjournment without action last week should be voted out of office. That won’t happen due to voter apathy and the megabucks corporate oil will pour into campaigns to maintain the status quo, but it’s a nice thought maybe we can keep around for next year when legislators, unhampered by a voter mandate they don’t want to seek, try again to lift the drilling ban in state waters.

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