“Human kindness has never weakened the stamina or softened the fiber of a free people. A nation does not have to be cruel to be tough.”
― Franklin D. Roosevelt
Woke up this morning in my, our, personal paradise, watching the sun rise through the sunroom windows at Wyldswood.
Yesterday was an endurance test, with a morning prep session followed by a full day's deposition in Tallahassee, then racing southeast to Perry so I could play a few very bad holes of golf just before dark, then feeding the fish at Wyldswood and talking until late with P on the phone about all the heavy stuff in our life right now.
I woke up feeling a little better, rested and ready to make the long drive back to Panama City for a day of meetings and conference calls.
Whatever bonhomie I was prepared to shine on those around me vanished, however, somwhere on that long, boring road through the pines, or what's left of them after the storm. It wasn't just that the two lane was crowded with school buses and country people in modest cars driving very, very slowly now that gas has hit $4 a gallon while their income has remained the same.
No, it was the news that got me down. Political events in Florida right now leave me startled at the brazenness, as we watch "owning the libtards" become the equivalent of good governance.
I knew something was amiss on Tuesday night, when my client and I encountered our state representative in the lobby of our hotel. He's a boyish thirty-something, the scion of a wealthy local family, and shifted around in sneakers and golf shorts as Ron asked him if he was in town for the special session on redistricting.
"Well, there are a couple things on the agenda now. And we're being called back for another special session in a few weeks."
A couple things indeed.
The single issue that brought them there in the first instance was odious enough: cramming through a redistricting map drawn by the Governor's staff that deliberately disenfranchises anyone who's not a Republican. Two black congresspersons will be out of a job. In a state that is split evenly between Republicans and Democrats, 20 of our 27 congressmen will be Republicans.
Take that, libtards. You can live here. You just won't be represented politically.
How can they get away with this? Well, the Supreme Court gave them the green light a few weeks ago, in a very consequential decision that was mostly ignored by my neighbors.
Our state representative would likely have been fidgety enough about discussing that power grab, but the new agenda item was even more chilling.
It seems the Republican Party's obsession with sex has led it to pass legislation limiting discussion of certain sexually sensitive subjects in the classroom. This is actually a more nuanced and complicated discussion than either side wants to admit, framed in the broader context of whether we should ever be talking about sexuality in a room full of first graders. But the law itself singles out questions of sexual orientation and sexual identity as its target; hence, the "don't say gay" moniker we've heard so often over the last couple weeks.
The right worked itself into a lather on this one, the first QAnon inspired law on our books (there will likely be many more) that accuses anyone opposed of being groomers or pedophiles.
A lot of folks weren't amused at this bit of political theater, including Disney. That would be our state's largest employer. Reluctantly, the company took a position in opposition to the new law. In response, our petulant little governor (he's only 5'9", something he can't help of course, but it may drive the megalomania we're all witnessing) looked for something he could take from Disney as revenge and to throw gasoline on the already fully developed political firestorm.
So an item was added to the agenda for this special session: the demise of the Reedy Creek Improvement District.
First, a bit of legal background. Florida law allows the legislature to create districts that can tax, spend, and regulate their physical space to one degree or another. Mostly they exist for things like economic development or the support of a critical piece of infrastructure like an airport. The district may have its own fire department, security, water and sewer, etc. And it's allowed to levy taxes to pay for all that.
In 1972 the state created the Reedy Creek Improvement District at the behest of Disney, to allow it to have what amounts to its own private county carved out of Orange and Osceola Counties. The Magic Kingdom truly was and is a little kingdom, and Walt Disney World became its outward manifestation.
That is, until now. At a moment when our economy is being rocked by pretty much all four horsemen of the apocalypse, Florida's elected leaders concentrated on a more pressing need: dismantling Reedy Creek as a comeuppance for Disney's temerity in voicing its unhappiness with our wee governor. And the House managed to pass a bill in one day flat. No need for debate in a single party system.
The argument regarding the continued existence of Reedy Creek, or whether the legislature did the right thing in creating it in the first place, is a lot more complicated than this little dust-up: my favorite take on the whole thing is Carl Hiassen's darkly hilarious Team Rodent: How Disney Devours the World. But that's not the point. This is not a policy argument regarding the wisdom of creating these districts for the gain of a single corporation. Rather, this is an abuse of power, an exacting of political revenge by arbitrarily destroying a politically created privilege as punishment for not toeing the party line. The Kremlin is more subtle.
And, of course, it's going to be expensive if it happens at all, with some estimates putting the cost per household in increased property taxes in the two affected counties at over $2,000 a year.
But hey, we sure owned those groomers down at Disney. Win!
I smirk a little in observing that the two counties that are the real losers here are heavily Republican. Elections have consequences. Enjoy not doing whatever it is you all planned to do with that two grand you'll no longer have.
However, as I said there's a big "if" here, and in all likelihood Reedy Creek will go on as before. It's all show, all political theater to rile up the base and make people who perceive themselves lost and emasculated in a world of eroding rights and economic opportunity feel like there's an arena where they can still whup on those in the professional and information economies for whom things have never been better. Those folks aren't real Americans anyway. No one who's not in our tribe is a real American.
It's not clear where all this leads, when one party gains the levers of power and promptly re-rigs the voting laws, redistricts to cement one-party rule while an complicit Supreme Court looks on impotently, then uses their unassailable power to punish and torment half their population for the entertainment of the other. Or maybe it is pretty clear, if you know your history.
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