FL State Senator Trolls With Bill To Outlaw Democrats

// On the one hand, Florida State Senator Blaise Ingoglia’s plan to void the party registration of every Democrat in the state is a spectacularly obnoxious exercise in trolling.

“For years I’ve been watching leftist Democrats cancel people, places, and things for things that have happened in the past 250 years,” said the Spring Hill Republican of his recently proposed “Ultimate Cancel Act” which would switch all Democrats to non-party voters because 250 years ago the precursor to the modern day Democratic Party supported slavery. “I thought it was hypocritical that you have these Democrats wanting to remove statues or rename buildings because of things that tie back to slavery. Well, under that same metric, then, the Florida Democrat, the Democrat Party itself, should be canceled.”

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Because rechristening a high school named for a Confederate general is exactly the same as voiding the voter registration of 4.8 million people. Presumably the point of this exercise is to flatten all nuance into a reductio ad absurdum argument about the evils of cancel culture, although getting lectured about censorship by the party currently banning books and seeking to circumscribe what students from pre-K through grad school can learn is a bit much.

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On the other hand, this kind of bullshit is extremely on brand for a party which has sought to disenfranchise poor and minority voters at every turn.

The state is home to 20 percent of American citizens who cannot vote due to a prior felony conviction, despite being home to just 6.6 percent of the US population. And even after the state’s residents voted in 2018 to re-enfranchise many of those would-be voters, Republicans did everything in their power to stop it. During the last redistricting cycle, Governor Ron DeSantis rammed through maps which broke up Black districts at the federal and state level, depriving minority communities of their chosen representatives, particularly targeting former Rep. Al Lawson, a Black politician who had represented the area since 1982. Florida voters passed a constitutional amendment in 2010 outlawing partisan gerrymandering, but, again, Florida Republicans did not care about the law.

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And indeed Mr. Ingoglia himself recently proposed to restrict absentee balloting now that Democrats have taken up the practice due to concerns about non-existent voting fraud.

“I don’t know, but I’m sure it was going on,” he said on the House floor about Bigfoot sightings or possibly rampant so-called ballot harvesting by evil Democrats. “Just the fact that they weren’t caught doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s not happening.”

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Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Likewise troll bills are not evidence of a real political party that intends to legislate for the good of its constituents.

A state senator proposes a plan to cancel the Florida Democratic Party [WFSU]

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Liz Dye lives in Baltimore where she writes about law and politics.

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Election Law, Florida, Government