New laws make DeSantis' simmering Florida meaner and more dangerous

The 2024 Florida legislative session reached its bleak denouement this week, when nearly 180 new laws took effect, many with sweeping, pernicious and — with enduring right-wing majorities locked in place — virtually irreversible changes to the state's quality of life. The upshot is a Florida less safe for workers, less culturally rich, more corrupt, and less free, a sunbaked place where kids can work long hours and local governments can't protect workers from record-setting heat, where the cops get to police their own conduct, where the sea reclaims cities while the state airbrushes "climate change" out of its statutes. And, for reasons known only to the hayseed legislator who proposed it, residents can now shoot black bears on impulse.

Nature has failed to cooperate with Tallahassee's designs. While climate change terminology has now been officially scrubbed out of Florida's policy books, South Florida is still recovering from a record, monsoon-like series of June rains and the frightening Hurricane Beryl — the earliest Atlantic Category 5 in recorded history — serves as a haunting opening act for the storms to come.

These phenomena are not, as Gov. Ron DeSantis' flacks have argued, ordinary rainy season inconveniences. They are harbingers of the hotter, more dangerous world we are simultaneously creating and inheriting. No one is asking DeSantis or his legislative allies to change the weather — the Capitol is no place for miracles — but their denialism, their reactive posture and their obsession with culture-war catnip at the expense of solving real-world problems, like the state's failed private insurance market, cost us all.

And when they're not solving real-world problems, they're deep in the business of inventing new ones: Legislators and the governor snapped into action to block local governments from mandating that private employers offer heat-exposure protections and water breaks to their employees — because why, in a humid, agrarian state like Florida, parts of which have experienced record heat this summer, would any local government want to do that?

https://www.heraldtribune.com/story/news/columns/nate-monroe/2024/07/03/new-laws-make-desantis-simmering-florida-meaner-and-more-dangerous-commentary/74287602007/