Part of the series, Assault on Florida.
Who ordered Sumter County, Fla., deputies to prevent Democrats from attending GOP Florida Gov. Rick Scott’s budget-signing event in the public square at The Villages, a retirement community, on May 26?
And why did the deputies wade into the crowd assembled at the square and confiscate what a Miami Herald reporter described as “anti-Scott signs and liberal-looking pins” on orders from people the Herald reporter identified as “staffers and Republican operatives?”
At a campaign-style event that banned some Democrats, Republican Gov. Rick Scott fashioned himself into Florida’s new veto king Thursday when he axed $615 million from the state budget before signing it.
The biggest target of the veto pen: $305 million targeted for environmental land buys. Scott also cut $169 million in college projects and vetoed scores of hometown spending lawmakers earmarked for their districts.
Scott blamed “special interests” for the “shortsighted, frivolous, wasteful spending” — thereby irking some of his fellow Republicans who control the Legislature. Some accused him of hypocrisy, others of inflating his veto amount with financial gimmickry….
The speech had all the trappings of a campaign celebration. It was paid for by the Republican Party of Florida, which broadcast the event and the banners that touted “Less Waste, More for Education.”
Members of The Villages Democratic Club were barred from the budget signing by Scott staffers who said the outdoor event in The Villages town square was “private.” Other staffers and Republican operatives scoured the crowd and had Sumter County sheriff’s deputies remove those with anti-Scott signs or liberal-looking pins and buttons. They escorted more than a dozen people off the property.
Even the Orlando Sentinel, a newspaper aligned with the GOP, reported that deputies were deployed at the event to muzzle the governor’s critics:
Before the start of the rally, about two dozen or so people sat down prepared to watch Scott’s speech, Many of them wore blue T-shirt with the words “Vote Democratic” on the back and carried signs with messages including “Pink Slip Rick.” Sumter deputies quickly told them to stand across the street from the square in front of a Johnny Rockets restaurant, away from the rally site.
Some argued that they’d read in a local newspaper that the event was open to the public but were told it was a private event for the Republican Party only. A deputy said he was told that law officers would ask anyone who wasn’t welcome to leave.
Say what?!
Apparently the reporters from the Herald and the Sentinel were not interested in knowing who it was among the event’s management staff who decided to deploy the deputies as the governor’s personal goon squad.
It’s particularly galling because the deputies’ salaries are paid by the same Sumter County residents they barred from the event and whose First Amendment-protected printed materials they impounded.
This would be truly shocking if it weren’t a) the act of a state party headed by the most corrupt governor elected outside Louisiana in a century or so and b) it weren’t right out of the Bush-Rove playbook when Bush toured the country promoting his Social Security privatization scheme after his polling sank into the 20s, as Scott’s is now.
(Of course, it took five years for Bush’s approval ratings to scrape bottom. Scott got there in five months.)
Aside from the desperation signaled by this descent into jackbooted brutishness, it also represents a new low in hypocrisy. Given the GOP’s ideological hatred of government — especially government employees like, say, deputy sheriffs — they should have at least hired private goon squads to suppress Gov. Scott’s critics at the event.
