Gov. Rick Scott’s administration is positioning itself for a showdown with the U.S. Department of Justice for demanding that Florida cease searching for and purging noncitizen voters.
The DOJ gave Florida until Wednesday to respond to a letter, sent last week, that said the purge probably ran afoul of two federal voting laws. Florida will respond, but it probably won’t quit its effort and will likely ask the DOJ to clarify its interpretation of the federal laws it cited.
“Our letter will address the issues raised by DOJ while emphasizing the importance of having accurate voter rolls,” said Chris Cate, spokesman for Florida Secretary of State Ken Detzner, who’s in charge of the state’s elections division.
The U.S. Senate on Tuesday couldn't muster the votes to consider a pay equality bill that the White House and congressional Democrats say is necessary but Republicans decry as a show vote designed to taint them as anti-women.
The bill needed 60 votes to be considered; it got 52 votes from Democrats and independents. All Republicans in the Senate voted against it.
Florida's senators split their votes along party lines, with Democratic Sen. Bill Nelson voting for the proposal, and Republican Sen. Marco Rubio voting against it.
The Paycheck Fairness Act requires businesses to show that wage discrepancies between men and women are not based on gender. The measure also bans retaliation against workers who reveal their wages or try to get wage information from their employers.
Rubio called the legislation more about "scoring political points" than solving any problems. (And said his anti-union legislation, the Rewarding Achievement and Incentivizing Successful Employees Act should get a hearing.)
From Public Policy Polling, a firm that typically surveys for Democrats but has consistently produced pretty good Florida surveys, which are robo-poll based:
PPP's newest Florida poll finds little change in the state compared to mid-April. At that time Barack Obama led Mitt Romney 50-45 there, and now his advantage is 50-46. Voters in the state narrowly approve of Obama, 49/46, and continue to dislike Romney, giving him a 39/53 favorability rating.
Obama's strength is based on what's become a pretty predictable set of groups. He's up 57-39 with women, 61-36 with Hispanics, 93-7 with African Americans, and 65-27 with voters under 30. Romney's up 52-46 with seniors and 55-41 with whites but he'd need larger advantages with those demographics to be ahead overall.
The state AFL-CIO has co-endorsed Democratic rivals -- Kristin Jacobs and Lois Frankel -- in the Broward/Palm Beach Congressional District 22 race.
The co-endorsement means equal support for the candidates from central AFL-CIO bodies but allows local unions support their candidate of choice. The co-endorsement is unusual from the state union but it has happened before.
“The co-endorsement allows us to kind of agree as a family look we’ve got two excellent candidates in this race,” said Richard Templin, AFL-CIO legislative and political director.
Jacobs, a Broward County Commissioner, faces an uphill battle to catch up after jumping in nearly a year after Frankel, former West Palm Beach mayor and state legislator. Jacobs raised about $204,000 in her first quarter while Frankel has raised about $1.8 million throughout the race. Another challenge for Jacobs is geography: about 57 percent of the district is in Palm Beach County.
The winner is expected to face Boca Raton Republican Adam Hasner, a former House majority leader.
Currently U.S. Rep. Allen West (R-Plantation) represents the swing district but due to redistricting the electorate will lean Democratic and West is running in a district to the north instead.
The door slammed on protections for assisted living facility residents this legislative session, but a committee of stakeholders met this morning with the hope of hammering out limited changes.
The 15-member panel, made up of bureaucrats, assisted living facility administrators and resident advocates, will meet six times in the latest attempt to impose changes on the powerful ALF industry.
The thrust for change followed months of reporting from the Miami Herald, which unveiled rampant abuse and neglect of ALF residents after years of deregulation and poor oversight.
The liberal group MoveOn is blasting out an email today urging its members to contact Gov. Rick Scott's office to pressure him to stop a noncitizen voter purge. Here's a partial text of the email:
Dear MoveOn member,
We have just 24 hours to make sure Governor Rick Scott stops his all-out assault on Florida's Latino voters. It's the worst attack on voting rights in the country.
Florida's Division of Elections is challenging the citizenship of over 180,000 voters based on bad information.1 If voters don't respond to the challenge in time, their names will be erased from the voter roll. The media has already exposed the purge as hopelessly flawed, wrongly accusing many people who are citizens—including nearly 400 voters in Miami-Dade county alone.2
And of course, more than half of the targeted voters are Latino—the group least likely to get challenged were white Republicans.3 This is overt and illegal racial bias.
That's why the Department of Justice told the Florida Secretary of State that the program is in violation of two federal laws and to demanded that it be stopped. Governor Scott is required to respond by tomorrow—and so far he is refusing to comply.4
We have to stop Governor Scott today—he is embarrassing Florida and corrupting the electoral process. His reckless acts have local and national implications. So let's ring his office's phones off the hook until he stops his racially-targeted attack on voting rights.
Will you call Gov. Scott right now? Tell him, "Stop illegally purging Florida voters."
Miami-Dade School Board member and State House candidate Renier Diaz de la Portilla was none too pleased about a blog post concerning opponent Manny Diaz Jr.'s fundraiser. Diaz de la Portilla points out that, not only is he really leading Diaz in fundraising, he has perhaps the most-important of endorsements, former Congressman Lincoln Diaz-Balart.
"I am supporting Renier Diaz de la Portilla for State Representative because he has done an exceptional job on the School Board and because I am convinced that he will continue to serve our community well in Tallahassee," Diaz-Balart wrote in a statement. "In the coming months I look forward to asking our entire community to support Renier as well."
Diaz de la Portilla certainly has high name ID. He's not just a sitting school board member and former state representative -- he's the brother of a current state Sen., Miguel Diaz de la Portilla, and a former state Rep. and Sen. Alex Diaz de la Portilla.
"I have the support and endorsement of Lincoln Diaz-Balart. An important DISTRICT-WIDE endorsement," Renier Diaz de la Portilla wrote in a text message. He said Diaz can't compete.
"He can't win unless he outspends me 3-1. Not happening. I outraised him more than 2 to 1 in the last quarter, even though he has been raising and campaigning since 2010," Diaz de la Portilla said.
The Karl Rove-affilited Crossroads GPS political action committee is running yet another spot in Florida, this one called "Stopwatch," which attacks the president for the national debt. It's spending $1.7 million on this spot, and $7 million nationwide on it, as part of a $25 million campaign.
Echoing the conservative line, the ad wants Obama to "stop the spending," and makes no mention of the idea that the national debt could also be reduced by raising some taxes (anathema to Republicans). It also says 'he's adding $4 billion in debt every day... borrowing from China for his spending."
Unmentioned: The debt has grown by an average of $4.2 billion per day since January 2009, meaning some of the debt is also the result of Obama's predecessor's time in office and the previous congress. So it's not all Obama and it's not as if he personally is asking China for the money. And China isn't the number-one debt holder. It might account for a sizable 8-10 percent. But more than two-thirds of U.S. debt is held by domestic U.S. institutions and investors.
None of this means that spending and debt hasn't increased under Obama. It has. But it's not like he's doing it all on his own to help China.
Update: Here's former Obama campaign spox and current Priorities USA PAC leader Bill Burton: "In rushing to defend his candidate, Karl Rove has highlighted one of Governor Romney’s key weaknesses. As CEO, Romney often made millions by loading up companies with unsustainable debt to pay himself fees. As Governor, Romney increased state debt by $2.6 billion – leaving the state with the highest debt per capita in the country. Now Romney is proposing to add $3.4 trillion to our debt with new tax cuts for the very wealthiest Americans. In business and government, Romney has always been for more debt at the expense of the middle class, especially when it stood to make the wealthy, wealthier."
Vice President Joe Biden couldn’t have picked a better spot Monday to make an election-year pitch: The new Marlins Park baseball stadium, site of Cypress Bay High School’s 2012 graduation ceremony.
"As a kid, this was my dream, standing at home plate at a major league ballpark. Not as a speaker, but as a batter,” he told the graduating class of 2012. “But I had to settle on being vice president.”
Biden hailed Cypress Bay, one of the newest, biggest and best high schools in Florida. He sounded optimistic notes about the brightness of the future and the need for tolerance in a global village wired ever tighter by technological advancement.
“You are going to lead those changes as you leave this school, so don’t sell yourself short,” Biden said. “Don’t think small. Don’t give into cynicism, don’t give into the negativity that pervades our public discourse. And imagine."
Mitt Romney's presidential campaign is out with another dual English-Spanish web ad, this one about the "dismal" jobs report that showed Hispanic unemployment rose from 10.3 to 11 percent in the past month. This is only a web ad right now, but it has the feel of TV spot (if it were cut in half to 30 seconds).
President Obama's campaign has been waging an early-and-often battle for the hearts and minds of Hispanics and will likely win the Latino vote. Obama supports the pro-immigrant DREAM Act, popular among many Hispanics, and Romney said he would've vetoed it. Obama's also trying to make Romney look extremist to Latinos when it comes to immigration. Romney has largely dropped the issue as a topic now that the GOP primary is over.
But will it be enough for Obama if Hispanics feel worse off under the president? It's not as if they'll flock to Romney. But many might stay home on Election Day. That would be a killer for Obama, who won 57 percent of the Florida Hispanic vote in 2008 (George W. Bush took 56 percent in 2004).
Romney might be making gains, or Obama might be losing support among Hispanics. Last month's Quinnipiac University poll showed Obama winning the Latino vote 42-40 over Romney. That's not enough for the Democrat. A Marist Florida poll was better news for Obama. It showed him winning the Hispanic vote 55-36 in Florida. Both polls have relatively small Latino sample sizes. So it's unclear who's right.
