Recent editorials from Florida newspapers:
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April 14
The Miami Herald on wealthy individuals purchasing coronavirus test kits from private institutions:
Are we surprised that the wealthy residents of exclusive Fisher Island have purchased their own coronavirus test kits from another private institution to keep themselves and their employees safe?
No. As our state and federal governments have made clear, we are on our own.
According to the Miami Herald:
“Fisher Island - an exclusive enclave of multimillion-dollar condos and homes and one of the wealthiest ZIP codes in the country - has purchased thousands of rapid COVID-19 blood test kits from the University of Miami Health System for all of its residents and workers.
The private island, set along Government Cut and nestled between Miami and Miami Beach and accessible only by boat or helicopter, worked out a deal with UHealth to make the tests available to the 800 or so families that live there, and all the workers who maintain the property and patrol its streets.”
The cost was not revealed, but it likely was a pretty penny. After all, the average annual income on the island was $2.5 million in 2015.
The concern should not be that a community is taking care of its own, including employees. Makes sense. But, rather, it highlights the kind of societal inequity that makes Bernie Sanders’ blood boil. Others’, too.
But from the start of this pandemic, an obvious class system emerged regarding who could get tested early in the game and who had to wait for a test - if they could get tested at all.
At one point, it seemed as if members of the public had to be at death’s door to be given a test. But celebrities, mayors and famous athletes appeared to get them for the asking. Money talked, even while some government officials were still talking down the potential severity of the coronavirus.
Unfortunately, this gives the lie to the happy-face cliche that has floated to the surface in this time of the coronavirus: We’re all in this together.
Well, maybe not. Not when essential workers have fight their employers to get masks to do their jobs safely. Not when the governor deems wrestling as essential as a worship service. Not when African-American and Hispanic Americans have been hardest hit by COVID-19 because they’re more likely to be in poor health, or lack insurance, or unable to shelter in place. It’s almost comical when political leaders - too many of whom have been practicing medicine without a license - advise people with symptoms to call their primary-care doctor. Almost comical. In Florida, where lawmakers won’t expand Medicaid because their lives don’t depend on it, they don’t care that the default primary-care doctor for the poor is the costly and crowded emergency room.
This dichotomy is not new. The coronavirus has simply thrust it in front of our faces.
Here’s the real consequence:
The privilege of getting the test kits will save lives. For the not-so-rich, being denied testing early on for not meeting a set of criteria when they first asked has sometimes meant the disease progressed until it was too late to save them.
That won’t be the case for those who live and work on Fisher Island. Good for them.
Online: https://www.miamiherald.com/
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April 14
The Sun Sentinel on releasing information regarding the number of Covid-19 infected patients within nursing homes and other elder-care facilities:
No one is at greater risk in the Covid-19 pandemic than the residents of nursing homes and other elder-care facilities. They and their families have a sacred right to know which of these places have had positive tests for the coronavirus.
But Gov. Ron DeSantis doesn’t think so. His people refuse to identify the facilities where 962 residents have been infected statewide.
In rural north Florida, it was a Live Oak City Council member who told a television reporter that at least 51 people have tested positive for Covid-19 at Suwannee Health and Rehabilitation in rural Live Oak.
And in Fort Lauderdale, it was Mayor Dean Trantalis who told the Sun Sentinel about the cluster of cases at Atria Willow Wood senior facility. The governor later named Willow Wood, too, but says he will name no others because of patient privacy laws.
By contrast, sheriffs, school superintendents, hospital officials, EMS departments, grocery stores and other public officials are being transparent about the number of people who have contracted the virus - and where they worked.
The public, patients and their families have a right to know about nursing homes, too. They care for some of our most vulnerable citizens, after all, and get a lot of public money for doing so. And incredibly, they’re seeking immunity for what’s happening inside right now.
Facing a public records lawsuit from the Miami Herald, DeSantis’s office late last week called the newspaper’s law firm, which yanked the Herald’s veteran lawyer off the case. The governor’s office denies that was the intent, but it was the result.
This episode is unprecedented. And the reputation of one of Florida’s oldest and most respected law firms, Holland & Knight, has been compromised. It chose to give up a long-term media client, if only temporarily, rather than withdraw from representing the DeSantis administration in an unrelated case, or ask for a waiver of the conflict of interest.
It apparently took only one telephone call from DeSantis’s general counsel, Joe Jacquot, to George Meros, a Tallahassee lawyer who is a partner in the firm.
Meros is the law firm’s registered lobbyist and a lawyer for the governor’s side in a case involving voting rights for ex-felons. He isn’t the lawyer who sent the governor the five-day notice of the proposed public records lawsuit, a letter required by Florida law.
That lawyer is Sandy Bohrer, a Miami-based senior partner in Holland & Knight. Bohrer has represented the Herald, its staffers and other journalists for decades. Among his many First Amendment victories has been to open the records of prostitution arrests, the records of a foster child who disappeared, and the video of a prisoner being restrained to death.
Bohrer never heard back from Jacquot. The next thing he knew, someone high in Holland & Knight ordered him not to file the lawsuit.
“They did not want Holland & Knight to represent the Herald,” he told the newspaper.
There is an issue with conflict of interest if a law firm undertakes to represent a client - in this case the Herald - against another client - in this case the DeSantis administration - which it is defending in an unrelated case.
However, a conflict-of-interest issue can be waived with the consent of the clients. In this case, though, Holland & Knight indicated that it never asked for a waiver.
“Holland & Knight acted appropriately in declining the representation of the Miami Herald,” the law firm’s public relations manager, Olivia Hoch, said in an e-mail to the Sun Sentinel late Monday.
“After assessing the possibility of a conflict of interest, the confidentiality of client communications, and the risk of an adverse impact or delay on the Miami Herald’s records request, the firm concluded that it was best for another law firm to take over the matter. These were the only factors the firm considered. The records request will continue unimpeded with new counsel.”
The bottom line: Holland & Knight chose to continue representing the DeSantis administration, a relatively new client, rather than the newspaper that had long retained it.
It is curious that Jacquot called Meros about the notice letter, rather than Bohrer, the attorney who had prepared it.
“He’s the Holland & Knight attorney that we work with all the time,” Jacquot told the Herald.
Jacquot said he never asked the firm not to represent the Herald. “I said, ’Hey, we got this letter and it’s a pre-suit letter. Let me know if Holland & Knight wants to discuss it … George (Meros) just said, ‘Ok, I’ll get back to you.’’
Currently, Meros is representing the DeSantis administration - specifically Secretary of State Laurel Lee - in what’s so far been a failing attempt to defend a law that keeps hundreds of thousands of ex-felons from voting simply because they owe fines they can’t afford to pay.
How Meros came to represent the governor’s side in that case is a story in itself, one that involves Broward’s appointed elections supervisor, Peter Antonacci. The upshot is that his selection forced the original federal judge, Mark Walker, to withdraw because his wife also works for Holland & Knight. Walker wrote that he found Antonacci’s hiring decision “deeply troubling.”
The DeSantis administration is the media’s nightmare when it comes to requesting public records. Apart from the names of nursing homes with Covid-19 cases, the governor also is holding back information on how many unemployment claims have been paid through the state’s dysfunctional system, how the state is spending nearly $50 million in emergency state business loans and how the virus is affecting the prisons.
The Herald’s executive editor and publisher, Aminda Marqués Gonzalez, said the newspaper will pursue the public records suit with another lawyer. The Sun Sentinel and Orlando Sentinel, whose reporters and lawyers have faced the same roadblocks, are joining forces with the Herald.
“We are disappointed,” Marqués said, “that the governor’s office would go so far as to apply pressure on our legal counsel to prevent the release of public records that are critical to the health and safety of Florida’s most vulnerable citizens.
“We shouldn’t have had to resort to legal action in the first place. Anyone with a relative in an elder care facility has a right to know if their loved ones are at risk so they can make an informed decision about their care.”
It is impossible for the state to justify refusing to identify the elder-care homes where coronavirus tragedies are happening.
The information blackout is especially questionable considering that the Florida Health Care Association, the trade group for the long-term care industry, last weekend asked DeSantis for immunity from civil or criminal liability “sustained as a result of an act or omission” during the Covid-19 outbreak.
That’s outrageous. None of the governor’s emergency powers can or should be stretched so far as to discard laws intended to protect Florida citizens.
By asking for immunity, the nursing home lobby is tacitly admitting its failures to protect the most vulnerable.
Online: https://www.sun-sentinel.com/
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April 14
The Palm Beach Post on improving the voting system:
The coronavirus is attacking Americans’ health, our economy and our voting systems, too.
We saw it in Palm Beach County on March 17, Election Day for Florida’s presidential primary and some local elections. More than 800 poll workers, leery of contagion, called in to say they wouldn’t show up. Property managers withdrew their sites as polling locations. It took all of Elections Supervisor Wendy Sartory Link’s powers of persuasion to keep them open.
On Election Day, another 600 poll workers simply never reported to work over 1,500 no-shows in all, Link told the Post Editorial Board. Although 100 volunteers stepped in as last-minute replacements, most of the 454 polling places were shorthanded, some opening late, to voters’ confusion and frustration. Amazingly, given the crisis circumstances, only three didn’t open at all.
“The people who did come in worked under extraordinary conditions,” Link said. “They were real heroes.”
We can’t afford a repeat of this kind of chaos in the August primary or, especially, the November general election, when President Donald Trump will be up for reelection presumably against former Vice President Joe Biden. The March election was a lightly attended affair, with just 27% of eligible voters turning out. The November face-off will bring out voters in hordes.
That’s why we welcome the joint action by all of Florida’s 67 county election supervisors, asking Gov. Ron DeSantis to expand vote-by-mail and early voting. In a letter dated April 7, the Florida Supervisors of Elections who hail from both red and blue counties say they need more flexibility and authority to create alternatives to people forming long lines on Election Day.
The election chiefs want Gov. Ron DeSantis to allow counties the option to extend early voting to three weeks from two and continue early voting through Election Day, not end on the Sunday prior, as usual. Paired with that, they want the power to consolidate polling places with early-voting sites. By reducing the number of sites on Election Day but using larger facilities and for a longer time the counties would have fewer locations to deep-clean and fewer poll workers whose health to worry about. And voters would have extended opportunities for in-person voting.
But in this stay-at-home era of the pandemic, voting by mail will likely be more attractive than ever. In March, 41% of votes cast in Palm Beach County were by mail. And so the supervisors are also asking DeSantis for the ability to canvass and tabulate mail-in ballots earlier than usual.
DeSantis hasn’t yet responded. It’s possible he’s weighing the supervisors’ level-headed good sense against the huffing of his political mentor, President Trump, who suddenly doesn’t like absentee voting despite having recently voted by mail himself. Last week, the mercurial Trump denounced mail-in voting as rife with fraud and claimed that if the United States switched to all-mail voting, “you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.”
It’s unsubstantiated nonsense, and Florida’s elections supervisors know it. They are hardly a radical bunch and they’re certainly not dedicated to keeping Republicans out of office (if they were, they’ve been doing a terrible job of it for 20 years).
Trump’s, as well as Senate Majority leader Mitch McConnell’s, real worry is that more people will vote in the next election, period. For at least a decade, Republicans have made voter suppression a staple of their playbook. Voter ID laws, voter-roll purges, the rollback of the landmark 1965 Voting Rights Act the GOP is doing all it can to make it harder for people to vote. Especially black and brown people. The reason is simple: only a minority of Americans agree with the party’s positions; it hangs on to power by shutting out as many of its opponents as it can from our elections.
Does election fraud exist with absentee ballots? Sure, here and there political operatives will collect bunches of ballots from naive groups of people such as seniors in a nursing home or non-English speaking immigrants. Small-time stuff, usually. But even that should diminish now that ballots come with postage prepaid.
As experts at the Brennan Center for Justice have concluded: “Mail ballot fraud is incredibly rare, and legitimate security concerns can be easily addressed.” Adding: “While mail ballots are more susceptible to fraud than in-person voting, it is still more likely for an American to be struck by lightning than to commit mail voting fraud.”
Vote-by-mail has been a growing feature of Florida’s elections for years. Both the Republican and Democratic parties encourage their members to vote by mail. And, Trump to the contrary, it’s been Florida’s Republicans, with their heavy reliance on older voters, who’ve made the most effective use of the method.
Five states now do all their voting by mail (Oregon, Washington, Hawaii, Utah and Colorado) and report virtually no problems. Theoretically, all-mail voting might be the best way to hold an election amid the pandemic, but Link said it would be difficult for a county as large as Palm Beach to switch its system in time for August and November balloting.
Nevertheless, Link expects that about half of the county’s 981,000 registered voters (at last count) will want to mail their ballots, and she has already ordered 1 million absentee-ballot envelopes for August and November’s elections.
Link said she must set her department’s budget by May 1. That makes it imperative not only that DeSantis gives his OK to the supervisors’ proposals, but that he does it soon.
The elections chiefs of all 67 counties want to avoid an Election Day catastrophe. The governor should, as well.
Online: https://www.palmbeachpost.com/
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