Florida: Where State Republicans Won't Do Their F-cking Jobs

It just keeps getting worse.  Per the Tampa Bay Times' headline:

Florida House abruptly adjourns session early, saying impasse is insurmountable

Bullsh-t.  It's not insurmountable.  YOU ALL WERE JUST TOO DAMNED SCARED AND LAZY TO DO YOUR DAMN JOB.

This is all about the Florida House Republicans - as noted last time I ranted about the f-ckers, which was less than a week ago -  unwilling to resolve the Medicaid funding gap that's due to open up in June.  Rather than even pretend to care about the matter - which they don't - the House leadership just up and sent everyone home for an early vacation.

Florida's Legislature collapsed into chaos Tuesday as the House unilaterally ended the annual session with more than three days left, leaving dozens of major bills dead and escalating tensions between the House and Senate over their health care stalemate...

...House Speaker Steve Crisafulli, R-Merritt Island, gaveled the legislative session to a close at 1:15 p.m. Tuesday. "We didn't get everything we wanted, and we won't get everything that we hoped, but we have done all that we can do for this session," he said. He then told House members to go home "until the Senate decides they are ready to negotiate."

It marked the first time in Florida's modern history that one chamber shut down and went home on a different day than the other in a regular session. Adjournment records go back only to 1971...

The departure not only left the Medicaid matter unsettled, the House refused to consider other matters as well, effectively abdicating ANY accountability for what they're supposed to do up in Tallahassee.

The House's early exit left unfinished major policy bills that would have rewritten the state's water policy, decided how to spend money from the Amendment 1 environmental measure, increased economic and educational options for people with special needs, reformed the state prison system, revised ethics rules at the Public Service Commission and provided financial benefits to charter schools.

Lazy, unfocused, undedicated...  these bastards do not deserve to draw a paycheck from the taxpayers.

So of course this all means that the Florida Legislature has to call back a special session, which means more money wasted, more time wasted, more political posturing to the base.  It's sick and it's wrong.

The presiding officers of each chamber must now agree to come back in special session in order to complete the state budget — the only bill they are required to pass each year by the June 30 deadline — or Gov. Rick Scott could order them back together.

Given that Rick "Medicare Fraud" Scott is openly opposed to the Senate's proposal to go ahead and switch over from the old LIP Medicaid funding to the new ACA "Obamacare" Medicaid funding, I doubt Scott would feel the need to give that order.

Of course, this could all be just political posturing on the part of the Republicans.  There is every likelihood the state leadership is aware they've got few options here, and have to make the switch-over to the ACA Medicaid funding to keep the whole state budget afloat.  This may all be an elaborate kabuki dance, where they'll fidget and postpone all the way up to the June 30 deadline, giving themselves political cover with their wingnut Teabagger base by railing against the dreaded Obamacare directives, and then "reluctantly" play ball with the federal government and take the ACA money.  That way they can claim they were "forced" to submit to EVUL OBAMA and placate that voting base from primarying against them in 2016.

Then again, this might not be a ruse.  We are at the state level of government: where the political players are more partisan and pandering than they would be at the federal level where more attention is paid to what elected officials do (considering how wingnut the Congressional Republicans can get, that's how bad the state Republicans are).  The elected leaders in the state House are a little too sincere, a little too eager to twist the knife in on the whole "killing Obamacare" agenda.  And with a sitting governor in Scott who's proven a few too many times to suck up to the partisan crowd - especially as he's eyeing a Senate run to prolong his political career - there is every likelihood that the state government will let LIP expire without getting replacing ACA funds.

In that scenario, 800,000 Floridians will suddenly lose Medicaid health care funding.  We're talking poor elderly, we're talking poor families with sick kids.  We are talking about nursing homes and assisted living housing losing funds to keep their residents fed and cared for.  We are talking about enough people here in state that everyone will know at least one person suffering because of this.  This will be a level of pain no one will be able to ignore.

And in that scenario, I would not at all be surprised to see the House Republicans and Rick "No Ethics" Scott eagerly point the finger of blame at their Senate colleagues for THEIR not compromising to Scott's plan (of talking the feds into continuing the LIP program for one more year, as though that solves anything).  None of us should be surprised when Scott accuses Obama as being responsible for Scott's refusal to do the right thing for a massive number of Florida residents.

This is the modern Republican Party on full display here.  This is not a party that wants to govern, or make decisions, or do the hard things that need doing.  This is a political party obsessed with "winning", whatever the hell that is, either winning the election cycle or winning the photo op news cycles.

This is what we get Floridians, when enough of you buy into the Republicans' snake-oil con jobs, when enough of you refuse to show up to vote for Democrats who would at least TRY to pass legislation and do their jobs.