Here's some rare good news from Florida: On Friday a Florida judge ruled that the Florida Legislature violated the law and Florida's Constitution because of the manner in which it ordered prisons to be privatized in 18 South Florida counties in the last legislative session, and demanded that the project be stopped immediately. Chalk up a small victory for the union folks who brought this lawsuit and for all us regular citizens in our fight against the Republican Party's relentless, ginned-up campaign to amass as much public resources into the hands of a greedy, wealthy few.
The judge was very clear in her criticism of the behind-the-scenes manner in which the Republicans in the Legislature tried to sneak through this massive privatization scheme:
"Actions taken to date are declared illegal without authority in violation of law," Leon County Circuit Judge Jackie Fulford wrote in a strongly-worded, six-page decision that faulted lawmakers for a lack of transparency.
Florida runs the nation's third-largest prison system, and awarding just a part of the system to a private company would have been one helluva lucrative deal. The judge noted that it was legal for the Legislature to privatize the state's prisons, but they went about it in an unconstitutional manner. Nothing new for the Florida Legislature, but for once they were called on it.
The prison privatization scheme was never discussed or debated in any legislative hearings and did not go through any appropriate committee process. Instead, it was quietly inserted into the final budget document in the closing days of the 2011 legislative session (a typical Florida Legislature move), and the final budget cannot be altered or amended and must be voted on by the Legislature. That move violated Florida's Constitution, the judge ruled, because the privatization plan needed to be enacted by law, not through budget language. Why didn't Republicans do that?
Some legislators said the privatization venture wasn't proposed as a law because it wouldn't have passed on a floor vote.
Yes, the privatization scheme was too extreme even for the extremely Republican-controlled Florida Legislature to pass. So the greedy few in the Legislature who wanted this to pass - including Senator JD Alexander, one of the wealthiest people in the state - resorted to hiding the plan inside the budget.
Kudos to the Florida Police Benevolent Association, the union for the state's correctional officers, which filed the suit in hopes of saving the jobs of several thousand correctional officers - at least there's someone in the state worried about keeping jobs in Florida. (It should be noted that two of the three companies that were going to bid on the prison deal were located in Nashville and Utah.)
In case you're wondering about the clearly "activist judge" who made this decision, Leon County Circuit Judge Jackie Fulford was appointed by that pinko commie Republican Governor Charlie Crist and is a registered Republican.