Man, Florida Republicans cannot get enough of drug-testing legislation. A bill allowing the state to randomly drug-test state workers
passed the House and heads to the Senate. In the House, a Democratic amendment calling for legislators and the governor to also be subject to drug testing failed.
Once passed, the bill will doubtless be challenged in court, like so many other recent Florida drug-testing bills:
The last attempt to randomly drug test state employees without suspicion landed the state in court. State officials are currently awaiting a ruling on that case, but the judge who will hear the case has already expressed serious concerns with its constitutionality.
To state the obvious, when politicians put forward drug-testing bills aimed at selected populations with no evidence that there's a widespread drug problem within those populations, it's not about actual drug use. It's about branding groups of people that those politicians don't like, painting them as potentially criminal. So people who need government assistance, unemployed people, public workers—all groups that Republicans don't like and don't want the public to feel sympathy for—get told to pee in cups. Like Republican-controlled legislatures in
Indiana, Ohio, Georgia and other states, though the Florida legislature likes itself too much to submit itself to that indignity.