By Diane Roberts
Floridians are big mad.
Not all 20-odd million of us, of course: We tend to be politically soporific, occasionally becoming passionate over potholes or maybe a too-short grouper fishing season, but preferring to keep reality at arm’s length.
Still, something is changing. People are angry, auto-calling their representatives, making signs, demonstrating and showing up at town halls.
MAGAs will tell you these are nothing but a bunch of disgruntled Democrats, but I’ll bet cash money a good number of those veterans protesting silently outside Tallahassee City Hall last week usually vote Republican.
And I’ll bet a decent number, frightened and frustrated over President Musk’s scorched-earth attacks on the Department of Education, NOAA, USAID, etc. (it’s a terrifyingly long list), didn’t vote at all in 2024.
I overheard a couple of them talking about it during a recent town hall in Tallahassee. They both said they didn’t like either candidate: Harris was too pro-Israel, Trump was good at business (highly debatable) but a terrible person, and until now they never really thought it mattered who got elected.
Now they know.
The town hall was organized by the Democratic Party of Leon County, hoping to get our congressman to come and talk to us, his constituents.
Rep. Neal Dunn was invited. He never even responded. He certainly didn’t show up.
Republicans don’t show up, not any more.
They don’t like getting booed. They don’t like facing outraged citizens.
A few tried holding town halls. Did not go well. But hey, at least they actually held town halls. Nobody’s seen hide nor hair of Florida Republicans.
Maybe they’re huddled together in an undisclosed location.
I doubt anyone expected to see either of our senators: Ashley Moody remains a MAGA acolyte, while Rick Scott held a telephone town hall once, but that was back during the pandemic.
Invisibility
Lawmaker invisibility hasn’t stopped constituents from arranging meetings and imploring these politicians — who allegedly work for them — to come and listen.
Tampa Bay voters put on a town hall in Clearwater on March 15 in Rep. Anna Paulina Luna’s district.
She was, unsurprisingly, absent. Undeterred, a large crowd addressed a cut-out of her.
Some told the cardboard Luna they feared DOGE would wreck Social Security.
One lady, whose husband was fired from the U.S. Geological Survey in DOGE’s senseless purges, said, “I’ve called and I have emailed and heard nothing from you.”
Maybe Luna’s too busy lobbying to carve Trump’s face on Mt. Rushmore.
Luna doesn’t support Ukraine, and pitched a little hissy fit when Democrats waved the blue and yellow flag in the House, snapping, “Put those damn flags away!”
But by God, she’s determined to get to the bottom of the great JFK assassination cover-up, demanding the doctors who treated JFK in Dallas and members of the Warren Commission who investigated it appear before Congress.
Unfortunately for her and for the CIA/Cuba/KGB/Space Aliens conspiracy theorists, all those people are quite dead.
No-show
Neal Dunn, last week’s no-show, is a urologist from Panama City and is, like Luna, one of the state’s least impressive members of Congress.
He’s done absolutely nothing of note, unless you count his proposed resolution to “Protect American Businesses from Onerous Refrigeration Regulations.”
You’d think he might have bothered to attend a room of 500+ voters, eager to hear from him.
It wouldn’t have been much of an inconvenience, either: According to his website, he was in Tallahassee that morning, hosting an event for young people who might want to attend one of the service academies.
That event ended at 11 a.m.; the town hall started at 11 a.m.; the distance from City Hall to the American Legion Hall is 1.8 miles.
It would have taken him a solid five or six minutes to drive there.
Concerns
The standing-room-only audience created a list of what they’d like to talk about: the unelected Musk, DOGE’s trashing of government services, Ukraine, health care, reproductive rights, our endangered planet, our endangered entitlement programs, and our endangered democracy.
A panel of worthies, including a county commissioner, a city commissioner, legendary activist Karen Woodall, and former Democratic congressman Alan Boyd, tried to address people’s issues.
It wasn’t smooth sailing.
Many were thoroughly annoyed with the good souls on the panel as well as the minority party in Washington.
Democrats are good at lamenting, hand-wringing, and doom-predicting — all reasonable responses to the atrocities visited upon the country by President Musk and his henchpersons.
They just don’t seem to have much in the way of answers.
One guy stood up and yelled, “What’s the solution? I think we know the problem!”
Attack on universities
Sentient Americans understand the United States is being dismantled, hurled into a Dumpster, and set on fire.
Rep. Dunn’s district contains six institutions of higher education. All receive federal funds.
If DOGE gets its way and slashes the budgets of the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health, what will become of research at FSU, FAMU, and other colleges and universities?
FSU alone could lose $65 million.
That would be a direct hit on the College of Medicine, all the science departments, and the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory — the largest and most important magnet lab in the world.
It conducts experiments in (among other things) superconductivity, critical to efficient and sustainable energy sources.
If that money goes away, it won’t just be scientific research that suffers: There will be a knock-on effect, harming the whole university.
The best professors will leave; the best students won’t enroll; lots of people will be laid off.
What will happen to the hundreds of federal jobs at Tyndall Air Force Base at the western end of Rep. Dunn’s territory? How about the USDA Farm Service office in Madison at the eastern end?
Florida is home to 100,000 federal employees, most of them represented by Republicans.
How about DOGE’s decimating NOAA and the National Weather Service? Florida’s entire Democratic congressional delegation warned that this was a Very Bad Idea.
No Republicans signed onto their letter.
Remember Michael?
Maybe Dunn thinks Florida doesn’t need hurricane forecasters; maybe he’s forgotten what Hurricane Michael did to his district in 2018.
Without NWS it would have been even worse.
What would Dunn — or any of Florida’s senators and representatives— say to the 400 statewide who’ve lost their jobs with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service? Or the untold numbers who’ll soon be sacked by the Veterans Administration?
Dunn is a veteran himself, but he’s pretty offhand about their concerns. It’s only 20 “in the region” (whatever than means — VA jobs, maybe?
“This is not a massacre,” he said.
Maybe not to him, but the veterans protesting outside his recent event at Gulf Coast State College weren’t impressed: “There’s nowhere in the Constitution that what is going on with DOGE and Elon Musk is appropriate,” one told WJHG TV.
That’s putting it mildly.
But the Constitution doesn’t seem to matter to DOGE, President Musk, Trump, or the Republican-controlled Congress.
Maybe it will mean something to the Supreme Court.
What do you say, Rep. Dunn?
Diane Roberts is an 8th-generation Floridian, born and bred in Tallahassee. Educated at Florida State University and Oxford University in England, she has been writing for newspapers since 1983, when she began producing columns on the legislature for the Florida Flambeau. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, the Times of London, the Guardian, the Washington Post, the Oxford American, and Flamingo. She has been a member of the Editorial Board of the St. Petersburg Times–back when that was the Tampa Bay Times’s name–and a long-time columnist for the paper in both its iterations. She was a commentator on NPR for 22 years and continues to contribute radio essays and opinion pieces to the BBC. Roberts is also the author of four books.
