Joe Biden Won Florida, Florida’s Child Labor Law & Trump’s 50% - Top 3 Takeaways – January 18th, 2024
- Joe Biden won Florida. No, unless hell has frozen over it’s not something you’ll hear in November. But it is something that was just decided, not voted on mind you, but decided. Technically, you could have said that it was something that the Florida Democrat Party decided on in October, but the final decision that Joe Biden has won the Democrat Primary in Florida, including all 250 delegates, has definitively been decided. So given that Florida’s Presidential Preference Primaries aren’t until March 19th and given that Joe Biden is being contested for the nomination by Dean Phillips and Marianne Williamson, you might wonder how this is so. Well, it’s so because when the Florida Democratic Party’s State Executive Committee met last October to decide who would appear on the state’s presidential primary ballot, the only candidate to receive any votes by the executive committee was Joe Biden. So, team Nikki Fried, who has a proclivity for weed, was (and is) 100% behind Joe Biden without consideration for any other candidates or allowing Florida’s registered Democrats having the ability to vote on the matter. Under Florida law, if only one candidate is running in a race, they automatically win without an election being held. In this instance, when the Florida Democrat Party only submitted Joe Biden as a presidential candidate he automatically won. Now this anti-Democratic decision by the so-called Democratic Party was challenged in court by a Democrat who felt disenfranchised by the party’s decision. The ruling is in, and the court determined that the attorney who challenged the party’s decision lacked standing for bringing the case. So, it’s official. Joe Biden has won the Democrat Party primary in Florida along with all 250 delegates that come along with it. The anti-Democratic Party used to use super delegates to negate the votes of registered democrats in presidential primaries. Now, under Nikki Fried’s leadership in Florida, they’ve decided that the party faithful shouldn’t even vote. That’s one way, and perhaps the only way that Joe Biden, who currently sports a 33% approval rating in Florida, can win Florida. It’s also the latest and most pervasive evidence to date that indeed the idea of the Democratic Party is a marketing scam. It remains the anti-Democratic Party – now more than ever. I can’t imagine the Party’s decision will help reverse the hemorrhaging of formerly registered Democrat voters in Florida either. What’s the marketing pitch? Join the Democrat Party where we choose the candidates for you?
- Let them work. There’s a battle brewing over a Republican effort in the state legislature to expand the opportunity for 16- and 17-year-olds to work. Broadly speaking Republicans would like to see the expanded work opportunities and Democrats don’t. Multiple like proposals are currently active in the state House and Senate so it’s a little early to say what the final version of a bill to reform Florida’s child labor law may look like, but for the context of this conversation I’ll start with what the broadest proposal, which is the House proposal would do. It would allow 16- and 17-year-olds to work over 30 hours a week when school is in session and over 8 hours a day when school is scheduled the next day. This has prompted news headlines such as this: Florida Republican Seeks to Weaken Child Labor Laws, Florida Republicans Want to Destroy Restrictions on Teenage Labor, and perhaps my favorite: It’s unAmerican: New Florida bill would remove work hour restrictions for 16- and 17-year-olds. I frankly can’t think of anything more American than hard work at an early age in an effort to get ahead...and that’s probably in part because that’s exactly what I did – only I started working well before 16. But then again, I’ll not make this about me, the kid who sold paper airplanes door-to-door out of my red wagon at 5, or who traveled the neighborhood with a lawn mower looking to cut lawns at 11. I’m sure by today’s absurd standards the boobs who wrote those stories would have turned my amazing parents, who supported and appreciated hard work, into child protective services (and who knows, maybe they feel threatened by the prospect of 16-year olds working harder than them). But here’s the thing and it’s an extraordinarily absurd thing about Florida’s law. It’s the most absurd aspect of this entire debate from my point of consideration. Why does Florida impose any standards that are more restrictive than the federal standards anyway? The federal government has imposed and regulated child labor standards nationally since the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938. The federal mandates which are imposed are still less restrictive than even the least restrictive bill that’s currently proposed in the state legislature. Remember those absurd headlines I referenced – especially my favorite...that the Florida House proposal would be “unAmerican”. The irony of ironies is that Florida’s child labor law, even if that bill became law, would quite literally be entirely American. As in living within the confines of what the federal government mandates pertaining to child labor. Maybe if the writers of those stories had worked at 16 or 17, or perhaps even younger, as many of us who believe in hard work did, they would have known how patently absurd their articles, and thus their positions are. Let parents be parents over this situation and let kids that want to get ahead in life work as their parents, and the limitations of the federal government, see fit. Florida should get out of the way of this happening.
- 50%. The first poll post the Iowa Caucus results, and without Chris Christie, Vivek Ramaswamy and Asa Hutchison in the race (although Asa’s actual existence in the race has long been debatable), show’s Trump at a number in New Hampshire he hasn’t polled at yet – 50%. If the Boston Globe/Suffolk poll proves right, and if Trump wins New Hampshire with greater than 50%, the race for the Republican Nomination for president would be all but officially over, at least on this side of the wildcards of Trump court rulings and legal affairs (which btw, is why Nikki Haley will likely remain in the race until the end no matter what). New Hampshire has consistently been the state Trump’s polled worst in, and that Nikki Haley has polled best in. Anything short of a win for Nikki, is a loss that’s much bigger than the state of New Hampshire.