Republican Hypocrisy is Loud and Clear

What if Disney moved to North Carolina and hundreds of thousands of Floridians lost their jobs? Imagine all the hotels, car rental agencies, restaurants, retail stores and gas stations that would close if Disney left Florida. Imagine the sales tax revenue that would be lost.

The governor now wants to create taxes to punish Disney for beating him at his own game by making the new DeSantis oversight board for the resort a toothless dragon. I thought Republicans were against taxes. For a supposedly pro-business governor, DeSantis seems intent on destroying critical revenue streams for our state. He previously attacked the cruise industry during the pandemic and is seemingly intent on destroying the industries that feed us all.

On another hypocritical note, Republicans are pro-life when it comes to abortion, but seem to ignore the thousands of mass shootings that have occurred in this country over the last decade. I guess if a 9-year-old dies at school that is not a loss of life to them. How many children must die before we ban assault rifles?

And it amazes me that Republicans are trying to protect our children from library books but turn a blind eye to gun violence. What’s more dangerous – a book about Hank Aaron or an AR-15? Sometimes, the craziness of our country’s lawmakers makes me want to cry.

Something else I am trying to understand is why some Republicans are so in love with Vladmir Putin. Remember when the great Republican President Ronald Reagan described the Soviet Union as the evil empire? Now, the successor to that state is led by a former KGB officer who invaded a peaceful country and somehow, he’s a good guy. Former President Donald Trump has almost a hero worship-like reverence for Putin, which – of course – is followed by all of Trump’s minions, even those who contemplate running against him like DeSantis, who’s expressed only a lukewarm support of Ukraine.

Now let’s remember how Republicans love to quote the U.S. Constitution, especially when it comes to gun rights. They even justified the Jan. 6 insurrection as an exercise of the First Amendment right to free speech.

But what about the First Amendment rights of the three legislators in Tennessee who protested against their majority-Republican colleagues for their inaction when six people at a Christian school in their state were shot dead, including three 9-year-olds? The two Black legislators were expelled from their duly elected seats and in a blatantly racist move, the white female legislator who demonstrated with them was not. Such in-your-face racism cries out for a good lawsuit.

Republicans are big on law and order, especially when it comes at the expense of Black people. Trump wanted five Black and Hispanic teenagers who were wrongly accused and convicted of raping a white woman – and thus falsely incarcerated for years – to face the death sentence.

He wanted Hilary Clinton to be locked up for deleting emails, and seemed to have no problem with one of his fixers, Michael Cohen, going to jail for paying adult film star Stormy Daniels hush money to keep quiet about her sexual encounter with Trump years before. However, when Trump was indicted for directing Cohen to make those same hush money payments, suddenly he’s being wrongfully prosecuted in a “witch hunt.”

Finally, there is Clarence Thomas, the Supreme Court justice who doesn’t appear to have a moral compass and should resign. Good thing for him no ethical rules govern our highest court’s justices or he would have to report all those expensive gifts and vacations from big Republican donors. I guess expensive “gifts” – called bribes in some countries – don’t impact how Thomas rules from the bench, even when cases involve companies that pay his wife, an election denier, huge sums of money.

Republicans are running amok in this country, and we need to vote, I mean really turn out to vote – not at a 60% level, but at a 90% level – to drive them from power. It’s time to put this country on a sane track. Maybe we can we send all the crazy Republicans to Siberia. I’m sure Putin would welcome them; he needs cannon fodder for his “special operation” in Ukraine.

Reginald J. Clyne is a Miami trial lawyer who has practiced in some of the largest law firms in the United States. Clyne has been in practice since 1987 and tries cases in both state and federal court. He has lived in Africa, Brazil, Honduras and Nicaragua.