The following votes were used to determine the ratings for our House scorecard. We are developing a graphically enhanced publication that will show each legislator and each of the votes cast, but for now we are printing the votes we used to determine the scores. The scores for each House member can be found here.

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SB 718 (Stargel) and HB 231 (Workman) were a pair of bills that would, essentially, reduce alimony benefits for divorcees. This legislation would have changed family law in Florida to include statutory time limits on how long alimony can be received to – in most cases – half the length of the marriage, set caps on awards as a percentage of the paying partner’s gross income, and shift the burden of proof to the party seeking alimony. The Senate version made it to Governor Scott’s desk where he vetoed it citing concerns that the bill, which could have applied retroactively to settlements reached years ago, would be disruptive to the affairs of divorced women and their families. OUR POSITION WAS NO.

SB 7083, known by its supporters as the “Timely Justice Act,” would curtail the appeals process for inmates convicted of capital crimes and speed up the process from conviction to execution. If signed, Governor Scott would have to take action on the delayed executions of 13 prisoners this June; it is all but certain that they would be hurtled toward an accelerated death at the hands of the state. Florida has the largest backlog of capital convicts in the U.S. of any state besides California. In the past, 24 Floridians have been exonerated of their crimes while sitting on death row. OUR POSITION WAS NO.

Amendment 458213 to HB 7169 was an effort to insert language into the Florida Health Choices Program (the House GOP’s alternative to Medicaid expansion) that would match the language in Sen. Joe Negron’s proposal in the upper house to accept the $55+ billion made available to Florida via Medicaid by the federal Affordable Care Act. Though the amendment was co-sponsored by a clutch of House Democrats (Thurston, M. Jones, Rouson, Cruz, Gibbons, Waldman and A. Williams), the rhetorical and procedural charge was led by Republican Rep. Mike Fasano of New Port Richey, who held the line admirably for the uninsured during a 5-hour debate on the House floor which featured discussions on everything from the plight of the working poor and their children in agricultural Florida on the Yea side, to the Federal Reserve and Chinese-owned debt on the No side.  OUR POSITION WAS YES.

HB 5001 and SB 1500 respectively were the House and Senate budget proposals, later consolidated by the bicameral Budget Conference into a transmuted text under the moniker SB 1500. The most revealing House floor vote on the Senate proposal occurred on April 12, when time was running out on attaining broad support for any provision for dealing with Medicaid expansion, despite calls from the Governor as well as progressives, moderates and health professionals all over the state to include it. That vote was 99-17 in favor, with some interesting party defections on both sides, and that is the vote we scored.  OUR POSITION WAS NO.

HB 759 and SB 876, together aimed at enshrining a “Violence Against Unborn Children Act,” were part of an effort to define unborn children as legal persons entitled to certain rights.  The bills increased criminal penalties for injuries sustained to fetuses in utero, regardless of whether the perpetrator had any knowledge of the existence of said fetus. It appears to be aimed at re-opening settled jurisprudence as to what constitutes a person and create opportunities to effectively ban or limit abortion by judicial edict. This effort is part of a long tradition of circuitous legislative attempts on the part of social conservatives to bolster the rights of the “unborn” at the expense of certain actual persons, i.e. pregnant women. OUR POSITION WAS NO.

SB 862 was the Senate version of a law to be entitled the “Parent Empowerment Act,” or what opponents called the parent trigger bill. The bill provided for a petition process by which 50% plus one of the parents of a school receiving a grade of “F” from the Department of Education two years in a row could initiate the conversion of said school into a for-profit charter school. Though parent trigger passed the House, it was stopped for a second year in a row in the Senate by a coalition of independent Republicans and a unified Democratic Caucus. OUR POSITION WAS NO. THIS VOTE WAS COUNTED TWICE

HB 999, a Leviathan bill dealing with environmental regulation and permitting, was carefully chaperoned through the process by ALEC State Chairman Rep. Jimmy Patronis broad in scope and length, the bill is a mixture of relatively innocuous measures like changing permitting rules in order to clear up conflicts between water management districts and the like, accompanied by ham-handed attempts to degrade environmental regulation and weaken home rule by superseding rules and ordinances passed by county and local governments — it illustrates perfectly the koan of the infamous Brian Pitts: in the Florida House, “If the bill is long, you know something’s wrong.” The bill was lobbied against heartily by the entire conservation community, including 1,000 Friends of Florida, the Audubon Society, the Sierra Club, and even Senator Bob Graham. The Senate pruned the bill of some of its most pernicious aspects, such as a three-year moratorium on all local regulations regarding fertilizer runoff and curtailing the permitting authority of water management districts, but the bill is still, as the Florida Conservation Society put is, “toxic.” OUR POSITION WAS NO. THIS VOTE WAS COUNTED TWICE

HB 7007, which contains Governor Scott’s vaunted manufacturing tax credit, is another that we did not support. As we’ve written before, these tax incentives rarely lead to more jobs and always lead to holes in the budget. OUR POSITION WAS NO.

House Memorial 545, styled the “Right to Keep and Bear Arms” initiative by its sponsor Rep. Neil Combee, is a legally moot symbolic gesture indicating its supporters satisfaction at the failure of background check legislation at the federal level last month. While its no surprise that conservative ideologues in safe, rural districts voted for the memorial, we were disappointed to see that several Democrats voted to join them. OUR POSITION WAS NO. THIS VOTE WAS COUNTED TWICE

SB 1350, officially a Bill Relating to Criminal Penalties, would allow judges to circumvent Supreme Court decisions that prohibit handing life sentences to minors, with some exceptions, exposing more minors to the penalty of life in prison. Though the bill died in the Senate due to a procedural move which prevented it from advancing from the Calendar to the floor, it got entirely too far through the process before it was stopped. We believe the blood-thirsty legislators who supported this bill ought to be held accountable for their turning the screws on afflicted, disproportionately black teenage offenders, so we’ve taken it into consideration in our scorecard. OUR POSITION WAS NO.

HB 7011 (sponsored by Rep. Jason Brodeur) and SB 1392 (Sen. Wilton Simpson) were bills aimed at “overhauling” the Florida Retirement System (FRS) by essentially legislating it out of existence. Though Senator Simpson’s bill was less coercive, allowing rank and file state workers to remain within the system, both were aimed directly at the throats of Florida workers and pensioners. The FRS is one of the strongest pension plans in the nation, currently able to fund 87% of its future obligations – there is no crisis in our state pension program. Therefore, we believe that an attempt to do away with it is ideological rather than practical in nature, making it a great litmus test of who stands with labor and who is legislating on behalf of the large donors and owners. OUR POSITION WAS NO.

We also scored votes final passage votes on HB 87 related to Foreclosure, HB 0682 related to Coal Ash, HB 7029 related to Digital Learning and HB 785 related to Juvenile Offenders (we opposed all four bills) and we supported the Nuclear Tax Amendment to HB 1472.