Never before has America seen a governor so obsessed with forcing other people to pee in cups as our own Rick Scott. Two of the first orders he issued after taking office required welfare recipients and all state employees to urinate into cups -- all to make sure drug fiends aren't secretly infiltrating our DMVs and Dollar Stores.
Now, even though the employee program is tied up in a legal fight set for a hearing in Miami federal court today (and the welfare law landed Scott on the Daily Show refusing to pee in a cup himself), Scott is still hot on urinalysis. He's backing a newly worded state employee testing law that passed a committee yesterday.
It's not clear why GOP legislators and Scott feel the new law wouldn't end up in the same legal quagmire as the original requirement, but that didn't stop Rep. Jimmie Smith -- a Republican from Inverness -- from bringing the "Drug Free Workplace Act" to a vote late yesterday.
The House's Appropriations Committee passed the bill 18-8 mostly along party lines, with Democrats loudly demanding to know how the law could be Constitutional.
Smith's rebuttal -- essentially, "I dunno, I'm not a lawyer!" -- could be put to the test this afternoon in Miami federal court. That's when the state will argue the Constitutionality of its original workplace testing law.
Civil rights lawyers say the rule violates the Fourth Amendment: ""It is unconstitutional," Pamela Burch-Fort, an ACLU attorney, tells the Florida Independent. "(It) subjects state employee to suspicionless drug testing."
Scott's lawyers are in Miami today preparing to argue on behalf of the bill.
"It is an important issue to the governor," spokesman Brian Burgess tells the Independent.
Surely Scott's heavy support of all this peeing into cups has nothing to do with the fact that Solantic, the medical company he founded and that his wife still has a stake in, makes heaps of money from drug testing, right?
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