By Lindsay Beyerstein, Media Consortium blogger
Florida Republican Governor Rick Scott plans to force public workers and welfare recipients to undergo random drug testing every three weeks.
Why? Because he doesn’t like either group, Cenk Uygur argues on the Young Turks. “It’s an attempt to stigmatize, demonize, and punish those people,” Uygur says:
Suzy Khimm of Mother Jones explains why Scott’s plan is almost certainly unconstitutional. The Supreme Court has ruled that public employees cannot be forced to take drug tests unless public safety is at stake. The government can impose random drug testing for bus drivers, but not clerks at the DMV. Scott wants to spend millions of dollars testing all state employees. The only beneficiary of Scott’s plan will be the drug-testing industry.
The governor’s wife is the ostensible owner of a company that does drug testing…. the ultimate in crony capitalism.
Rick Scott gets to go first. That way we can see exactly what is in the Kool Aid he’s drinking.
and of course, Florida is the center of the drug war madness with the Semblers located in St Pete–if they ain’t dead yet. They are big GOP backers and always play a role down there in implementing ever more extreme anti-drug measures… do a search for “straight inc” and “drug free america foundation” for an idea of the Florida drug war lunacy…
“an attempt to stigmatize, demonize, and punish” We’re ALL Jews in the Republican Reich.