Cruella DeSantis And Florida GOP Punish Kids With Huge Cuts To Food, Healthcare, Work Protections

Maybe he’s still licking his wounds after dropping out of the Republican 2024 presidential race. Or maybe Ron DeSantis is always this cruel. After all, he launched the “Don’t Say Gay” law which originally included kids up to third grade and was later expanded to all public school grades. We certainly know he’s also cruelly targeted trans children by repeatedly spreading false information about doctors mutilating children’s genitals, even though, as The Associated Press reported, there have been no such documented cases. DeSantis portrayed the law as defending kids from mutilation when it is actually about preventing trans children from receiving healthcare, a federal judge noted in December 2023.

Now he and the GOP are at it again. During his time as Governor, DeSantis and his now-defunct presidential campaign made “parental rights” a central theme. It’s all part of a far-right movement that empowered conservative parents’ political and social grievances while scuppering their children’s rights to a fully, well-rounded education and ignoring their needs, Raw Story reports.

Kids in Florida don’t need a bogeyman, a monster under their beds when they have Ron DeSantis. He and his fellow Skeksis/Republicans are working to take healthcare, food, and workplace protections away from kids.

“Desantis and conservative/trumpian/maga public officials” are “disassembling Florida’s social service safety net,” writes barrington salmon in an op-ed for the FLORIDA PHOENIX.

Barrington notes Republicans are “refusing to allocate money or enough of it for school lunch programs to feed hungry children; rejecting no-strings-attached federal government dollars to expand Medicaid that would allow the state to enroll 1.4 million people; not prioritizing access to quality healthcare; continuing to siphon off money from traditional public schools to give to church-affiliated and private schools, and passing punishing draconian laws to further alienate and marginalize gay, transgender and LGBTQ children and teens.”

And DeSantis and his minions are even nastier than that. Having already tossed 420,000 children off Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), the Florida Governor is currently suing the Biden administration in the wake of a new federal law that mandates children be allowed to remain on Medicaid for at least 12 months, despite the challenges to their eligibility or their ability to pay, according to Axios.

That’s right, DeSantis wants the opportunity to remove even more children from the life-saving healthcare program. And it gets worse from here.

Central to the federal government’s new policy is that it allows a child to stay on the program for an extra 12 months and continue to receive benefits even if their parents aren’t able to pay. So of course, DeSantis doesn’t like this, and he’s claiming in his federal lawsuit that this amounts to a “free-for-all.” Joan Alker, executive director of the Georgetown University Center for Children and Families warns that what DeSantis is doing is “harmful.”

You have to wonder if DeSantis lies awake at night counting dead children. Really, how can anyone take away life-saving programs from people who need them? But politicians and the burgeoning corporatocracy do it all the time and sleep just fine.

I’ll never understand this.

“if he is successful, the governor will ensure that more children in florida will spend more time being uninsured” Alker noted in a STATEMENT. “He’s not stopping there — he’s seeking to remove the protection for all children in separate chip programs that charge premiums. this is harmful and puts children’s health and educational outcomes at risk in both the short and the long term.”

You have to wonder what DeSantis has against ensuring that all children in his state can receive the healthcare they need. How do you tell a child with cancer and his parents who can’t pay that they are out of luck?

“this comes on top of medicaid unwinding where florida has the second worst performance in the country having terminated medicaid coverage for over 400,000 children. (only Texas has a worse record.) the new federal protection for children was designed in part to mitigate against inappropriate losses of medicaid and chip for eligible children resulting from red tape and shoddy customer support for families renewing coverage — problems which have been on stark display recently in florida,” Alker said.

And DeSantis isn’t stopping there. What he and his fellow Republicans are doing is downright medieval.

“gov. ron desantis and state administrators have rejected at least $11 billion in federal funds in the past years, saying there were strings attached, they ‘politicized’ roads or fought climate change,” the orlando reported in january. “the programs affected include an expansion of medicaid, rebates for energy-saving appliances and upgrades, a program to cut motor vehicle emissions and summer lunches for children from low-income families. millions of mostly low-income floridians could have benefited from the funding, the governor’s critics says.”

Desantis isn’t content with depriving poor children of proper healthcare and decent food, he also seems intent on taking Florida back to the 1800s when child labor wasn’t only common, but necessary.

Raw Story noted that last week Florida Republican lawmakers passed legislation that greatly reduces workplace protection for children. The measure is very draconian and it allows “16- and 17-year olds to work more than 30 hours a week and as late as 11 p.m. on a school night, according to Florida Politics.

But the bill’s sponsor, state GOP Rep. Linda Chaney tries to make it sound all happy-slappy as if she’s doing teens a big favor when she’s really depriving them of the time they need to do their school work and spend time with family and friends. Indeed, to her “the bill merely offered opportunities for teens to work more flexible hours.”

“This bill is about choice and opportunity for families. i trust that our families and our teens will make the right choice for them,” Chaney said.

House Democratic Leader Fentrice Driskell sharply criticized the legislation.

“this is 2024 this is not the 1900s, this is not the 1800s,” Driskell said. “just because our kids like to play minecraft doesn’t mean we should send them back into the mines.”

Driskell is correct, of course, but Florida Republicans have something even worse up their sleeves. The Florida Senate has introduced a “more expansive” bill “allowing 16- and 17- 17-year-olds to work starting at 5:30 a.m. and until midnight on a school night.” They even have an alternative version of the bill “that would bar 16- and 17-year-olds from commercial construction sites while allowing them on jobs with scaffolding, roofs and ladders under six feet.”

So if teens can work from 5:30 until midnight on a school night, when does that leave time for school? This is insane.

How very disgusting of DeSantis and his cronies. While Republicans want to take Florida back to the 1800s will other red states follow suit?

Sure makes you wonder.