Florida Legislature should respect voters on pot amendment. After all, Trump backed it | Opinion

Florida’s lawmakers will return to Tallahassee next Tuesday for the newly elected Legislature’s organizational session. Miami’s Rep. Daniel Perez will take the gavel as House speaker while Sen. Ben Albritton of Wauchula will be Senate president.

In one respect, this new Legislature resembles the previous one: The GOP still holds so-called super majorities in both chambers. However, when the previous session began, Gov. Ron DeSantis had just been re-elected in a landslide and was able to get pretty much anything he wanted from the ever-obliging lawmakers.

Since then, however, several lawmakers — including Republicans who sided with Donald Trump’s presidential bid rather than DeSantis’ ill-fated campaign — have had disputes with the governor, including a major dust-up over the DeSantis administration’s plans to despoil state parks with golf courses and hotels.

So whether DeSantis will continue to have the same success with the legislative branch of government is an open question. Indeed, a political observer with a fertile imagination could conjure up an interesting test of the evolving relationship between the lame-duck governor and the new Legislature, although it would be part of a very unlikely scenario that goes like this:

It would start with legislative leaders, citing the results of the voting on the controversial constitutional amendments dealing with recreational marijuana and abortion, firmly declaring that the people have spoken and the Legislature should listen, starting with Amendment 3.

After all, they could reason, the “people who have spoken” are their constituents. Fifty-six percent of them voted to legalize the recreational use of marijuana. They gave the Legislature its Republican super majority. They overwhelmingly re-elected Sen. Rick Scott. And these same Floridians gave a landslide victory to Donald Trump, who supported Amendment 3.

DeSantis, meanwhile, spent thousands of taxpayers’ dollars on ads attacking Amendment 3. Those ads did point out some aspects of the amendment that were worrisome enough to raise doubts in enough voters’ minds so that it fell short of receiving 60% of the votes, the threshold for amending the constitution.

However, a Legislature in which the leaders say “The people have spoken! Let’s listen to the people!” could easily address Amendment 3’s shortcomings while enacting a statute to achieve the amendment’s broad goals.

For instance, a statute legalizing the recreational use of marijuana for adults could avoid catering to the wishes of Trulieve, the company that poured millions of dollars into the petition campaign that got the amendment on the ballot this year, then spent millions more on ads supporting it.

Moreover, a statute could also address critics’ worries about every public place in Florida reeking of marijuana smoke. All it would take is to ensure that existing clean-air laws that apply to tobacco smoking and vaping also apply to marijuana.

A statute could also mandate the safe packaging and labeling of edible forms of marijuana to prevent toddlers from ingesting the drugs. A statute could also enhance law enforcement training to better detect motorists impaired by drugs.

Finally and most importantly, a statute truly reflective of the live-and-let-live spirit of “the free state of Florida” could also end the decades of mass incarceration of persons for merely possessing small amounts of marijuana and could expunge the criminal records of persons convicted when the penalties were extremely harsh.

Of course, once statutes pass through the Legislature, they must pass muster with the governor, who can veto them. So it would be futile — and out of character for this pro-life Legislature — to cater to the voters’ views on Amendment 4, which would have enshrined abortion rights in the state constitution. The best the pro-abortion forces can hope for is another shot at passing a constitutional amendment.

Amendment 3 is a different matter. For the 2025 Legislature, responding to the voters’ overwhelming preference for legalizing the adult use of marijuana would provide an interesting test of whether DeSantis will listen to Florida’s voters on this issue… or continue to ignore them.

Robert F. Sanchez, of Tallahassee, is a former member of the Miami Herald Editorial Board. He writes for the Herald’s conservative opinion newsletter, Right to the Point. It’s weekly, and it’s free. To subscribe, go to miamiherald.com/righttothepoint.