Republican Jeffrey Buongiorno subscribes to the fantasy that millions of immigrants are surging into the country illegally to vote Kamala Harris into the Oval Office. “Avoid a civil war by filing a civil complaint against the treasonous traitors who are conspiring to offset your vote,” he urged in a message on X.

There was a time when such conspiracy-wielding candidates were laughed off as unelectable. No more. After all, millions of Floridians will cast ballots for the biggest election conspiracy theorist of them all in November.

In 2020, there was just one election conspiracy. Now there are dozens, and across the state, election conspiracy theorists like Buongiorno are on the ballot or jostling to influence whose vote counts.

Take Florida Secretary of State Cord Byrd, who’s in charge of Florida elections.

Just as Mrs. Samuel Alito’s flags suggested what kind of political talk took place behind closed doors, Byrd’s wife Esther’s post-Jan. 6 Facebook posts warn of “coming civil wars.”

“There are only 2 teams,” she wrote. “With Us [or] Against Us.”

Conspiracy theories

A figure of speech, Cord Byrd said when asked about the posts, before he bowed to another conspiracy theory and withdrew the state from a multi-state compact ensuring the accuracy of voter rolls. The Electronic Information Registration Center (ERIC), can find voter fraud. But someone floated a George Soros conspiracy, Donald Trump chimed in, and Florida was left without a one-of-a-kind tool to find duplicate voter registrations.

Then there’s Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody. Because nothing says election integrity like pressuring another state to ditch its votes, Moody joined 16 other states petitioning the U.S. Supreme Court to jettison ballots in four swing states in 2020. It took all of 48 hours for the court to turn away the poor-loser arguments. Moody’s own lawyers had already derided the case as “bat-s–t insane” and, in an especially prescient description, “weird.”

The same adjective equally applies to Buongiorno’s 36-page lawsuit. He hints that House Speaker Mike Johnson introduced an election bill in part because of Buongiorno’s analysis, alleges a Haitian couple once guaranteed him a congressional primary win for $85,000, and says a new local voting tabulation center “defies the will of the people.”

Assigned to a Trump judge

Buongiorno’s fact-free claim of mass non-citizen voting has traction from Mar-a-Lago on down. Nor can you shrug off the suit. The judge assigned to his case is Aileen Cannon, a Trump appointee known for her novel legal decisions.

Further, Buongiorno is just one of several conspiracy-minded supervisor of election candidates who hope to oversee Florida votes, the Tampa Bay Times found. In Charlotte County, David Kalin told reporters his radio frequency analyzer proved 99.9% of Florida’s ballot machines are connected to a modem. Lake County GOP candidate Tom Vail’s website declares that “Easy to Vote Means Easy to Cheat.”

Then there’s EagleAI, a software system backed by Cleta Mitchell, best known for being on the call when then-President Trump asked Georgia’s Secretary of State to find another 11,780 votes.

In May, EagleAI dumped the names of 10,000 Florida voters on Cord Byrd’s doorstep, alleging they might be illegally registered.

Such name dumps are cutting-edge voter suppression. A voter can only hope that their registration is not being challenged, and if it is, that underfunded and overworked supervisors of elections get around to combing through all 10,000 names before election day.

It’s the sort of thing ERIC would have accomplished, only with access to confidential detail that can distinguish between glitches and actual problems, such as a part-time Floridian registered in two states.

Solving actual problems is not the end goal of conspiracy theorists, though. Keeping people from voting is. Vail, for instance, believes that not everyone should be encouraged to register, the Orlando Sentinel reports. And one of Cord Byrd’s complaints about ERIC was its requirement that states send postcards urging people to register to vote. Floridians apparently don’t need extra nudges to participate in democracy, because the state is doing just fine, he said.

There really is an election fraud being perpetrated in Florida, one that voters need to pay attention to: It’s the clickbait fiction that the machinery of democracy is hopelessly rigged and is fixable only by limiting access to the ballot box. Plenty of people are lining up to do just that — if we let them.

The Sun Sentinel Editorial Board consists of Opinion Editor Steve Bousquet, Deputy Opinion Editor Dan Sweeney, editorial writers Pat Beall and Martin Dyckman and Editor-in-Chief Julie Anderson. Editorials are the opinion of the Board and written by one of its members or a designee. To contact us, email at letters@sun-sentinel.com.

True to form, most voters will resolutely avoid it, even though several major public offices are at stake and this election sets up the final choices that voters will make in the decisive general election on Nov. 5.

In a year when democracy itself is endangered, it’s not easy to detect a civic pulse locally. But everywhere, we hear that people’s eyes are on the big prize, the presidential race. Let’s hope so. Every election is important.

Despite repeated reminders, most voters have still not bothered to request a mail ballot — and most of those who did have not yet returned them.

Where is everybody?

The busiest early voting site in Broward is a regional library in Pembroke Pines, where two of the most spirited contests are being held.

They are the three-way Democratic primary for a state Senate seat and a nonpartisan race for the District 2 School Board seat. (In those races, the Sun Sentinel has endorsed Chad Klitzman for Senate and Rebecca Thompson for the School Board.)

Candidates and campaign workers sometimes overwhelm voters who show up, one or two at a time, at the library.

Some voters arrive with completed, sealed mail ballots, or are holding so-called slate cards, listing candidates recommended by a political party or an interest group.

“Everybody seems to have done their homework,” said Kathleen Angione, a candidate for county court judge who has spent many hours under a broiling sun at the Pines library. “They seem like savvy voters.”

Signs of disinterest

A good sign, but there simply are not enough savvy voters.

So get out and vote, and consult the Sun Sentinel’s list of candidate endorsements (which you can bring to the polls).

Broward will elect seven judges, up to five School Board members, two state House members, an election supervisor, a court clerk and its first tax collector on Tuesday, and control of the sheriff’s office is at stake for the next four years.

Palm Beach will elect its first new public defender in two decades and nominate candidates for state attorney and sheriff. Voters in both counties will nominate candidates for Congress and will help select Republican U.S. Sen. Rick Scott’s Democratic opponent.

Candidates rely on direct mail, texts, robocalls and TV ads to reach the voters they can’t find. Too few candidate forums, the slow trickle of returning mail ballots and even a lack of political signs at highway intersections all suggest a high level of disinterest.

By Wednesday morning, fewer than 8% of Broward voters had voted early or by mail, according to Supervisor of Elections Joe Scott’s website, and two-thirds of the 220,000 voters who have received mail ballots had not returned them. The numbers are higher in Palm Beach, where 10% had voted.

More Palm Beach voters (38%) had returned their mail ballots, and people were even waiting to vote at the Boca Raton library.

Broward’s loneliest early voting site, Broward College in Davie, had attracted a paltry 45 voters after four full days. Early voting in both counties will continue through Sunday.

A rare exception to the apathy occurred on July 29, when nearly 200 people turned out for a two-hour afternoon forum at John Knox Village, a Pompano Beach retirement community.

If current turnout trends continue, fewer people will vote in this local election than did four years ago in the “pandemic primary” during Covid-19 — a time when many candidates avoided knocking on doors and voters, fearful of contracting the virus, cast mail ballots from home.

In Broward, 317,160 people, or 26%, voted in the 2020 primary that preceded the last presidential election. In Palm Beach, 263,873 voted, or 27%. The statewide turnout was 28%.

There’s still plenty of time

It’s still possible for turnout to spike upward, but it will take a stampede of in-person voters on Election Day in both counties.

So in the unlikely event that you still intend to vote, here are a couple of helpful reminders.

Mail ballots must reach your county elections office by 7 p.m. Tuesday, Aug. 20. If you received a mail ballot and haven’t returned it, it is too late to mail it. You should bring it to any early voting site.

If you received a mail ballot and you decide to vote in person instead, you can do that. Broward Supervisor Joe Scott said you do not need to turn in the blank mail ballot at the polls.

“Just go vote,” Scott told the Sun Sentinel.

That’s good advice. Just go vote.

The Sun Sentinel Editorial Board consists of Opinion Editor Steve Bousquet, Deputy Opinion Editor Dan Sweeney, editorial writers Pat Beall and Martin Dyckman, and Editor-in-Chief Julie Anderson. Editorials are the opinion of the Board and written by one of its members. To contact us, email at letters@sun-sentinel.com.

We refer to the Florida Commission on Ethics, which just threw out two well-founded complaints against Gov. Ron DeSantis.

Both concerned his failure to report as gifts what the ethics code most certainly should have required him to disclose. But the commission said the law didn’t apply.

One complaint cited unreported free air travel to speeches DeSantis made in the three months before he formally announced his run for president.

A $28,000 golf simulator

The other dealt with a golf simulator worth a reported $28,000, gifted to him at the Governor’s Mansion by his longtime political supporter Mori Hosseini of Ormond Beach.

Hosseini is one of Florida’s largest homebuilders and — thanks to DeSantis — holds a highly coveted patronage appointment as chairman of the University of Florida Board of Trustees.

Hosseini told the commission’s investigator that the virtual indoor golf practice setup was a loan to the state intended not only for the governor’s use but by “anyone” who works there.

What? The simulator is in an outbuilding on the grounds of the mansion, with fortress-like security, that houses a gymnasium normally off-limits to all but the governor and his family.

Nevertheless, the ethics commission, five of whose nine members DeSantis appointed, ruled unanimously that as a loan to the state, Hosseini’s generosity didn’t have to be reported as a gift to the governor. It would have cost DeSantis dearly had he bought or rented one for himself.

One online vendor quotes prices ranging from $199 to $550 an hour to rent similar golf simulators for special events.

Even as a loan to be returned to Hosseini eventually, it was a gift of wild generosity.

Free flights? No problem

The other dismissed complaint cited free airplane rides DeSantis took as a guest of And To The Republic, a conservative group. The flights were in connection with about a dozen speaking events in eight states arranged by the organization in 2023.

The commission ruled DeSantis didn’t have to report them as gifts because they were considered honorariums for his speechmaking.

The staff investigation of the golf simulator neglected to mention the scandal over the DeSantis administration’s 2022 decision to spend $92 million in federal Covid stimulus money on a highway interchange that would directly benefit a major housing and commercial project of Hosseini’s near Daytona Beach, as the Washington Post disclosed last year.

DeSantis has had use of the simulator since September 2019.

The commission’s investigator, Ronald Moalli, reported that Hosseini, chairman and CEO of ICI Homes, disclaimed any lobbying or contractual relationships with the executive branch.

Stonewalling, again

The investigator wrote also that three key people had been unavailable to speak with him.

They were Mary Mica, the mansion’s curator at the time, who refused; James Uthmeier, DeSantis’ deputy general counsel and now his chief of staff, who did not return his phone call; and the governor himself.

“Given the governor’s busy schedule and the information that the governor’s office has already provided, the governor will not be available for an interview,” his assistant general counsel wrote.

Mica, Uthmeier and the governor were the people with the most direct knowledge of Hosseini’s original intentions.

The ethics commission has power to subpoena witnesses and take testimony under oath. Asked whether the commission chair had considered that, Executive Director Kerrie Stillman said the agency doesn’t discuss investigations.

The commission’s chair, Ashley Lukis, is married to a lobbyist who is a former DeSantis chief of staff. Lukis herself is deputy chair of the litigation department of a law firm, GrayRobinson, that has been paid more than $3 million for representing the governor’s office in the past year.

Stonewalling, a show of contempt, has become the default response of the governor’s office to inconvenient information requests.

A clear pattern of secrecy

In one example, DeSantis got a circuit judge to agree that he has an “executive privilege” to withhold records; an appeals court decided the case on other grounds. In a pending case before another judge, the governor’s office contends Uthmeier’s private cell phone records are not public despite his using the phone to conduct public business.

“Why would we have public records laws?” asked a visibly exasperated Circuit Judge J. Lee Marsh. He declined at the time to cite the governor’s office for contempt but left the issue open.

DeSantis also signed a law forbidding the ethics commission to investigate any new complaints, such as the two filed against him, that aren’t based on the personal knowledge of those filing them. That was equivalent to forbidding police from investigating crimes they don’t see. Both the Hosseini and air travel complaints were based on newspaper exposés.

Earlier, he had signed a law shielding even his state travel records from public view.

The lessons to be drawn are self-evident. The two new public-be-damned laws need to be repealed. There should be an alternate authority, perhaps an ad hoc panel of judges, to substitute for a governor’s appointees when he’s the subject of a complaint. The Legislature should declare that anything of value loaned for a public official’s use is a gift subject to disclosure. The same should go for free travel.

No such reforms are likely while DeSantis is governor and his obedient Republicans have their engorged supermajorities in the Legislature.

But he’s term-limited, and his legislative lapdogs have to run for re-election. That creates an opportunity for the voters to give ethics a chance.

The Sun Sentinel Editorial Board consists of Opinion Editor Steve Bousquet, Deputy Opinion Editor Dan Sweeney, editorial writers Pat Beall and Martin Dyckman, and Editor-in-Chief Julie Anderson. Editorials are the opinion of the Board and written by one of its members or a designee. To contact us, send email to letters@sun-sentinel.com.

Both districts recently regained the highly coveted A rating from the state Department of Education, a reflection of learning gains by students in the two K-12 systems.

Palm Beach County slipped from an A to B just last year.

“Students, you did it,” Superintendent Mike Burke says in an upbeat online video, which concludes with this important message: “Palm Beach County schools remain your best choice.”

Indeed, both urban districts can and must use this bright seal of approval to market their schools more aggressively in an effort to reverse the trend from public to private and charter schools.

For Broward, the return to top-tier status has been a very long time in coming.

The Broward district has been B-rated since 2012, and the uphill climb to an A has been a longstanding priority of the School Board and of Superintendent Howard Hepburn and his immediate predecessor, Peter Licata.

‘A great motivator’

All of them contributed to this achievement, but the greatest credit goes to Broward students.

“It means a lot to everybody. We’re at the top of our game. I think it’s a great motivator,” School Board member Debbi Hixon told the Sun Sentinel Editorial Board. “It’s about having all of our schools reach that proficiency level.”

Equally gratifying, Hixon said, is that Broward has no D- or F-rated schools, another positive sign for the nation’s sixth-largest school district.

Two other major changes await the 251,000 Broward students who return to classes Monday.

For the first time, all high school students will need to walk through metal detectors at the start of each school day — a safety measure that has been under consideration since the Parkland mass shooting in 2018.

A little patience, please

We urge students and parents to exercise patience as the district works out the kinks. Some common items, such as metal eyeglass cases and three-ring binders, may set off alarms, as they would in any airport security line.

For more details, go to to browardschools.com and its “What’s New” page.

The second and much bigger change will require a serious attitude adjustment for students. Starting Monday, students will be prohibited from using their cell phones while in school — even while changing classes or during lunch.

This change, recently approved by the School Board, is a positive, necessary step — phones mean big headaches for teachers. At best, they can be a tempting distraction. At worst, they facilitate cheating. During school hours, students can keep their phones, but they must be either off or turned to airplane mode.

The policy also applies to any device capable of two-way communication, such as Apple watches.

Making the new policy work will demand effective, consistent enforcement among teachers and principals, which is no easy feat in a district of this size.

“We’re trying to help students who disconnect to reconnect and engage socially in a positive way,” Hepburn said in an online forum earlier this week.

The superintendent noted the link between excessive phone use and mental health, and that restricting them should improve socialization among students. The big problem in school used to be that kids talked too much; now, obsessed with their phones, they don’t talk enough.

Hepburn, who was recruited to Broward from Palm Beach, was engaging and humorous during the 45-minute forum on X and Facebook, as he discussed the new school lunch menu options, such as ham and cheese Strombolis and shredded rotisserie chicken.

He kept his sense of humor even during the inevitable questions about how students will find ways to dodge the cell phone restrictions.

With a knowing look, he said: “We used to be kids, too.”

The Sun Sentinel Editorial Board consists of Opinion Editor Steve Bousquet, Deputy Opinion Editor Dan Sweeney, editorial writers Pat Beall and Martin Dyckman, and the  editor-in-chief, Julie Anderson. Editorials are the opinion of the Board and written by one of its members. To contact us, email at letters@sun-sentinel.com.

If Amendment 4 passes this November, the Florida Constitution will be amended to ensure that women and their health care providers, not lawmakers and their think tanks, will determine whether abortion is appropriate.

Polls show it’s headed for passage.

That’s not surprising. Banning abortion is not a winning political strategy. More than four of 10 Republican women nationwide favor a federal right to abortion, according to KFF polling. Combined, more than six in 10 Democratic and independent women said abortion is the single most important issue in their vote.

In Florida, a recent survey showed 69% of polled voters back Amendment 4.

Gaming the system

Winning over hearts and minds to defeat the amendment was always going to be a challenge, but why do the hard work when you can game the system?

At the ballot box, voters will see both the amendment and a brief explanation of its likely financial impact on state and local budgets. Assembled by a team of sober-minded experts in state government, it’s ordinarily routine.

The panel’s first bottom-line estimate could be summed up as “we’re not sure.”

But there’s a new estimate now, which will appear on your ballot barring lawsuits, that reads: “The proposed amendment would result in significantly more abortions and fewer live births per year in Florida. The increase in abortions could be even greater if the amendment invalidates laws requiring parental consent before minors undergo abortions and those ensuring only licensed physicians perform abortions. There is also uncertainty about whether the amendment will require the state to subsidize abortions with public funds. Litigation to resolve those and other uncertainties will result in additional costs to the state government and state courts that will negatively impact the state budget. An increase in abortions may negatively affect the growth of state and local revenues over time. Because the fiscal impact of increased abortions on state and local revenues and costs cannot be estimated with precision, the total impact of the proposed amendment is indeterminate.”

What changed is that Tallahassee put its thumb on the scale.

Governor plays politics

First, Gov. Ron DeSantis replaced one of the panel members with Chris Spencer, his former budget director who oversees the state pension fund. Spencer was involved in securing lawmakers’ and lobbyists endorsements for the governor’s presidential run as DeSantis was positioned to greenlight or kill their legislation.

Then, the governor’s office shelled out $300 an hour for the services of Michael New, an assistant professor at The Catholic University of America, who’s on record as opposing expanded birth control because it could lead to more sex.

The state House of Representatives put Rachel Greszler on the panel. Greszler, who hails from The Heritage Foundation, is a contributor to the think tank’s notorious Project 2025, which has plenty to say about who has the last word on women’s bodies (and it’s not women). Heritage separately provided its analysis.

So no one should be surprised that a required realistic assessment of budgetary impacts devolved into a series of imaginary futures. What if there were fewer students five years from now because there were fewer babies? Wouldn’t that hurt school budgets?

Hypothetical what-ifs

What if the state were sued to enforce the amendment and lost? Wouldn’t that cost a lot? What if fewer future babies meant fewer adults to buy fewer things? Wouldn’t that hurt sales tax collections?

Then there’s Medicaid. A financial review pointed out that the state’s Medicaid program currently has no legal obligation to pay for abortions. But what if someone sued and won and the state had to pay damages?

A voter presented with this litany of what-ifs might understandably be moved to vote no. Which is entirely the point.

It’s also why the fanciful budget scenarios did not seriously consider the flip side of their doomsday costs. Florida is most likely to lose a costly lawsuit if it tries to end-run a voter-approved constitutional amendment. And no child costs Florida more than one who is born to parents unwilling or unable to care for them.

Overlooked or undetermined were the costs of increased foster care for children parents did not want, or the price of doctors avoiding Florida, or the state-subsidized child care that mothers will need to return to work and support their babies, or the economic hit of young families refusing to live in a state that injected criminality into pregnancy.

A petition pending at the Florida Supreme Court asks justices to order yet another set of financial estimates, one not twisted by pretzel logic.

Even if justices see through the politics, the gamesmanship isn’t over. There are three more months before election day, plenty of time for people behind this win-at-any-cost strategy to keep Floridians from deciding what’s best for Floridians. Don’t be fooled, voters.

The Sun Sentinel Editorial Board consists of Opinion Editor Steve Bousquet, Deputy Opinion Editor Dan Sweeney, editorial writers Pat Beall and Martin Dyckman and Editor-in-Chief Julie Anderson. Editorials are the opinion of the Board and written by one of its members or a designee. To contact us, email at letters@sun-sentinel.com.

But there’s still time for Moore and the bureaucracy under his command to set this city on a new fiscal course, starting with a commission meeting at 5 p.m. on Tuesday, Aug. 13.

For those who have forgotten, everything in Delray Beach government changed on March 19, or should have, with the election of a new majority. Mayor Tom Carney and commissioners Juli Casale and Tom Markert all promised a laser-focused approach to spending and taxes.

Carney and Casale are fiscal hawks who promised to scrutinize city spending, with Casale in particular focused on the city’s excessive generosity with costly firefighter pensions. All three candidates won with the editorial endorsement of the Sun Sentinel, which saved this dynamic beachfront city from the throes of rapacious real estate developers.

Remember what he said?

In the nonpartisan mayor’s race, Carney was a Republican with strong bipartisan appeal in a Democratic-leaning city.

He blanketed Delray with mailers promising to “cut property taxes” and railed against “bloated government and wasteful spending,” blunt messages that surely reached the city manager’s office.

Well, here we are, five months later, and Carney’s trying to keep his promises. If he were trying to raise taxes, we would be all over him — but he’s trying to do what he said.

The mayor could not hide his frustration at recent budget workshops, saying he found “fluff” and “a lot of holes” in Moore’s proposed budget for the fiscal year that starts Oct. 1.

When Moore proposed a fractional cut in the property tax rate, Carney insisted on a bigger reduction, back to the rollback rate — the rate that would generate the same amount of revenue as this year’s budget.

The rollback rate of 5.91 mills, or $5.91 for every $1,000 of assessed property value, would support a general operating fund of $187 million and save a typical Delray homeowner about $67 a year, the city said.

But city officials, including Police Chief Russ Mager, warned it could also reduce the quality of service, including to public safety and parks and recreation, which only made Carney more concerned.

Carney, Casale and Markert all agreed to lower property taxes to the rollback rate. Commissioners Angela Burns and Rob Long said no, and preferred Moore’s proposal to reduce the tax rate to 6.06 mills.

‘Washington monuments’

Carney warned the public about the “Washington Monument” syndrome in which bureaucrats, told to reduce spending, deliberately slash cherished programs to stir public opposition against the cuts.

What frustrated Carney even more, he said, was the discovery that Moore has kept 30 full-time city jobs on the books even though they have all been unfilled for the past year, giving him an additional $1 million in flexibility, according to the mayor, who says the chronically unfilled positions should be eliminated.

Carney is already dubious of overstaffed fire trucks. (The city sends three people on fire calls, which is city policy, which the fire chief says is the industry standard.)

But because a city rescue vehicle often responds to the same call, Carney said, “We’re sending five people to a heart attack.”

He said the fire department exhausted its $2 million overtime budget in the first six months of the year. It’s a familiar problem: Moore told his bosses that the city’s fire pension costs have risen 144% since 2015, from $4 million a year to $10 million.

The mayor would have had many more questions, but he said Moore’s budget lacked the detail that he routinely got a decade ago in his first tour of duty as a commissioner, such as the annual cost of pest control in the city attorney’s office. Moore said he did not realize Carney wanted such “granularity.”

One way to raise money

Get granular, Mr. Moore. The manager’s future at City Hall could be tenuous if he doesn’t reassure his bosses that service levels will be maintained while embracing serious revenue options that will help the commission avoid any reductions in service.

One option, proposed by Casale, is a $35 daily parking fee on nonresidents who park at city meters along State Road A1A, mostly to visit the beach. (Boca Raton has a similar fee for nonresidents.) Casale said the fee could raise up to $5 million a year, depending on public usage.

Casale said the city should consider taking over the lucrative parking valet service along Atlantic Avenue in the heart of the city’s entertainment district.

Moore seemed to get the message and said he would offer “tweaks” to reduce taxes to the rollback rate without jeopardizing public safety or other core city services.

“Give me that opportunity,” the manager told his bosses. “I’ll be happy to accept that challenge.”

The Sun Sentinel Editorial Board consists of Opinion Editor Steve Bousquet, Deputy Opinion Editor Dan Sweeney, editorial writers Pat Beall and Martin Dyckman and Editor-in-Chief Julie Anderson. Editorials are the opinion of the Board and written by one of its members or a designee. To contact us, email at letters@sun-sentinel.com.

More interesting is why he ran and what it says about us — and him.

As he told it on Twitter, Walz took two students to hear President George W. Bush speak at a 2004 re-election rally in their hometown of Mankato, Minn. They were turned away because the students had volunteered for the Democratic Party.

Walz, a National Guard master sergeant, had just returned from a deployment to Italy. He wanted to hear from the commander-in-chief who had sent him and thought it would be a learning experience for the students. But they got a taste of how deeply divided our country was becoming.

“It was at this moment that I decided to run,” he recalled.

Two years later, Walz headed to Capitol Hill. The political divisions that so offended him have deepened since then, and our country is worse for it.

In choosing Walz as her running mate, Kamala Harris chose a partner with fewer political targets on his back than two others who might help nail down vital electoral votes in the swing states of Arizona and Pennsylvania. Minnesota is safe for the Democrats, and Walz may help in neighboring Wisconsin.

Of greater benefit is the message Walz’s selection sends to the nation. He has served 12 years in Congress and six as governor, building a progressive record in a heartland state. He grew up on a farm in rural Nebraska and served 24 years in the National Guard. He’s a gun owner and a hunter. He taught school and coached football. He advised his high school’s first gay-straight alliance to protect LGBTQ students.

“He doesn’t bring a state,” CNN commentator David Alexrod said, “but he brings a state of mind.”

Walz and Florida

Walz had an A-rating from the NRA. Everything changed after the mass shooting in 2018 at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, where 14 students and three staff members died. His teenage daughter persuaded him to respond.

Running for governor that year, Walz donated NRA campaign money to charity and endorsed universal background checks and ending reciprocal-carry gun agreements among states. His NRA grade fell to an F. He won the election.

Walz and Gov. Ron DeSantis share a mutual dislike. In his 2023 State of the State address, Walz cited their vast differences, saying “I’m pretty glad we do things our way and not their way. I mean, they’re banning books from their schools. We’re banishing hunger from ours.”

Citing other differences on voting rights, abortion rights and gender-affirming health care, Walz said: “It’s amazing what you can accomplish when you stop worrying about corporations going ‘woke,’ and start giving a damn about the real lives of real people.”

Walz has already managed to distill to one word the vast differences between Harris and Donald Trump.

“You know there’s something wrong with people when they talk about freedom: freedom to be in your bedroom, freedom to be in your exam room, freedom to tell your kids what they can read,” he told MSNBC. “That stuff is weird.”

Walz said later he was speaking of Trump, not his running mate JD Vance. But the single word “weird” fits them both.

There’s more weird news about Vance. He wrote a gushing blurb for a book titled “Unhumans,” meaning anyone to his left. The book’s co-author is a notorious extremist, Jack Posobiec, who left the right-wing outlet Rebel News after plagiarizing a white supremacist and who collaborated with neo-Nazis on a conspiracy-laden documentary.

Progressives are ‘unhuman’

The book says of progressives: “As they are opposed to humanity itself, they place themselves outside of the category completely, in an entirely new misery-driven subdivision, the unhuman.”

Others in Trump’s orbit who added book blurbs included Tucker Carlson and Donald Trump Jr. The foreword is by Steve Bannon.

Such is the company Vance keeps.

This is Vance’s praise for “Unhumans”: “In the past, communists marched in the streets waving red flags. Today, they march through H.R., college campuses and courtrooms to wage lawfare against good, honest people.”

Weird. It’s a fine descriptor for one who takes up Joe McCarthy’s torch and finds Commies everywhere, and who praises a book that paints fellow Americans in tones that recall the genocides of the 20th Century.

Who better represents the America we hope to be — Vance or Walz? The contrast couldn’t be sharper. Harris chose wisely.

The Sun Sentinel Editorial Board consists of Opinion Editor Steve Bousquet, Deputy Opinion Editor Dan Sweeney, editorial writers Pat Beall and Martin Dyckman, and Editor-in-Chief Julie Anderson. Editorials are the opinion of the Board and written by one of its members or a designee. To contact us, email at letters@sun-sentinel.com.

Instead, it has become the most powerful, reckless and unaccountable.

On its own, Congress could not have made presidents immune to prosecution for any crime committed under the color of official duty. No president could have immunized himself against the law, licensing himself to establish a dictatorship, take bribes or kill — but six extremist Supreme Court justices could and did.

Because they claimed to be interpreting the Constitution, their appalling decision in Donald Trump v. the United States can be erased in only two ways, both littered with hurdles.

One is to amend the Constitution to erase that decision, as President Biden has proposed. Our future as a democracy depends on reasserting that no one is ever above the law.

The other is to impeach and remove the six, but that’s politically impractical, given the Trump idolatry in Congress. If he were president again. the replacement justices would be as bad or worse.

A work of urgency

It’s difficult to amend the Constitution, but the work is urgent. No democracy and no citizen are safe from a president who is licensed to take bribes and to jail his enemies. The decision to weaken the criminal cases against Trump leaves the nation vulnerable to corruption at the highest level.

Only two other Supreme Court decisions have been as iniquitous: The Dred Scott ruling in 1857 that brought on the Civil War, and Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896, which institutionalized racism for generations.

The Trump decision follows a long line of cases in which the current majority has shilled for relentless forces that crave a powerful presidency, a weakened Congress, weaker protections for consumer and the environment, and the trampling of reproductive choice in favor of religious zealotry.

It’s equally urgent to adopt Biden’s recommendations for 18-year term limits on the court and a binding code of ethics. The term limit proposal would guarantee more turnover and reduce “the chance that any single presidency imposes undue influence for generations to come,” as the White House put it.

Look at the numbers

Since President George H. W. Bush in 1988, three Republicans have occupied the White House for a total of 18 years and three Democrats have been presidents for 20.

But all six justices who subverted the Constitution at Trump’s bidding were Republican appointees. The most senior, Clarence Thomas, was confirmed over the opposition of then-Sen. Biden and all but two other Senate Democrats. Trump, in the White House only four years, appointed three of them.

Hypocritical Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell complains that term limits would “end our independent judiciary.” That’s the same McConnell who for nearly a year blocked President Barack Obama from appointing Justice Antonin Scalia’s successor and who then railroaded Trump’s third appointment after he had already lost the 2020 election.

Even John Roberts, a White House attorney at the time, promoted term limits. So did a co-founder of the Federalist Society. Across the country, term limits for the court have broad popular appeal.

The U.S. is an outlier

Appointing justices for life was well-intended. Justices dependent upon presidential reappointment and Senate reconfirmation would not have the independence that Hamilton said was “particularly essential in a limited constitution.” But life tenure is not the only way to establish judicial independence. Non-renewable terms would serve the same purpose.

“(T)he United States is the only major constitutional democracy without either a fixed term or a mandatory retirement age for its highest court,” wrote Washington Post columnist Ruth Marcus.

The constitutional checks on misconduct in high office — impeachment and removal, criminal prosecution and constitutional amendment — have lost their potency in an age when partisanship trumps patriotism.

The reasons for term limits for the Supreme Court do not apply to Congress, whose members are theoretically accountable to voters at the polls. If it weren’t for the court’s unprincipled decisions to ignore political gerrymandering and allow unlimited dark money in politics, many more lawmakers would be voted out.

Erwin Chemerinsky, founding dean of the University of California at Irvine law school, published a compelling book entitled “The Case Against the Supreme Court.” His proposals included a binding ethics code and the 18-year term limits that would, over time, guarantee each president at least two appointments during a four-year term.

Chemerinsky is strongly and properly skeptical that term limits could be adopted in any way other than by a constitutional amendment. But as he wrote in a New York Times op-ed: “The focus in the months ahead should be on the enormous difference between who Mr. Trump and Kamala Harris would appoint to the court.”

The public’s best defense against the ghastly presidential corruption that the court has invited is to elect as president the one least likely to exploit the opportunity. Character matters now more than ever.

The Sun Sentinel Editorial Board consists of Opinion Editor Steve Bousquet, Deputy Opinion Editor Dan Sweeney, editorial writers Pat Beall and Martin Dyckman, and Editor-in-Chief Julie Anderson. Editorials are the opinion of the Board and written by one of its members or a designee. To contact us, email at letters@sun-sentinel.com.

Donald Trump’s choice for vice president says that when he expressed the view that childless adults should be forced to pay higher taxes and people who have children should get more votes, and that “childless cat ladies” are responsible for world misery, he didn’t mean to insult anyone’s pet.

Families with children were just more invested in the fate of the country, Vance said. They’re more important. They’re more entitled to a little additional cash, a little extra democracy.

The words seemed designed to amplify the trope of selfish, career-driven women of child-bearing age, and sure enough, the public face of furor over Vance’s words falls within that age group.

Selling out seniors

But there’s another group Vance insulted when he insisted that families with children — and only families with children — were vested in the future of the country. And it’s a group that might not want higher taxes or less voting power. It’s people over 60.

Even Vance, whose loose lips have been busy alienating everyone from fans of the childless Taylor Swift and Dolly Parton to Diet Mountain Dew traditionalists, knows he can’t afford to discuss this quiet part out loud.

That’s because people 60 and over are among the most reliable voters, especially in Florida, and they are crucial to Trump’s core support.

Despite the caricature of selfish retirees who only vote in their best interests, older voters are very much invested in the future. In South Florida, they have been among the most reliable supporters of public education — even though few of them have school-age children.

Almost two of every 10 Broward residents are over 65, and their votes were critical to the passage of a major $800 million education bond issue in 2014. Three of 10 Palm Beach County residents are over 60, but voters in 2022 overwhelmingly agreed to tax themselves to fund public schools.

Vance’s obsession with declining U.S. birth rates, part of the rockiest roll-out of a running mate since Sarah Palin, did not come out of thin air.

Pregnancy as economic policy

It reflects a movement based on jump-scares from wealthy Silicon Valley technocrats such as Peter Thiel and Elon Musk. Their bottom line: More children mean a more robust workforce. Falling birth rates require more American-born babies to avoid an economic armageddon.

In this world view, pregnant women are the cherished means to an end. There’s no place for women of child-bearing age who choose to not have children — with or without cats.

But if fertility is rewarded with tax benefits and more votes, and children are the measure of your investment in America, where does that leave older people who never had children or whose children are grown?

What does it say about the value Vance and his technocrat backers place on our seniors?

Their assessment is never directly addressed, but always insinuated. Aging “arrests creativity,” said Thiel, Vance’s billionaire mentor who funneled millions into Vance-friendly PACs, propelling the political neophyte into the U.S. Senate. Musk bemoans “a civilization that ends … in adult diapers.”

The Project 2025 angle

The stance on aging is dropped into documents like Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s toxic blueprint for seizing power and not letting go after November.

Vance has endorsed chunks of the plan as Trump scrambles to distance himself from it. Trump’s campaign issued a threat to anybody trying to tie him to the document. “It will not end well for you,” they warned in a press release.

But Project 2025’s contributors include dozens of former Trump hires. And in the authors’ scenario, traditional Medicare takes a back seat to commercial insurers. Prescription costs rise for seniors.

There’s no mention of cutting Social Security in Project 2025. But separately, Heritage is pushing to raise the retirement age and to cap benefits. By one estimate, caps would bring a person’s income to the poverty level and not much more.

Keep in mind that some of the people advocating bumping the retirement age up to 70 are the same ones who would never consider hiring anyone over 50.

Vance said he has been misunderstood, that he simply wants to shore up the nuclear family ideal. Of course, he also said that the country’s leaders are sociopaths and that psychotic Twitter posters are deranged because they don’t have children.

In the view of Vance, a father of three, children are the antidote to mental instability. But not, unfortunately, to political madness.

The Sun Sentinel Editorial Board consists of Opinion Editor Steve Bousquet, Deputy Opinion Editor Dan Sweeney, editorial writers Pat Beall and Martin Dyckman and Editor-in-Chief Julie Anderson. Editorials are the opinion of the Board and written by one of its members or a designee. To contact us, email at letters@sun-sentinel.com.

Surely you’ve noticed: Tony’s extravagant self-promotion is out of control. And you probably haven’t seen his workout videos on TikTok or Instagram.

This must end, and the only way it will happen is if Tony is defeated at the polls in the Democratic primary on Aug. 20.

Broward voters have a strong alternative in Steven “Steve” Geller, a 33-year police veteran with a sterling record who has worked for both the Plantation Police Department and Florida Department of Law Enforcement.

The Sun Sentinel Editorial Board has endorsed Geller, who would put the men and women of BSO first.

The sheriff’s office has a new research, development and training center, and you just know it wouldn’t be complete without Tony’s name all over it in big, bold letters.

Tony’s name, image and likeness are everywhere in the training center, which so far has cost $74 million, $10 million more than anticipated, according to an interim county audit.

Auditors said the sheriff shifted money from personnel, including deputies, to cover cost overruns.

Tony’s name is on the floor and it’s on the ceiling — in the light fixtures.

Yes, his name is literally up in lights, courtesy of Broward taxpayers.

Tony’s name is even on the shower curtains, with his academic title of Ph.D.

His face is part of a mural at a BSO gun range there, too.

This has gone beyond overkill. It just isn’t right, and the people of Broward County shouldn’t stand for it.

Broward County commissioners, who set the sheriff’s annual budget, should have blown the whistle on this outrageous behavior a long time ago.

Tony’s office did not respond to questions, and a spokeswoman for his political committee, Broward First, would not comment.

Tony isn’t the first Broward sheriff to make the agency an extension of his own ego.

The same thing happened three decades ago, during the rocky reign of Nick Navarro. He put his name on just about everything he could find. Voters were not impressed, and in a Republican primary in 1992, they unceremoniously threw Navarro out of office.

His successor, Ron Cochran, had to spend taxpayers’ money to scrub Navarro’s name off buildings, brochures, business cards and even patrol cars — but it was money well-spent.

Eventually, Gregory Tony’s successor will have to do the same thing.

Better now than later.

Voters have a chance to show their disgust with this self-absorbed style of leadership at the ballot box, and they should not miss the opportunity.

The Sun Sentinel Editorial Board consists of Opinion Editor Steve Bousquet, Deputy Opinion Editor Dan Sweeney, editorial writers Pat Beall and Martin Dyckman, and Editor-in-Chief Julie Anderson. Editorials are the opinion of the Board and written by one of its members. To contact us, email at letters@sun-sentinel.com.