The Revisionist View Of The United States, According To Florida’s Newest Senator

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Illinois Governor JB Pritzker gave a rousing speech in New Hampshire this week in which he argued that US citizens are demanding urgent action. We must, he said, “fight — EVERYWHERE AND ALL AT ONCE.” He refuses to follow the advice of “do-nothing political types” who are calling for caution at a time when the Trump administration is dismantling the US federal government. Instead of acquiescing to a revisionist theory of the Constitution, Pritzker is asking us to fight alongside him “for our democracy, for our liberty, for the opportunity for all our people to live lives that are meaningful and free.”

So that’s what I’m doing, right here and now. Pritzker’s call-to-action comes at a time in which I’ve been indignant over a press release that Florida’s newest US Senator has distributed and that celebrates her clear lack of qualification for the job.

Ashley Moody says it has been busy for her in Washington since she was appointed to serve out Marco Rubio’s term as a Florida US Senator. She is proud to be “working around the clock to help implement President Trump’s agenda,” and she’s outlined some of her priorities. She insists that she is “ready to continue fighting for and delivering wins for the Sunshine State.”

I’m a Florida resident, and I hate it when my politicians lie to me. It’s a bunch of balderdash.

Moody is working hard to “carry out the mandate given to us by the American people.” Trump actually received 49.81% of the vote. Harris received 48.34% of the vote, and other candidates added 1.85% to the overall tally. That means 50.19% voted for someone other than Trump — not even close to a “mandate.”

If you lived on another planet, it might sound like Moody has vision. But we’re here on the ground, experiencing the horrific and audacious cuts to federal programs on which US citizens depend. Moody’s revisionist narrative is told from the point of view of a puppet hired to parrot King Donald J. Trump and his court of not-so-merry jesters.

Moody speaks of the importance of “home ownership, combating the fentanyl crisis, cutting red tape for our farmers, working to bring NASA headquarters to Florida, and making the government work.” This summary is arrogant, self-serving, and contrary to any suggestion that Moody is fighting “for the American people.” Her boasting illuminates how Orwellian talk has replaced rational political discourse.

Our CleanTechnica colleague, Michael Barnard, refers to such discourse as a “bureaucratic form of suppression, targeting funding and dismantling programs rather than physically persecuting scientists.” Such an approach has an implicit “distrust of intellectualism, a prioritization of political loyalty over expertise, and long-term damage to national scientific progress,” Barnard continues. He states that the US “risks ceding global leadership in multiple areas of scientific research and climate science to other nations.”

Let’s deconstruct Moody’s revisionist take on issues important to technology, research, innovation, and energy.

Grounding her argument that its headquarters in Washington is filled to only 15%, Moody says the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) should turn its focus to “Florida’s Space Coast: The CAPE Canaveral Act.” It’s part of new Trump administration standards for a higher minimum occupancy standard for federal buildings — a government-wide push to bring employees back to the office full time.

What Moody has left unsaid is how the Trump administration has hog-tied NASA research. Isn’t it more important, for example, to focus on continued funding for NASA’s ECOsystem Spaceborne Thermal Radiometer Experiment on Space Station (ECOSTRESS)? It provides thermal infrared measurements of Earth’s surface that help answer questions about water stress in plants and how specific regions respond to climate change.

It’s more important for Moody to cut “bureaucratic red tape” for Florida citrus growers. Already the Florida budget would allocate $200 million to help the industry increase production levels and to combat citrus greening, caused by aphids and usually handled by removing infested trees. Why isn’t Moody also fighting for disbursement of funds from the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA), which have been so helpful to Floridians? She doesn’t mention how in January Trump’s Unleashing American Energy executive order put an immediate pause on all IRA funds. Importantly, the fate of the American Clean Energy Tax Credits, including solar incentives, hangs in the balance and could be vital to the Senator from the Sunshine State. Clean energy tax incentives have existed for over fifty years and have often enjoyed bipartisan support. Not anymore.

“My first vote was in favor of the Born Alive Survivors Protection Act.” This bill establishes requirements for the degree of care a health care practitioner must provide in the case of a child born alive following an abortion or attempted abortion. Problems here include:

• referring to a non-viable fetus as a “child”
• the implicaton that a sworn medical provider would deny care to human needing it
• how nearly 99% of abortions occur before 21 weeks, but when they are needed later in pregnancy, it’s often in very complex circumstances

As a note of interest, prior to the Civil War, white men were not generally involved in the kind of gynecological or obstetric, or OB/GYN, practices we know today. Half of the women who provided reproductive care were Black women, some of whom were enslaved; midwives also included Indigenous and white women. Today’s US Senate has 25 women and 73 men. The US medical community is made up of 677,00 male and 424,00 female doctors. Political and professional power structures continue to dictate women’s health and autonomy in the US. Shame on you, Ms. Moody, for abandoning women in need.

She is proud to see her friend and fellow Floridian Pam Bondi as US Attorney General, saying Bondi is a strong, conservative leader who continues to make Florida proud. The junior Senator from Florida looks forward to working with Bondi and Trump “to restore common sense and fiscal sanity to our federal government.” But Bondi has been a tool of special interests. In the last five years Bondi lobbied the federal government for 30 different clients, including a gambling company who wanted to circumvent the Interstate Wire Act; a private prison company; a waste management company that has resisted removing nuclear waste from its radioactive landfill; and, a tech company with alleged children’s privacy violations, high injury rates, and workplace safety violations.

She’s introduced “bold legislation to halt the issuance of student visas to nationals of the People’s Republic of China (PRC).” Afraid that these students will help China “with intelligence gathering that is being used to bolster the military force of the CCP and their Army,” she seems to have forgotten that Hegseth uses Signal to communicate important military matters, so China is probably laughing at the ease in which it can now gather US intelligence. M’dear, China isn’t getting info from 20-somethings.

Lying that colleges and universities are “prioritizing support for Hamas over their duty to protect the civil rights of all students,” her RECLAIM Act would “claw back federal funds when institutions of higher learning violate” — allegedly, I will add — the rights of individuals that the Trump administration holds near and dear.

“No government — regardless of which party is in power — should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue,” Harvard’s president, Alan M. Garber, wrote in an open letter in response.

Senator Moody should take a quick college course in the rule of law if she really wants to represent the sunny state of Florida.