My garbage person of the week kind of often is Ron DeSantis
specifically for legislation in this case.
He signed a bill into law this week that will require teachers who are part of
unions that pay their dues to no longer be able to pay them conveniently by having
them taken out of their paycheck.
No, they have to end individually, send in checks through the mail.
Here is him giving an explanation for why this needs to happen.
>> You have this situation with school unions.
You have a right to not do it but what they do is they provide authorization
forms, blanket authorization for automatic deduction of dues.
So even though a lot of teachers don't do it, many teachers feel pressured to do it.
And so what this bill does is it protects them.
It says, no automatic deduction for school union dues.
If you wanna join, you can but you write a check and you hand it over,
that is gonna lead to more take home pay for
teachers because they're not gonna have as many deductions in their paycheck.
What I think we saw during Covid here in Florida,
we led the country saying kids need to be in school.
All schools need to be open.
What did they do?
Did they say, yeah, we're with you, we wanna stand up for the kids?
No, they sued me to try to close the schools.
>> Argument as that this has to do not with attacking teachers
union specifically, this is just about deductions or
whatever you can't then go to.
And they were so mean to me.
Well, if they were being mean to you, that's cause for
retribution, not a logical extension of blah blah legislation.
But by the way,
we don't even need to get into his comments that imply that this is revenge.
If the idea is just that the automatic deduction has an issue with the taxes or
whatever, then okay, you make the change.
But he is telegraphing how obviously partisan this is by the fact that in
crafting legislation, carve outs were offered for some unions.
Police, firefighters, corrections officers,
they will not be affected by the new regulations.
Those unions have been deemed by the regime to be acceptable.
They will be able to automatically pay their dues.
Everyone else will have to do it individually, with the idea being that
it'll make it inconvenient, it will make some people drop off,
it will hurt the funding of the unions, that's all this is.
And it feels like this is probably going to follow up the whole Disney
thing with leading to lawsuits.
Brett, what do you think?
>> Yeah, he's targeting them with harassment.
He's making their lives harder.
And there's no justification to exempt a police union and not a teacher's union.
He has more confidence in his ability to woo the police union
than he does in the teachers union.
And traditionally, even in non collective bargaining states like Alabama,
the teachers union is so well positioned more than other unions to lead to
political activism and successes from the left.
When I was in college, I did this.
I worked for this super insanely conservative guy named Terry Mo
who hated teachers unions because in states that were able to gut everything,
that's the only real infrastructure that's there is for teachers.
And then a high proportion them actually become representatives because A,
they're plugged into the community and B, they have an extensive system to
take time off and get coverage from other teachers in terms of substitutes that
other people just don't have baked into their company's business models.
>> Yeah, I appreciate that.
I'm gonna read one super chat.
Matiah says, if money is free speech, Ron blocking union paying members to send
their dues and electronically is violating their personhood.
Also, by the way, is he making all political donations to activist
organizations like PACs and parties and things like that have to go through
the mail rather than, like, through Act Blue, Act Red, all that stuff?
Exactly, that's ridiculous.
What's that?
>> Cost money to send a check.
>> Well, it costs money to send anything through the mail.
>> Yeah exactly don't pretend to be on teacher's side and
then say that you want them to spend more money and make their life harder.
>> Exactly.
Well, those are our garbage vote of the week, but many of you voted.
36,000 of you voted, and here are your top five.
Coming in at number five with 1% of the vote, you have Brian Slatten,
the Texas Republican for
his inappropriate relationship with an intern after demonizing groomers.
At number four, 2% of the vote, you have Eric Adams for
his weak response on the killing of Jordan Neely.
Coming at number three with 19% of the vote, you have Greg Abbott for
doing absolutely nothing after gun violence near Dallas.
Coming in at number two with 31% of the vote, pretty split this week.
You have Donald Trump for saying sex assault happens.
Fortunately or unfortunately, he's not sure.
But your community garbage person of the week with 47% of the vote is
the Supreme Court for believing they're above ethics codes and
they don't need to comply with oversight or anything like that.
I'm going to be getting more in depth into my thoughts about these on an upcoming
video on our TikTok at tiktok.com/thedamagereport.
So definitely look for that every Friday.
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