Columns

Members, I am deeply moved and humbled by your faith, confidence and trust.   I will work every day to bring honor to this House and to those I represent.  

Two years ago, I held a series of roundtable meetings in Lutz, Florida with physicians, advocates, patients, and families from our area to hear about the challenges of finding cures for the thousands of deadly and chronic diseases impacting millions of Americans. Diseases like cancer, ALS, Alzheimer’s, and the 7,000 rare conditions. These discussions were eye-opening to me. I got a true sense of how difficult it is to get new medicines to market, and how painful it can be for families desperate for treatment.

John Morgan is one of the smartest businessmen in America, not just in Florida. I said it in 2014, it's just as true now: Underestimate him at your peril.

Of all the losers in this season of discontent, the mainstream media top the list. I don't say this lightly and sincerely fear that loss of faith in journalism ultimately will cause more harm to the nation than any outside enemy could hope to.

This column is a vehicle for a number of items in a bits-and-pieces, strictly opinion, sometimes irreverent format. Look for "Just Sayin'" to run once a week in this spot.

If you'd never heard of Steve Bannon before Tuesday, you have now. 

Seventeen days before President Donald Trump, his spoken oath of office still lingering in the wintry air, lifts his left hand from Scripture (a leather-bound edition of "The Art of the Deal"), the Republican-controlled Congress will begin working. Fittingly, on Jan. 3 the First Branch of government will go first, flexing its somewhat atrophied Article I muscles. 

Could the Florida Democratic Party and the Republican Party of Florida be any further apart than they are right now?

OK, I get it. Some Jewish people are upset with Dwight Bullard because he traveled with the Dream Defenders to Israel and their tour guide had ties to a terrorist organization.

The congressional echo chamber, on both sides of the aisle, constantly talks about the great reform fad: “payment for value” and “quality” care. And the Medicare version called MACRA passed nearly unanimously, with cheers from the marbled halls of the AMA tower. Obamacare too constantly harps on “quality.”

The goal of the recent, sometimes-unruly protests over the election of Donald Trump as the 45th president of the United States of America is unclear. Is it to make President-elect Trump preemptively resign? Is it to ensure that he never takes office—by any means necessary? Is it to exercise the protesters’ self-defined right to vandalize the property of others?

Witnesses who tuned in to Donald Trump and Barack Obama's post-election get-together can't have missed the change in the president-elect's demeanor and affect. 

Debbie Wasserman Schultz may be a Jewish girl from New York, but I'm guessing she's discovered what it's like to be Amish. Certainly she has a good idea of what a shunning is.

The Republican Party resembles the man who told his psychiatrist, "I have an identity problem, and so do I." The party's leader is at best indifferent to, and often is hostile to, much of the party's recent catechism: limited government, the rule of law, a restrained executive, fiscal probity, entitlement reforms, free trade, the general efficiency and equity of markets allocating wealth and opportunity, and -- this matters especially -- the importance of decorousness in political discourse. 

Democrats are in trouble, but not for the reason you might think.