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THANK YOU VOLUNTEERS!

Proud Democrat Volunteers contacted over 38,000 potential Indian River County voters during this election cycle by texting, preparing postcards, calling and canvassing. We reminded them to register to vote, to return their ballot, to verify where they can vote and the dates of early voting. We provided ballot recommendations, and we contacted voters whose ballots were returned as undeliverable so they could request another ballot. The DEC is working on the analysis of the election results and we will communicate that feedback in this newsletter once we get VAN updated with the final results.


CALENDAR


Wednesday, November 23, 2022


[link removed] ([link removed])


ANNUAL BIG BIRD BLESSING

We are still collecting donations at our office at 2345 14th Ave Vero Beach 32967 to help provide 1000 Holiday meals to those in need in Indian River County. Especially needed:

CANNED CHICKEN BROTH
EVAPORATED MILK
IDAHOAN MASHED POTATOES
STOVE TOP STUFFING
CANNED GREEN BEANS

Please visit [link removed] for more information, to volunteer, or to make CASH DONATIONS.

THANK YOU!


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Democratic Women’s Club

The DWC Book Group will meet at the Indian River County Brackett Library at 6155 College Lane on Friday, December 2, 2022 from
2:00-4:00p.m. “The Book of Hope: A Survival Guide for Trying Times” by Jane Goodall will be reviewed. Any questions about the book group can be addressed to Maryann and Rita at ** (mailto:[email protected])
[email protected]

SAVE THE DATE:

Saturday, December 10, 2022

DWC luncheon meeting HOLIDAY CELEBRATION at Bent Pine. There will be a raffle of gift prizes & a musical performance by Linn Kezer and Margretta Fosse.
More information to follow.


YARD SIGNS

Please do not throw yard signs in the trash.

You can return them to our office and we will return them to the candidates or contribute them to the IRC RECYCLES project that recycles yard signs into fuel cells.


LETTERS TO THE EDITOR


No more money for beach erosion



The idea of cities and towns trying to rebuild beaches, shoreline and seawalls and using taxpayer dollars to do it is ludicrous.

Mother Nature is going to win. The seas are rising. The weather is warming. The frequency and intensity of these storms is increasing. We have known it for decades, but we live in denial, and yet there is no solution that is palatable to the greenest of people.

We are burning fossil fuels at an increasing rate and will continue to do so. Let the chips fall where they may as far as the losses go. Let the course of nature continue, but please do not spend my hard-earned money trying to fix a problem that (for now) has no solution.

Spend the money tearing down the damaged structures and return the land to nature. At least we can enjoy that part.

David Hayes, Sebastian


Human re-engineering of the environment doesn’t work



If nothing else, the history of a Florida tells us that human attempts to re-engineer the environment seldom end well. We usually just make things worse in the long run. For example, human re-engineering of the natural flow of water through the Everglades has resulting in a critical ecosystem near total collapse.

Closer to home, we keep spending millions of dollars dumping sand on the beach, rebuilding boardwalks and repairing washed out roads. We do it over and over again.

Some argue that we must continue to protect ocean front property owners. Why? Anyone who built or purchased property on the oceanfront assumed the risk. The taxpayers of Indian River County have no legal or moral obligation to continue to bail people out from their own foolishness.

Others will argue that we must have beaches to attract tourists to support our local economy. We will. Our beaches are not going away, they are just moving. We simply need to accept that fact and move with them without a lot of expensive, fixed infrastructure.

A useful model is the Canaveral National Seashore just north of us. Those beaches are doing just fine with minimal human interference. Approximately a million people per year visit the Canaveral beaches.

Our elected officials have an obligation to spend our money prudently. There is nothing prudent about continuing to fight the same losing battle with Mother Nature over and over again.
When will the madness end?

Hugh Aaron, Vero Beach



LOCAL



Development with 175 single-family homes in south Indian River County gets unanimous OK

The Indian River County Commission Tuesday approved a conceptual plan for a 175-home development in south county.

Red Tree Cove, the 78-acre, single-family development, would be built at 43rd Avenue and 13th Street Southwest — former citrus and tree farm land, according to county planning documents.

The commission approved the preliminary plans unanimously.

Commissioner Laura Moss raised some concern about potential traffic impact on 43rd Avenue and 13th Street Southwest, both two-lane roads.

"This is very tight, this development," Moss said. "The traffic study for this indicated there would be almost 1,800 daily trips generated by the number of homes."

But the developer, Kolter Group Acquisitions LLC, in its plan agreed to add traffic, infrastructure and right-of-way improvements.

Those would include turn lanes on 43rd Avenue, 13th Street Southwest and 17th Street Southwest, a dirt road that would be paved for the length of the development, according to the plan.

The plan also includes street lights and sidewalks on 43rd Avenue and 17th Street.

"And that's at no cost to the county," said Current Development Chief Ryan Sweeney. "So those will be straight donations."

Kolter Group Acquisitions also agreed to help pay for a bridge on 17th Street Southwest to cross a canal east of 43rd Avenue to open up traffic to residents of the neighborhood heading east.

In return for providing the improvements, the developer requested waivers in minimum lot size and size of accessory structures such as pools or sheds.

Moss, along with the rest of the commission, still approved the preliminary plan. She hoped the developer's traffic and right-of-way improvements would be enough, she said.

To address stormwater runoff, the development would have four retention ponds, according to the plan. In regards to other environmental concerns, such as wetlands or protected trees, the site has none, according to county planning documents.

Next, the developer will need to obtain a land-development permit and then return to the County Commission for final approval.

** Thomas Weber ([link removed])
, TCPalm





STATE

Florida's Latino voters turned out solidly for Republicans in statewide contests.

In 2018, DeSantis narrowly beat Democrat Andrew Gillum by less than half a point, with only 44% of the Latino vote.
But this time, Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis even outperformed former President Donald Trump’s 2020 Latino gains in Florida, winning 58% of the Latino vote, including 68% of Cuban Americans, 56% of Puerto Ricans, and 53% of all other Latinos combined, according to the ** NBC News exit poll ([link removed])
.

Most Republicans running in the state won by large margins, turning Florida into a solid red state. Both chambers of the state legislature have supermajorities.

Republicans' voter registration and turnout efforts were more aggressive compared to Democrats.

When it comes to the Latino vote, DeSantis got substantial support from voters with no party affiliation as well as from those who previously voted Democratic. Florida International University professor Eduardo Gamarra, a Democrat, who had been saying for months that DeSantis is extremely popular among most Latino groups, said his messaging criticizing Democrats on immigration, crime and inflation resonated strongly with many of the state's residents.

By contrast, “Democrats started late, took the community for granted, and didn’t do the necessary research,” said Gamarra.

** DeSantis flipped ([link removed])
predominantly Hispanic Miami-Dade County and became the first Republican governor in 20 years to win what was once a Democratic stronghold.

DeSantis’ lieutenant governor Jeanette Nuñez, a Cuban American from Miami and a Florida International University graduate, helped the governor make inroads among Latino voters.

“She has all the descriptors that made her into an ambassador for this community,” said Gamarra. “Republicans identified from a strategic point of view that they needed to move early into South Florida at a very vulnerable time for this community.”

During DeSantis’ years as governor, Venezuela’s economy was in near collapse, Nicaragua’s president consolidated power — cracking down on dissent — Cuba’s government quashed historic protests, and Colombia elected its first leftist president, who is vehemently opposed by many Colombian Americans in Miami.

“Republicans became the real spokespeople for this community,” said Gamarra, referring to the governor, senators, and South Florida members of Congress. “They all coordinated very effectively with one message and it was uniform.”

“Latinos here were anxious about what was going on back home ... Republicans were saying: ‘It’s communism. Period.’ Democrats are looking for different shades of gray — even though in practice they didn’t really modify Trump’s policy in the region, but it’s the messaging," Gamarra said.

“The No. 1 factor why Ron DeSantis became so popular in the state, and among certain segments of the population, was his pandemic policy — from a purely political perspective,” said Carlos Curbelo, a former Republican member of Congress and an MSNBC analyst.

DeSantis, who had been more moderate until the pandemic, gained national attention for keeping businesses and schools open. Residents of New York and other states that had strict Covid lockdowns flocked to the Sunshine State. DeSantis always hammers down the message that Florida is a “free state.” Over 80,000 people have died of Covid in Florida.

“A lot of Hispanic families rely on jobs where tipping is a major part of their income; those people were able to go to work,” said Curbelo. Children who were learning English did not suffer setbacks like in other parts of the country were schools were closed for longer periods, he added.

Republicans have been actively registering Hispanic voters for the past couple of years and have gone up in numbers from 640,049 registered Latino voters in 2020 to 697,911 in 2022, an increase of about 58,000. Meanwhile, the number of Democratic Latino registered voters decreased from 947,853 in 2020 to 901,481 in 2022. The number of Latinos registered with no party affiliation exploded from, 879,984 in 2020 to 966,795 in 2022.

Evelyn Peréz Verdía, a Democratic strategist and president of We are Más said that in a state where Hispanic voters are more moderate, Democrats need to be careful using the word “progressive,” which equates to “socialist” to some Latinos born in Latin America. Images of raised fists are emblematic of left-wing politicians and movements in countries throughout the history of Latin America. "Those with no party affiliation are the Democrats' path to winning Florida."

Some Democrats have pushed back on the exit poll findings showing a 20-point jump for Republicans among the state's Puerto Rican voters.

Marcos Vilar, founder of Alianza for Progress, a progressive leaning voter outreach group, said Puerto Rican-heavy counties like Osceola and Orange had a lower turnout than in 2018. He said “small gains” are possible, the same way Trump made small gains with Puerto Ricans in 2020.

Vilar said one reason why DeSantis may have done a little better with Puerto Ricans is because Latino voters in general are a younger demographic and many recent candidates, like President Joe Biden, Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla., and Crist come from older generations that don’t connect well with Latinos.

“You see the drastic results, just four years ago with Gillum in the Puerto Rican community. He was very connected with this multiracial, diverse generation,” said Vilar. “I don’t think DeSantis sees it the same way, but his youth in comparison to other candidates that are the face of the Democratic Party today is probably a factor.”

"There's no question that DeSantis received strong support from Florida Hispanic voters beyond Cuban Americans because, in order to put up the kinds of numbers that he put out, you can't just rely on Cuban Americans participating at a high rate," said Curbelo. "You need to have other Hispanics as well. The question about turnout, I think, is a distraction to the big story, which is the way DeSantis put together a coalition that netted him nearly 60% of the vote in what was the perennial swing state of the country."
** Carmen Sesin ([link removed])

NBC News


FEDERAL

House weighs historic bid to add Cherokee Nation delegate

A House committee on Wednesday weighed a proposal to seat a delegate from the Cherokee Nation in Congress, holding a historic hearing that grappled with how to uphold a promise made in a nearly 200-year-old treaty that has yet to be fulfilled.

The hearing, held by the House Rules Committee, was part of a push to allow Kim Teehee, a veteran policy aide and a longtime Cherokee Nation official, to be seated in the coming months as a nonvoting delegate in the House, which would add the first delegate from a tribal nation ever to serve there.

The effort has prompted members of Congress to publicly confront some of the darkest moments in American history and the string of broken promises to Indigenous people across the nation.

If it granted the position to Teehee, 54, the House would fulfill a once-overlooked stipulation in the Treaty of New Echota, which forced the nation to relinquish its ancestral lands in the South. The treaty led the U.S. government to force 16,000 members of the Cherokee Nation on the Trail of Tears, a deadly trek to land in what is now Oklahoma. A quarter of those forced to leave — about 4,000 — died before they arrived, as a result of harsh conditions, starvation and disease.

But the treaty, ratified by just a single vote in the Senate and signed by President Andrew Jackson in 1836, also declared that the Cherokee Nation would be “entitled to a delegate in the House of Representatives of the United States whenever Congress shall make provision for the same.”

Congress has never done so.

Teehee, whose ancestors survived that treacherous march, was on hand in the committee room Wednesday to listen to a series of questions about the complexity of establishing another delegate position.

“It can be pretty overwhelming to think about, when I think about what was what was bargained for and what was lost as a result of that particular treaty right,” Teehee said in an interview before the hearing. “I think about my family’s history — the poverty, the loss of life, all the struggles that occurred as a result of that forced removal.”

“As I study this issue, I believe is the right thing to do — it’s the moral thing to do,” said Rep. Jim McGovern, D-Mass., chair of the House Rules Committee. He said he believed there was bipartisan support to allow for the seating of the delegate, even with Republicans set to take control of the House in January.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California said that Democrats would “continue to explore a path toward welcoming a delegate from the Cherokee Nation into the People’s House,” adding that her members were “committed to correcting the profound injustices of the past.”

Rep. Tom Cole, R-Okla., who reflected on his own Chickasaw ancestors and their tumultuous relationship with the federal government, said he was “glad to see tribes advocating for their treaties with such conviction.”

“It’s never too late to do the right thing,” he said, adding that the hearing had been “extraordinarily helpful and clarifying.”

Should Teehee be seated, she would join the ranks of a half-dozen delegates, including from the District of Columbia, Guam, and the Virgin Islands, who are able to introduce legislation and sit on committees, but cannot vote on the House floor. Unlike those delegates, however, Teehee was named to the post by Chuck Hoskin Jr., the principal chief of the Cherokee Nation, in August 2019 and was confirmed unanimously by the Cherokee Nation Tribal Council.

During the hearing, lawmakers questioned experts in Indigenous and congressional law about the precedent for seating a delegate who has not been elected, as well as the mechanics for establishing such a position. Both McGovern and Cole, as well as other lawmakers on the panel, signaled a preference for taking a vote to seat a delegate. Among the options, experts said, was including creation of the position in the House rules package that governs the chamber proceedings, although that would require a new vote every two years.

Hoskin, who was among those brought to testify before the panel, said he would be open to such a step, especially if lawmakers continued to pursue more permanent legislation.

“It’d be breathtaking for the next Congress to say we’re going to then break this promise,” Hoskin told the panel. “Now, I’m a tribal leader — I know my history and the United States has broken a promise or two.”

“But I think in the 21st century, when this House of Representatives seats Kim Teehee, there won’t be another Congress that will dare break that promise to the Cherokee Nation,” he added.

Lawmakers also raised questions about whether seating a delegate from the Cherokee Nation would open opportunities for other tribes to pursue similar representation. The Delaware Nation, which signed a treaty with the United States in 1778, and the Choctaw Nation, which signed the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek of 1830, may have similar rights to a delegate in the House and have already reached out to lawmakers, McGovern said.
But it appeared that the House would first focus on the right raised by the Cherokee Nation.

While Teehee studied law and political science, she said it was her experience as an intern for Wilma Mankiller, the first woman to serve as principal chief of the Cherokee Nation, that led her to work on tribal policy in Washington.

She worked as a senior adviser to Rep. Dale Kildee, D-Mich., when he helped lead the bipartisan House Native American Caucus, before becoming the first senior policy adviser for Native American affairs under President Barack Obama. In that role, she helped craft a series of tribal initiatives, including policies intended to reduce violence against Indigenous women and ensure that offenders were prosecuted.

“However effective I might have been in my career, it can’t be fully realized until you have a seat at the table,” Teehee said. “We want the treaty right honored.”

Emily Cochrane and Mark Walker
New York Times




VIDEO of the WEEK

Michelle Obama discusses her new book, "The Light We Carry"
with Stephen Colbert

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Office Hours

Monday through Friday 10am to 3pm

2345 14^th Ave. Suite 7
Vero Beach 32960

(772) 226-5267

[email protected]


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