Florida Gov. Rick Scott’s plan to randomly drug test every single state employee in Florida — from department heads to minimum wage DMV janitors — has already failed the common-sense test and an appeals court ruling. A trial run of the program found that almost no state employees were failing, while an appeals court ruled that the program violated the constitution.
But Scott hasn’t given up on the idea yet. The U.S. Supreme Court will likely decide this week whether to take up the latest petition filed by Scott’s lawyers.
Scott issued an executive order in 2011 ordering all 85,000-plus state employee to pee in a cup, but that order was quickly challenged by the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees.
The union — which represents about 40,000 of those workers — argued that the order violated the Fourth Amendment’s ban on unreasonable search and seizures. In April 2012, a Miami federal judge agreed with the union and issued a permanent injunction against Scott’s plan.
The biggest problem, Judge Ursula Ungaro wrote, was that Scott couldn’t show any pressing need for the testing that outweighed the privacy of the state employees.
To wit: For three years, the Department of Transportation and the Department of Juvenile Justice did their own drug testing and less than one percent of their workers failed.
So would it really be fair to the 99 percent of clean government workers to be subject to invasive screening to catch the one percent who mostly failed for marijuana use? Ungaro didn’t think so.
Miami New Times has the rest.