Life and politics from the Sunshine State's best city

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Martin Dyckman

Martin Dyckman has 78 articles published.

Martin Dyckman: It’s always about the money

in 2017/Top Headlines by

The Miami Herald columnist Leonard Pitts wrote a powerful case for Donald Trump‘s impeachment, in the style of an open letter to the “Dear Republicans in Congress,” that I was reading to my wife as she prepared breakfast the other morning. At the part where Pitts asked, “Have you no loyalties deeper than party?” Ivy broke in. “The money,” she exclaimed. That nailed it. It is always about the money. It’s about the campaign money they expect to continue bagging…

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Martin Dyckman: Home mortgage interest deduction, the third rail of real tax reform

in Statewide/Top Headlines by

There’s a $71-billion federal welfare program that costs more than aid to needy families, more than the earned income tax credit for working families, and almost as much as food stamps, but goes in great measure to people who don’t really need it. I’m on that dole. You may be, too. It’s the home mortgage interest deduction, the largest of the loopholes in the tax code, and the one that almost nobody in Congress or the White House has the…

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Martin Dyckman: Judges are not politicians, nor should they play politics

in Statewide by

When the Florida Constitution Revision Commission was debating the election of judges 20 years ago, I sat in the gallery to hear my own words used to attack something that my editorials and columns consistently had supported. The issue was whether all trial judges should be chosen exclusively by appointment, without elections, in the same manner as Supreme Court justices and judges of the district courts of appeal. A commission member who opposed that found a column in which I…

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Martin Dyckman: Elian Gonzalez, a painful chapter in Cuban-American history

in 2017/Top Headlines by

Some things in life ought to be above politics, none more so than a parent’s relationship to a child. How this truth was sorely tested in Florida not so long ago is the subject of a new documentary that we should all want to see. CNN reportedly will air it sometime after it begins to appear in theaters later this month. As described in the Miami Herald Sunday, it relates the “painful chapter in Cuban-American history” that began early on…

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Martin Dyckman: Florida needs answers on death penalty discretion

in Statewide/Top Headlines by

The courtroom at the Florida Supreme Court seats 164, which may not be enough for all the attorneys, organizations and individuals who have intervened in the unprecedented case of Aramis Ayala v. Rick Scott. Six groups have weighed in as friends of the court on behalf of Ayala, the state attorney for Orange and Seminole counties who is fighting to regain the 23 murder cases that the governor assigned to another prosecutor after she said she would not seek the…

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Martin Dyckman: On death warrants, Florida governor’s ‘awesome moral responsibility’

in Apolitical/Top Headlines by

When former Florida Gov. LeRoy Collins was nominated in 1964 to head the nation’s new Community Relations Service, South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond opposed him aggressively because Collins had renounced racial segregation. “…I hope that as long as the good Lord lets me live on this earth I will continue to grow and to recognize changes and to meet the new responsibility as changes require,” Collins said. The widely reported confrontation prompted Dessie Horne Williams, a Miami schoolteacher, to write…

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Martin Dyckman: Florida’s overbearing ‘politics of death’

in Statewide/Top Headlines by

He would put it off as long as he could, aides said, and trembled when he finally had to sign a black-bordered death warrant. Despite his profound opposition to capital punishment, LeRoy Collins sent 29 men to their doom during his six years as Florida’s governor. He was in anguish each time. To some people, that example casts a poor light on Aramis Ayala, the state attorney for Orange and Seminole counties, whose announced decision to seek no death sentences…

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