Florida Senator Annette Taddeo, who’s running for a new term in District 40, claims in paid ads and TV interviews she brought her home district the bacon during her rookie term in early 2018.
State records in the real world, however, show Taddeo couldn’t even bring home the fat.
Taddeo, who’s running for a second term, claimed in a Radio Caracol chat earlier this week she authored and passed 17 bills.
That’s not quite true.
Those 17 bills with her name on them? Well, not a one was passed and became law – showing Taddeo became a victim of her inexperience with the halls of Tallahassee power.
She did co-sponsored a bunch of bills, which is equal to lending her name to the actual authors. And some of them were downright goofy. Like the one making August 15, 2018 in Florida “India Independence Day” and all of August 2018 “India Heritage Month.”
There was another piece of legislation recognizing January 24, 2018 as “University of Central Florida Day” that Taddeo co-sponsored.
And she did take the lead on another attempt to expand Medicaid.
She couldn’t even get it to a vote, and the bill died.
Oh yes: She proposed that unarmed security guard training be offered online.
She couldn’t find a co-sponsor and the bill sank without a vote.
Wait, it gets worse.
She voted against the state’s budget in March, and therefore Taddeo isn’t even able to boast bringing any Tallahassee money to her district to fix important meaningful things like roads in notoriously traffic-choked areas, healthcare and extra school security.
We asked Taddeo’s campaign about her vote against the budget and neither she nor her campaign manager responded.
Marili Cancio, her Republican opponent, did comment and called Taddeo “ludicrous.”
“Senator Annette Taddeo’s assertion that she passed 17 bills during her first legislative session is outright ludicrous and highly misleading,” Cancio said. “She continues to display a troubling trend of deceiving the voters of District 40. She has yet to produce any evidence of the 17 bills she claims to have authored, let alone passed.”