“We committed to collaboration over competition,” said Paul Renner, who was speaker of the House during that session.
Flash forward to 2025 and uncertainty fills the air as the next regular 60-day session of the Legislature is to begin Tuesday. After starting the year with a bruising battle between legislative leaders and Gov. Ron DeSantis — all of them Republicans — over whose immigration plan was going to go forward, there are cracks in the once united front. The Legislature even threw in an override of a governor’s budget veto from 2024 as if to highlight its newfound independence.
Despite later embracing a compromise immigration bill, the governor is still at odds with legislative leaders who intend to continue asserting their own power while also signaling their fealty to President Trump.
“We can expect a very Trumpy session,” said Bob Jarvis, a NOVA Southeastern University law professor whose areas of interest include Florida politics and constitutional law. “All the Republicans will be trying to outdo each other to satisfy Trump and own the libs.”
Both DeSantis and lawmakers, for example, have proposed creating a Florida version of Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, and renaming the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America, as Trump did via executive order, in state laws and on official maps.
Other bills that reflect the interests of the Trump administration include one banning fluoride from municipal water supplies and another renaming the iconic Tamiami Trail the Gulf of America Trail.
All these are attempts to curry favor with the Trump administration, said House Minority Leader Fentrice Driskell.
“That could also lead to some extreme bills that veer toward culture wars,” said the Democratic leader, whose party remains vastly outnumbered. Republicans have a supermajority in both chambers, 86-33 in the House and 28-11 in the Senate.
Ahead of the session, Republican lawmakers also filed bills to ban diversity, equity and inclusion efforts in local governments and to prohibit the display of LGBTQ or Palestinian flags on government property.
But Floridians want the Legislature to engage in “robust conversations” about the state’s property insurance crisis, affordable housing and the ongoing teacher shortage, Driskell said.
At least one bill filed ahead of session addresses the high cost of homeowner premiums, including requiring more transparency around rate increases, speeding up the claims process and reversing some past reforms, including a limit on attorneys’ fees.
Residents also are worried that the decisions being made in Washington D.C. will impact the cost of living and access to healthcare and other services here in Florida, Driskell added.
Jarvis agreed that some of the state’s most-pressing issues seem to be overlooked. “The insurance industry is still a mess. Hurricanes are still dangerous," he said. "Condominium owners are pushing back against rising costs and special assessments and new safety regulations."
House Speaker Danny Perez of Miami has said housing affordability and trimming budget fat are among his top priorities, along with hurricane recovery and child welfare.
“We should be the House of Action,” Perez said in November when he took over as speaker. “We should pass laws that really matter to the lives of real people facing real problems.”
Senate President Ben Albritton, who comes from a farming family, has made reviving rural economies a signature issue with a proposed $197 million stimulus package.
“I think broadly the legislature and governor will still work together on a number of issues, but he won’t get everything he wants,” said Aubrey Jewett, political science professor at the University of Central Florida.
Legislative priorities will take more precedence than in past sessions with DeSantis as governor, he predicted. And Jewett said there will not likely be a repeat of the public event several ears ago when DeSantis laughed and joked as he vetoed projects of the House speaker and Senate president — while they stood on stage behind him.
“The Legislature needed to stand up and act as an independent branch,” Jewett said. “Maybe the governor has learned if he pushes too far there will be pushback.”
Still, “a big majority in the Legislature are conservative Republicans and so is DeSantis,” and they are more likely to agree than disagree on many issues, he added.
There could be agreement on proposals to restrict citizen-led ballot initiatives, to increase homestead exemptions to lower property tax bills and even to reverse age restrictions for buying rifles put in place after the shooting massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in 2018.
The Legislature also will have more immigration-related bills to consider, such as a bipartisan bill to require all companies to use E-Verify to check the immigration status of new hires. Currently, companies with fewer than 25 employees are exempt.
Still, Jarvis said, there is always a danger in predicting legislative outcomes. Every year hundreds of bills are introduced and only 10% or so make it to the finish line.
“Most are going nowhere,” he said.
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