By Diane Roberts
Florida’s elected representatives are fighting like weasels in a sack.
The Senate versus the House; the House versus the governor; the governor versus everybody.
They’re so furious they can’t even see straight.
The governor has one job: Look after the best interests of the people of Florida, who are crying out for affordable insurance, housing, decent public schools, clean water — small stuff like that.
But he prefers to spend his time yelling about “woke” education and exhorting cops to pick up anyone who looks “illegal,” even if they’re U.S. citizens.
The Legislature has one job: Pass a budget during their two-month session.
They haven’t managed to do it yet. They went home on Frida but they didn’t get around to the budget. They say they’ll reconvene in a week.
The Senate wants to cut sales tax on clothes costing under 75 bucks, reduce the business rent tax from 2% to 1%, and give a one-time credit for vehicle registration fees.
The House wants to slash sales tax on everything and spend $4.4 billion less than the Senate.
The two chambers are supposed to be negotiating a compromise, but Speaker Daniel Perez says senators aren’t playing nice, dismissing their proposals “unacceptable” and “patronizing.”
Senate President Ben Albritton politely insists he won’t pass massive tax cuts “at the expense of the long-term financial stability of our state.”
Such tax cuts would pretty much ensure county and municipal governments — police, firefighters, parks, roads, libraries — would take an enormous hit.
The governor says cutting sales tax will only help those dang tourists — AKA Florida’s No. One industry, especially the dastardly Canadians. (Who’s going to tell him they’re vacationing elsewhere these days?)
He wants to go even bigger (and dumber), abolishing property taxes or at least upping the homestead exemption.
If you rent or you depend on local services, you’re out of luck.
Dissing DeSantis
At the moment, both chambers are either openly flouting or ostentatiously ignoring directives from the governor’s office.
The Senate has refused to confirm a slew of his nominees, including University of West Florida trustees and heads of the Department of Children and Families and the Agency for Healthcare Administration.
In an attempt to stop the washed-up-politician-to-higher-ed-sinecure pipeline, the House has passed a bill to bring university presidential searches back into the sunshine, letting taxpayers know who’s under consideration.
DeSantis is outraged: “They want the universities to be able to pursue a leftist indoctrination agenda,” he says, a statement that suggests he has never met members of the Florida House.
The governor seems trapped in a perpetual temper tantrum, calling Daniel Perez “terrible,” “rotten,” “treacherous,” and “a tool of the Left.”
This “tool of the left” is the same Daniel Perez who’s such a good little MAGA he got the House to pass a bill called “Tackling and Reforming Unlawful Migration Policy” — also known as the TRUMP Act.
DeSantis had called a special session in January, demanding legislators adopt his bill, giving him near-monarchical power over private businesses and law enforcement, all in the name of fighting the sinister foreigners infiltrating the state to pick tomatoes and put up drywall.
Instead, the Legislature gaveled out, then gaveled in their own special session, thumbing their noses at the governor to whom they once bowed down before.
This is what happens when you 1. Run against Trump; and 2. Become politically irrelevant.
Mutual snark
Perez and DeSantis have been snarking at each other for months, but now their reactionary-Republican-on-reactionary-Republican war has gotten hotter than Tallahassee in August.
Not only has the House defied the governor, its healthcare budget committee has been digging into Hope Florida, a charity founded by Casey DeSantis.
Ms. DeS is generally assumed to be running for governor in 2026.
Hope Florida claimed to be about keeping needy people off that nasty ol’ gubmint assistance, funneling them to church programs and other private aid groups.
“Hope Florida is not a program,” says Casey DeSantis. “Hope Florida is an idea, Hope Florida is a philosophy.”
Problem is, as Rep. Alex Andrade, R-Pensacola says, Hope Florida also looks a lot like “conspiracy to commit money laundering and wire fraud.”
Oh, dear.
Here’s what happened: Centene Corp., a Fortune 500 company and Florida’s biggest Medicaid contractor, overcharged for prescription drugs.
It could happen to anyone! Just ask Sen. Rick Scott.
Centene settled with the state for $67 million.
The DeSantis administration told the Legislature about $57 million of that. But $10 million that should have been divided between the state and the feds somehow got donated to the Hope Florida Foundation.
Hope Florida promptly funneled that $10 million to two political committees, one called “Save Our Society From Drugs” (they mean fun drugs, not Advil) and the other “Secure Florida’s Future.”
SFF is controlled by the Florida Chamber of Commerce, which uses it to make dark money campaign contributions.
Nothing shady there, right?
You call this ‘clean’?
It gets better (or worse if you give a damn about ethics and the rule of law): Within a few weeks these two dodgy outfits directed $8.5 million of their windfall to another one, “Keep Florida Clean” (not making this up), the purpose of which was to defeat Amendment 3.
That was the amendment seeking to legalize marijuana. It narrowly lost in the 2024 elections.
Guess who controlled the Keep Florida Clean PAC?
James Uthmeier, attorney general of the State of Florida and DeSantis’ former chief of staff and presidential campaign manager.
A lot of that money paid for ads against Amendment 3, an action that was probably illegal.
Rep. Andrade accuses Uthmeier of “money laundering and wire fraud.”
Uthmeier dismisses Andrade as a tool of “Big Marijuana.”
He says he wasn’t involved in the Hope donation thing.
Or, not very involved, or even aware of what it was, though he swam in the tightest inner circle of DeSantisWorld, up to his eyeballs in some of the governor’s stupidest ideas, including building a golf course in the fragile habitat of Jonathan Dickinson State Park.
The evidence suggests he was very involved.
Meanwhile, DeSantis is in full hissy-fit mode, accusing legislators of working with Democrats and the “liberal media” to trash his wife’s pet charity and derail her political ambitions.
In one of his weird rants he says, “Some people feel threatened by the First Lady, accusing the Legislature and the press of “doing narrative.”
He goes on: “You know, if you’re looking at 2026 and you’ve got some horse, you don’t want her anywhere near that. You’re very worried because she runs circles around their people.”
‘Mistakes were made’
Rep. Andrade slaps back: “I don’t care if she files to run for governor,” adding, “Given how much credit she gets for the Hope Florida Foundation and the Hope Florida program, I’m just kind of shocked at how incompetent she’s been in managing all of it.”
Casey DeSantis had been polling pretty well against declared candidate Byron Donalds, recipient of the presidential endorsement, a congressman who calls Donald Trump “Daddy.”
The Hope debacle could change that.
Hope Florida’s president Joshua Hay allowed as how “mistakes were made” and resigned, as did one of Hope’s attorneys.
Frustrated that people from the Chamber of Commerce and the various dark money committees involved in Hope refused to talk, Andrade has dropped the inquiry — for now.
The House could return to it later.
The Legislature may have backed off investigating Hope, but the “liberal media,” lawyers, political consultants, campaign managers, and maybe even some judges will not.
More like this will come to light; more evidence of what Andrade calls the DeSantis “culture of neglect, incompetence and entitlement” will emerge, just as the 2026 gubernatorial campaign kicks off.
The Fall of the House of DeSantis is going to be quite the spectacle.
Diane Roberts is an 8th-generation Floridian, born and bred in Tallahassee. Educated at Florida State University and Oxford University in England, she has been writing for newspapers since 1983, when she began producing columns on the legislature for the Florida Flambeau. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, the Times of London, the Guardian, the Washington Post, the Oxford American, and Flamingo. She has been a member of the Editorial Board of the St. Petersburg Times–back when that was the Tampa Bay Times’s name–and a long-time columnist for the paper in both its iterations. She was a commentator on NPR for 22 years and continues to contribute radio essays and opinion pieces to the BBC. Roberts is also the author of four books.
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