Airport Renaming Aside, Florida Lawmakers Spent Two Months Perfecting Art of the Dither

By Diane Roberts

Back in the last century, before condos choked the beaches and theme parks displaced orange groves, I was a page in the Florida House of Representatives.

All you had to do was fetch coffee and copies of bills for men in fat ties who called you “Young Lady.”

For this, you got a week off school and $50.

It was a lesson on how the Legislature worked.

Or didn’t.

Sure, they made speeches about serving “the great people of the great state of Florida” and passed plenty of bills, but they also behaved like giddy kids, spinning in their chairs, telling jokes, playing pranks (it was mostly men in those days), yelling at each other, sometimes nearly coming to blows.

We rolled our eyes — such juvenile behavior.

We were in 5th grade.

I regret to inform you the Florida Legislature has not exactly matured.

Indeed, it has devolved to the point that it can’t even perform its one job — ONE JOB, y’all — which is to pass a state budget.

So, what have your 160 elected representatives been doing since the session began on Jan. 13 and ended on March 13?

Not much.

No state budget; no attention to making insurance or housing more affordable; no addressing the climate crisis or the monumental strain on our aquifer; no meaningful oversight of the cash-hemorrhaging school voucher program; no acknowledgment the war in Iran is driving up gas prices; no relief for food-insecure kids in Florida; no ensuring the public has a right to know if some vampiric tech bro billionaire is building an AI data center next door to you.

‘Embarassing’

Lawmakers couldn’t even get the new state bird bill over the finish line.

Better luck next year, Flamingo.

The 2026 session limped to Sine Die, the official ending at which they symbolically drop a handkerchief on the Capitol floor and head home.

Sen. Don Gaetz called it “embarrassing.”

How did they fill those long hours in Tallahassee — other than lying to reporters, bloviating in committee meetings, and downing cocktails at the Governor’s Club?

They passed a lot of resolutions, including ones to commemorate, celebrate, and raise awareness of things like Uterine Fibroids and Women in Diplomacy.

I’m afraid you’ve missed Florida Gulf Coast University Day (Jan. 27), Space Day (Feb. 3), and Florida Kidney Day (Feb. 10), but there’s still a chance to arrange festivities for Vein Week (April 6-12) and Endangered Species Day (May 15).

Sadly, some these special days and weeks will have a pretty short shelf life.

Endangered Species Day, for example: Legislators are happy to watch Florida’s panther population numbers diminish as ranchers demand their “rights.”

Mustn’t upset Big Ag.

They refused to name the threatened scrub jay, the only bird endemic to Florida, our state bird, too. That might lead to official protection of its habitat.

Mustn’t hurt developers’ feelings.

As for Rare Disease Day, it will soon be irrelevant.

Given the state surgeon general’s hostility to vaccines and other evidence-based medicine, rare diseases won’t be rare for long.

Y’all give a big Sunshine State welcome to Hepatitis B!

When legislators weren’t declaring Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University Day (Feb. 10) or Obsessive-Compulsive Awareness Week (Oct. 12-18), they were congratulating everybody they could think of.

At length.

Mean people

The Senate spent seven hours lauding departing colleagues term-limited out or (wisely) putting plenty of distance between themselves and the unseemly food fight we know as state government.

Former Senate President Kathleen Passidomo (R-Naples), Sen. Daryl Rouson (D-St. Petersburg), Sen. Lori Berman (D-Boynton Beach), and the ICE-loving Trump cheerleader Sen. Joe Gruters (R-Sarasota) got a heaps of fulsome praise, even from people who hate them like poison.

The House did the same thing, verbally licking each others’ ears and sharing their Milkbones.

As if this wasn’t enough time-wasting, they embarked on a lengthy round of Bobby Bowden love.

The FSU coach has been dead for five years and has yet to have anything named for him but two football fields and a fund-raising club. The Senate means to right this injustice by designating the capital’s “International” (stop laughing) airport the Bobby Bowden Tallahassee International Airport.

Sort of: It’s an “honorary” naming.

The Legislature made a name change for Palm Beach International (seriously! You can fly to the Bahamas from there and sometimes to Montreal!) official: the Donald J. Trump Airport and Modeling Agency.

(Might have made that last bit up).

OK, I’m being unfair. While your Florida legislators generally ignore bills sponsored by Democrats, or (in the House) bills the Senate cares about, or (in the Senate) bills the House cares about, they did pass a solid 12% of bills filed.

The problem is, none of these bills will actually make schools or rent cheaper or citizens healthier or do something about saltwater invading our aquifer or guns on our streets.

What they did pass — other than the new law mandating kids learn cursive — is almost entirely guaranteed to cause harm.

These are some mean people.

Non-existent problems

Speaker of the House Daniel Perez and Gov. Ron DeSantis despise each other (Perez labeled DeSantis’ refusal to shake his hand on Opening Day “petulant”), while the Senate sees no reason to cooperate with the tiresome folks in the other chamber.

Yet they somehow suspended their antipathy long enough to join forces on voter suppression.

The governor and the Republican legislative supermajority all say 1. Florida’s elections are great, safe, damn near perfect; and 2. At the same time, sinister foreigners and other undesirables compromise Florida’s elections with their fraudulent voting.

Therefore, they’ve passed HB 991, a solution chasing a non-existent problem.

In 2025, Florida had 13 million voters on its rolls.

The state has found 198 who could have registered or voted illicitly.

Possibly, maybe.

Making it harder to vote is something of a passion project for the current regime.

If you’re a married woman who took your husband’s last name, you’d better be ready explain yourself with paperwork.

Anyone wanting simply to register will have to prove who his, her, or their (although that’s not allowed anymore) identity with a passport, a REAL ID driver’s license, a court order, naturalization papers, or a birth certificate.

Hundreds of thousands don’t have REAL ID; getting a copy of your birth certificate costs money, and older, poorer people might not even have one.

This is a poll tax.

Not only do they not want you to vote, they don’t want you and your elected city or county government to celebrate Black History Month or Pride or Women’s Equality Day or, hell, maybe St. Patrick’s Day.

Why should the Irish get DEI?

Who’s heritage?

SB 1134 threatens local officials with removal from office if they spend a penny of public money recognizing or celebrating anything deemed insufficiently “Heritage American.”

Bill sponsor Dean Black, R-Jacksonville, says DEI initiatives foster “resentment instead of good will” and “mediocrity instead of merit.”

Here are some of those “mediocre” people and resentment-provoking assertions of human rights Rep. Black’s bill wants us all to ignore: Bayard Rustin, Sandra Day O’Connor, Sojourner Truth, Harvey Milk, Malala Yousafzai, Marie Curie, Alan Turing, Simon Bolivar, James Baldwin, Helen Keller, Toni Morrison, Tecumseh, Stonewall, Selma, Wounded Knee—

If you aren’t familiar with these names, look them up.

And imagine you are female or a person of color or LGBTQ+ or disabled: Your state government now says you should sit down and shut up.

Don’t expect the rest of us to care about your struggles and your experiences.

Some Americans are more equal than others.

If you dissent, if you say Black lives really do matter, if you oppose genocide in Gaza or protest the regime’s increasing authoritarianism, if you follow a disfavored faith, you may be a criminal — at least according to the state of Florida.

It has dawned on the governor and Legislature Florida’s voucher program also supports students in accredited Muslim private schools.

Republicans from the governor’s office on down began to holler about “sharia law,” although they presented no evidence these schools promote it or even teach it, and implied (again, without much evidence) the schools have connections to foreign terrorist groups.

Sharia is based on the Quran. You could say (as plenty of politicians do) that western legal systems derive from the Old Testament.

Both holy texts endorse gender discrimination and violent punishments. Neither has the force of law in the United States or any other western nation.

Spot the terrorist

But the soon-to-be-signed HB 1471 will allow the governor and Cabinet to declare groups “domestic terrorists,” deny vouchers to certain schools, and expel students who, say, wave a Palestinian flag at a campus demonstration.

DeSantis wants to ban the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a civil rights organization. A federal judge is blocking him.

Oddly enough, nobody’s talking about banning the College Republicans.

Members of the University of Florida chapter have been entertaining themselves with Nazi salutes and antisemitic declarations, while another gaggle of white boys, mostly students (one in law school at FIU) have been indulging in a WhatsApp chat insulting Jews, calling women “whores,” making free with the N-word, and suggesting Black people should be beheaded.

To be fair, UF kicked their College Republicans off campus.

The College Republicans suing on free speech grounds.

I wish I could say the Legislature’s done all the damage it can this year, but that’s not at all the case.

They’ll be back in Tallahassee after Easter, allegedly to pass a budget. It could end up with all kinds of insane and hateful provisions slipped in at the last minute.

They’ll be back again later to fight over property taxes and redistricting.

That’s assuming they can overcome their feuding, back-biting, tantrum-throwing, and snit fit-pitching long enough to do their job.

Then again, the collective emotional age at the Capitol is about 10, so let’s not get our hopes up.

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.