Republicans in the Florida legislature on Monday delivered a humiliating rebuke to Ron DeSantis by shutting down the governor’s planned crackdown on immigration in the state and moving ahead with their own proposals.
Lawmakers in the Florida house and senate abruptly “gaveled out” a special legislative session that DeSantis had called to seek their approval for measures he drew up in support of Donald Trump’s hardline immigration agenda.
They included the appointment of a new state “immigration officer” who would be appointed by the governor to liaise with the White House, and report directly to him.
The Republican senate president, Ben Albritton, accused DeSantis of trying to usurp the legislature’s authority to write laws, and said the chambers would pursue their own immigration bill following the “spirit and letter” of the president’s immigration policies without the governor’s input.
“President Trump is clearly leading from the Oval Office and has everything under control. Sometimes leadership is not about being out in front. It’s about following the leaders you trust, and I trust President Trump,” Albritton said.
Trump previously praised DeSantis for calling the session in a post on Truth Social, but was on his golf course in Miami on Monday morning and had no immediate comment about the day’s developments.
The Miami Herald said the Republican lawmakers’ action amounted to a “kneecapping” for DeSantis, who previously commanded their absolute loyalty until his failed challenge to Trump for the party’s 2024 presidential nomination.
Daniel Perez, the Republican house speaker, had previously said that DeSantis’s early summoning of lawmakers to Tallahassee, and demands they approve his proposals ahead of the regular 60-day legislative session that begins next month, were “overreach”.
“We have the opportunity to move both expeditiously and thoughtfully. We do not have to choose between right now and getting it right,” he said on Monday.
Both Florida chambers were planning to come back into session on Monday afternoon to begin debating legislation expected to be introduced by the Republican state senator Joe Gruters, who has been a vocal critic of DeSantis in the past.
Under his 75-page bill, there would still be a state immigration officer, but he would report to the legislature, and not to the governor. One name floated to fill the role is Wilton Simpson, the state’s agriculture commissioner, who has been tipped as a possible successor as governor in 2028, and who has had what observers describe as an “icy” relationship with DeSantis.
Among other measures, DeSantis had wanted to make it a state crime for undocumented immigrants to enter Florida; sought to pressure local authorities and law enforcement to join in deportation purges; and end in-state university tuition rates for non-citizens.
He also wanted another expansion of his much-maligned unauthorized alien transport program (UATP), an “act of calculated deception” according to critics in which migrants were tricked on to buses and planes with false promises of accommodation and jobs, then dumped in Democratic states.
Immigration advocates criticized the position of both DeSantis and the Florida legislature on Monday.
“UnidosUS is deeply concerned by the state’s focus on immigration policies designed to posture for national political ambitions rather than address the urgent needs of Floridians,” the group’s Florida director, Jared Nordlund, said in a statement.
after newsletter promotion
“[They] serve primarily as a platform for advancing extreme immigration enforcement reminiscent of the Trump administration’s policies rather than being laser-focused on lowering the cost of living or increasing wages. DeSantis is choosing to ignore the economic crises he has created and is instead using the state as a testing ground for divisive immigration measures to bolster his political image.”
Over the weekend, a number of raids by federal immigration authorities took place in south Florida and elsewhere across the US, with more than 950 arrested on Sunday, the Miami New Times reported.
In a further act of independence on Monday, the Florida legislature voted almost unanimously to override DeSantis’s veto last year of large chunks of the state’s budget, the first such challenge to his financial authority since he took office in 2019. Among DeSantis’s cuts that angered both Democrats and Republicans was the near-wholesale stripping of the state’s arts budget.
In condemning the governor’s veto on Monday, Perez noted that over those six years, the legislature had increased funding for the executive office of the governor by 70%.
“This veto was at best a misunderstanding of the importance of the appropriation, or, at worst, an attempt to threaten the independence of our separate branch of government. Whatever the rationale, this Special Session represents the first opportunity to correct this veto,” Perez said, reported by Politico.
Nikki Fried, the chair of the Florida Democratic party, said in a post on Twitter/X that the abrupt ending of the session and budget rebuke had delivered “a small dose of democracy”.
“The Florida legislature just overrode Ron DeSantis’s veto of millions of dollars from the leg operating budget and gave him the middle finger for his BS special session call,” she wrote.
English (US)