The U.S. and Florida flags fly at half staff outside the Florida Capitol on Jan. 15, 2025, to honor President Jimmy Carter. Gov. Ron DeSantis later ordered them raised to celebrate Donald Trump. (Photo by Jay Waagmeester/Florida Phoenix)
Ron DeSantis never passes up the chance to be spiteful, petty, and craven.
He’s ordered the flags, which should still be flying at half-staff to honor President Jimmy Carter, be raised to full-staff, celebrating the inauguration of a felon and adjudicated rapist, the second most powerful person in the world.
After President Musk, of course.
But that’s Florida government for you: If there’s a total jerk move to be made, they will make it.
DeSantis has demanded lawmakers come to Tallahassee next week for a special session to administer another dose of poison to the American ideals of liberty, generosity, and justice.
When Donald Trump gears up his mass deportation operation, DeSantis wants Florida to be ready to round up anybody who looks like an “illegal.”
And since he’s forcing the Legislature to convene, why not pretend to do something about the annoying way citizens put constitutional amendment proposals on the ballot, do “something” about hurricane relief, and look at what’s referred to as the “condominium crisis.”
Lawmakers will not, you notice, address Florida’s astronomical insurance rates, climate change, polluted water, unaffordable housing, or any of the other urgent problems bedeviling us.
Problem is, the president of the Senate and the speaker of the House don’t really feel like coming to Tallahassee in January.
In a Jan. 13 letter to DeSantis, Speaker Daniel Perez and President Ben Albritton basically said, OK, we’ll show up, but we don’t have to do anything you say: “The Legislature, not the Governor, will decide when and what legislation we consider.”
They’re not happy with DeSantis’ high-handedness and habit of blaming them for — among other things — laws increasing condo owners’ maintenance and repair fees, passed after 98 people died in the 2021 Seaside collapse.
Laws he signed.
Moment of Civics: Just because the Legislature has passed a bill doesn’t mean the governor is forced to sign it.
‘Completely irresponsible’
Perez and Albritton criticized DeSantis for not waiting for the regular session in March and not providing bill language, calling it “completely irresponsible” to get out in front of Donald Trump’s promised mass deportations “when uninformed or ill-timed state action could potentially impair or impede the success” of his determination to make this country white again.
Two days later, a petulant DeSantis put out a list of priorities such as tightening voter registration requirements and criminal penalties for any undocumented person trying to crash our elections.
Not that undocumented people are the ones doing that: Most voter fraud in Florida is committed by Republicans.
But why let the truth get in the way of xenophobia?
He also wants to appoint a Florida immigration czar to coordinate with Trump’s send-’em-all-back goon squads.
Moment of Nostalgia: Remember when DeSantis hated that the federal government was constitutionally in charge of immigration instead of the state and resisted any attempts by the feds to do their job?
I guess he’s changed his mind.
There might be a Capitol food fight: Lawmakers may want to show the governor they’re no longer his vassals. He’ll soon be unemployed and they have their own political futures to consider.
But make no mistake: This spat between DeSantis and the formerly supine Republican Legislature doesn’t mean they aren’t equally determined to rid Florida of what they see as the “wrong” people. You know, the ones cleaning the hotel rooms, cutting the grass, picking the tomatoes, putting up drywall, and performing all those other minimum wage jobs “real” Americans are strangely reluctant to do.
You’d think they would notice such a move is likely to wreck the state’s agricultural and construction industries.
Still, pleasing their angry white base and prostrating themselves before their angry orange overlord matters more than fripperies such as the economy.
(But won’t the Trump tariffs lower egg prices and make us all rich?)
Nastiness for nastiness’ sake
Which brings us, as stupid and cruel proposals often do, to Sen. Randy Fine.
In 2014, Republicans in the Legislature acknowledged that undocumented people worked hard, paid taxes, and built productive lives in Florida, and passed a measure allowing DACA kids to pay in-state tuition at public universities.
Randy Fine has filed a bill to repeal that law, attempting to deny affordable college to undocumented young people.
Instead of around $6,000 a year, they’d have to pay $30,000.
Fine not only hates Dreamers, he hates higher education. He’s happy in this instance to push DeSantis’ agenda, although they aren’t exactly pals.
A couple of years ago, Fine thought DeSantis would make him president of Florida Atlantic University.
It didn’t happen. A spitting-mad Fine withdrew his support for DeSantis in the 2024 primaries and jumped to the Trump camp.
Nonetheless, they’re brothers in arms when it comes to nastiness for nastiness’ sake.
The combustible Fine will back DeSantis’ agenda, even as he’s resigning from the Senate on March 31.
Fine’s a shoo-in to take the seat of U.S. Rep. Mike Waltz, who’s joining the Trump administration.
The special election is — fittingly — on April Fools’ Day.
We can all look forward to Fine in Washington trying to out-do South Carolina Rep. Nancy Mace in performative hatred on the House floor.
Chile!
The bathroom-obsessed representative from South Carolina recently blew up like a cheap cherry bomb when Rep. Jasmine Crockett of Texas proposed reinstating the subcommittee on civil rights.
Mace ranted about trans women threatening her and, as Crockett tried to answer, deploying the grand old Southernism “chile,” Mace hollered, “I am no child! Do not call me a child!” Then she suggested to Crockett they “to take it outside.”
Randy will need to up his game to compete with that level of epically juvenile brattiness.
Meanwhile back in Tallahassee, Big Ag, Big Building, and Big Tourism worry: When all those without the right papers are back in Venezuela or El Salvador or Honduras, who’s going to do the work?
Condos are sinking: The porous limestone on which most sit gets waterlogged from sea level rise. But instead of the state addressing the climate upheaval that is the root cause of condo disintegration, they’ll shield the builders from real penalties and see that the owners have to pay more, even as their homes cannot be hardened against geological and hydrological realities.
Worst of all, DeSantis and legislative Republicans mean to destroy citizens’ last way to force an unresponsive government to listen.
In 2024, well over half of Florida voters said they wanted legal recreational marijuana and reproductive rights. In most states, that would be a win.
But neither measure reached Florida’s required 60%. Now the governor is trying to make it nearly impossible for ordinary people to mount a petition drive and get an initiative on the ballot.
He calls it “closing loopholes.” Others of us call it killing a democratic process.
This is the country we’re now living in: dictatorial, unrepresentative, and deeply unkind. What will be left of Florida in four years?
What will be left of America?