DeSantis wants Legislature to ‘reevaluate' gun safety laws passed after Parkland
Gov. Ron DeSantis, Senate President Ben Albritton, and House Speaker Daniel Perez stand in front of a joint session of the Florida Legislature to hear the governor's State of the State address on March 4, 2025. (Photo by Jay Waagmeester/Florida Phoenix
Gov Ron DeSantis said Tuesday in his State of the State address that he wants the Florida Legislature to re-examine key provisions of the landmark 2018 Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School Public Safety Act, enacted following the shootings in Parkland that killed 17 students and school administrators.
Specifically, the governor wants the Legislature to repeal language that raised the legal age to purchase a shotgun or rifle in Florida from 18 to 21 and also the state's 'red flag' law, which allows law enforcement or family members to petition a court to temporarily remove a person's firearms if they pose a risk to themselves or others.
'We need to be a strong Second Amendment state. I know many of you agree, so let's get some positive reform done for the people in this state of Florida,' he said.
During a press conference held immediately after the speech, DeSantis reiterated his criticism of those laws, adding once again that he would like Florida to join the overwhelming majority of states that allow open carry.
'I don't know what the Legislature is going to do in those respects but, in spite of us saying that 'we're the free state,' in spite of us being like, 'oh, we're this Republican bastion, conservative bastion,' we definitely lag on that issue.'
Legislative leaders, particularly in the Senate, have opposed open carry in recent years. Senate President Ben Albritton said last fall that he doesn't support it because neither does law enforcement (specifically, the Florida Sheriffs Association), and repeated that opinion on Tuesday. He said he also supports 'Red Flag' laws.
Although the governor focused on guns, perhaps no issue is more important to Floridians than the cost of property insurance. DeSantis insisted the news on that front is good, mentioning how 11 new companies have entered the market over the last year with more than 130,000 new private policies put into effect in 2024, and that 73% of state-backed Citizens Property Insurance policyholders in Miami-Dade County are scheduled to receive a rate decrease of an average of 6.3%.
And he urged the Legislature to provide additional funding for those on the My Safe Florida Home waitlist — people who have been approved for grants to strengthen their homes against hurricane winds.
DeSantis said he supports House Speaker Daniel Perez's plan to order a committee to hold hearings into property insurance companies moving billions of dollars to affiliate companies losses, based on a report from the Tampa Bay Times.
'If there's things that need to be done to be able to make sure that we have transparency and appropriate oversight, I'm all for it,' the governor said. 'What I am not going to support is opening the litigation floodgates. The fact is, our markets were being driven into the ground because of excessive litigation.'
DeSantis took time once again to tout one of his new goals before he leaves office — to make Florida the first state to outlaw property taxes. The proposal could go before voters as a constitutional amendment in 2026 if lawmakers first approve a study of the issue. (Lee County Republican Jonathan Martin is sponsoring a resolution to require the state Office of Economic and Demographic Research to analyze the repercussions).
'Is the property yours or are you just renting from the government?' the governor asked the assembled members of the Legislature.
And he emphasized that no one should believe that removing property taxes would lead to a state income tax, which the Florida Constitution does not allow. 'This body will not pass tax increases, and this governor will not sign tax increases,' he said to applause.
DeSantis was successful in 2024 in stopping two proposed constitutional amendments from securing the 60% vote required for passage. Amendment 4 would have enshrined abortion rights in the Florida Constitution while Amendment 3 would have legalized use of recreational cannabis for adults. Both received majority support, however.
Since then, citing a state report alleging fraud in the petition gathering process by the group advocating for Amendment 4, the governor has been calling for the Legislature to make it even more difficult for citizen-led constitutional amendments, complaining the process had been 'perverted.'
'We need to clean up the petition fraud and we need to clean up this out-of-control amendment process, and you in the Legislature have the opportunity to do just that and protect Florida's Constitution once and for all,' he declared.
This was likely DeSantis' next-to-last State of the State address as governor. It came at an uncertain time in his tenure — while he remains the most powerful person in Florida government, in January GOP legislative leaders and rank-and-file legislators rebuked his initial proposals on illegal immigration.
Whether his wife, First Lady Casey DeSantis, decides to run to succeed her husband in 2026, the governor took time in his speech to give credit to her work in leading Hope Florida, an initiative designed to make it easier for Floridians to access help for mental health and substance abuse.
'By the end of 2024, Hope Florida has helped nearly 30,000 participants reduce or eliminate their reliance on government assistance, netting the taxpayers over $108 million in annual savings,' he said. 'The Hope Florida model is now being replicated by other states around the country. Thanks to Casey for her leadership and ingenuity,' he declared, pointing to Casey, who sat with the couple's son, Mason, in the East Gallery of the Florida House chamber.
Senate Democratic Leader Jason Pizzo praised DeSantis' handling of emergencies but lamented that Republicans have focused on culture wars instead of homeowner's insurance and increasing pay for law enforcement and teachers.
Pizzo, who is expected to run for governor, in a rebuttal speech mentioned one of his bills, which would require all private employers to verify that their new hires are authorized to work in the country.
'You are not serious about curbing illegal immigration if you continue to cower to donors and not listen to our citizens,' he said.
House Democratic Leader Fentrice Driskell delivered her caucus' rebuttal to the address. She hit DeSantis on his recently announced Florida DOGE initiative and push to remove property taxes, saying the governor was merely seeking attention.
But Driskell acknowledged her party's superminority position, making it essentially impossible to pass their priorities, such as expanding Medicaid and universal background checks in gun sales.
'We understand the political reality of Tallahassee, so we know these ideas aren't likely to go anywhere, regardless of how good they are,' Driskell said in her pre-recorded remarks.
'It isn't easy being in the minority party in the Legislature, but we aren't Democrats only when it's easy. We're here to advocate for our communities and make our voices heard, and that's what we'll be doing.'
SUBSCRIBE: GET THE MORNING HEADLINES DELIVERED TO YOUR INBOX
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
29 minutes ago
- Yahoo
‘We've lost the culture war on climate'
President Donald Trump's latest climate rollback makes it all but official: The United States is giving up on trying to stop the planet's warming. In some ways, the effort has barely started. More than 15 years after federal regulators officially recognized that greenhouse gas pollution threatens 'current and future generations,' their most ambitious efforts to defuse that threat have been blocked in the courts and by Trump's rule-slicing buzzsaw. Wednesday's action by the Environmental Protection Agency would extend that streak by wiping out a Biden-era regulation on power plants — leaving the nation's second-largest source of climate pollution unshackled until at least the early 2030s. Rules aimed at lessening climate pollution from transportation, the nation's No. 1 source, are also on the Trump hit list. Meanwhile, the GOP megabill lumbering through the Senate would dismember former President Joe Biden's other huge climate initiative, the 2022 law that sought to use hundreds of billions of dollars in tax breaks and other incentives to encourage consumers and businesses to switch to carbon-free energy. At the same time, Trump's appointees have spent months shutting down climate programs, firing their workers and gutting research into the problem, while making it harder for states such as California to tackle the issue on their own. The years of whipsawing moves have left Washington with no consistent approach on how — or whether — to confront climate change, even as scientists warn that years are growing short to avoid catastrophic damage to human society. While the Trump-era GOP's hardening opposition to climate action has been a major reason for the lack of consensus, one former Democratic adviser said her own party needs to find a message that resonates with broad swaths of the electorate. 'There's no way around it: The left strategy on climate needs to be rethought,' said Jody Freeman, who served as counselor for energy and climate change in President Barack Obama's White House. 'We've lost the culture war on climate, and we have to figure out a way for it to not be a niche leftist movement." It's a strategy Freeman admitted she was 'struggling' to articulate, but one that included using natural gas as a 'bridge fuel' to more renewable power — an approach Democrats embraced during the Obama administration — finding 'a new approach' for easing permits for energy infrastructure and building broad-based political support. As the Democratic nominee in 2008, Obama expressed the hope that his campaign would be seen as 'the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.' But two years later, the Democrats' cap-and-trade climate bill failed to get through a Senate where they held a supermajority. Obama didn't return to the issue in earnest until his second term, taking actions including the enactment of a sweeping power plant rule that wasn't yet in effect when Trump rescinded it and the Supreme Court declared it dead. Republicans, meanwhile, have moved far from their seemingly moderating stance in 2008, when nominee John McCain offered his own climate proposals and even then-President George W. Bush announced a modest target for slowing carbon pollution by 2025. EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin contended Wednesday that the Obama- and Biden-era rules were overbearing and too costly. 'The American public spoke loudly and clearly last November: They wanted to make sure that all agencies were cognizant of their economic concerns,' he said when announcing the rule rollback at agency headquarters. 'At the EPA under President Trump, we have chosen to both protect the environment and grow the economy.' Trump's new strategy of ditching greenhouse gas limits altogether is legally questionable, experts involved in crafting the Obama and Biden power plant rules told POLITICO. But they acknowledged that the Trump administration at the very least will significantly weaken rules on power plants' climate pollution, at a moment when the trends are going in the wrong direction. Gina McCarthy, who led EPA during the Obama administration, said in a statement that Zeldin's rationale is "absolutely illogical and indefensible. It's a purely political play that goes against decades of science and policy review." U.S. greenhouse gas emissions were virtually flat last year, falling just 0.2 percent, after declining 20 percent since 2005, according to the research firm Rhodium Group. That output would need to fall 7.6 percent annually through 2030 to meet the climate goals Biden floated, which were aimed at limiting the rise in global temperatures to 1.5 degrees Celsius since the start of the Industrial Revolution. That level is a critical threshold for avoiding the most severe impacts of climate change. Those targets now look out of reach. The World Meteorological Organization last month gave 70 percent odds that the five-year global temperature average through 2029 would register above 1.5 degrees. The Obama-era rule came out during a decade when governments around the world threw their weight behind blunting climate pollution through executive actions. Ricky Revesz, who was Biden's regulatory czar, recalled the 'great excitement' at the White House Blue Room reception just before Obama announced his power plant rule, known as the Clean Power Plan. It seemed a watershed moment. But it didn't last. 'I thought that it was going to be a more linear path forward,' he said. 'That linear path forward has not materialized. And that is disappointing.' Opponents who have long argued that such regulations would wreck the economy while doing little to curb global temperature increases have traveled the same road in reverse. Republican West Virginia Gov. Patrick Morrisey said he felt dread when Obama announced the Clean Power Plan in 2015. Then the state's attorney general, he feared the rule's focus on curbing carbon dioxide from power plants would have a 'catastrophic' impact on West Virginia's coal-reliant economy. 'It was really an audacious and outrageous attempt to regulate the economy when they had no power to do so,' said Morrisey, who led a coalition of states that sued the EPA over Obama's proposal. 'You can't take the actions that they were trying to take without going to the legislature.' Meanwhile, Congress has become harsher terrain for climate action. In May, House Republicans voted to undo the incentives for electric cars and other clean energy technologies in Biden's Inflation Reduction Act, the nation's most significant effort to spur clean energy and curb climate change. That same week, 35 House Democrats and Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.) crossed the aisle and voted to kill an EPA waiver that had allowed California to set more stringent tailpipe pollution standards for vehicles to deal with its historically smoggy skies. California was planning to use that waiver to end sales of internal combustion engine vehicles in 2035, a rule 10 other states and the District of Columbia had planned to follow. The Supreme Court has added to the obstacles for climate policy — introducing more existential challenges for efforts to use executive powers to corral greenhouse gas emissions. In its 2022 decision striking down the Obama administration's power plant rule, the court said agencies such as EPA need Congress' explicit approval before enacting regulations that would have a 'major' impact on the economy. (It didn't precisely define what counts as 'major.') In 2024, the court eviscerated a decades-old precedent known as the Chevron doctrine, which had afforded agencies broad leeway in how they interpret vague statutes. Many climate advocates and former Democratic officials contend that all those obstacles are bumps, not barriers, on the tortuous path to reducing greenhouse gases. They say that even the regulatory fits and starts have provided signals to markets and businesses about where federal policy is heading in the long term — prodding the private sector to make investments to green the nation's energy system. One symptom is a sharp decline in U.S. reliance on coal — by far the most climate-polluting power source, and the one that would face the stiffest restrictions in any successful federal regulation to lessen the electricity industry's emissions. Coal supplied 48.5 percent of the nation's power generation in 2007, but that fell to 15 percent in 2024. Last year, solar and wind power combined to overtake coal for the first time. 'Regulation has served the purpose of moving things along faster,' said Janet McCabe, who was deputy EPA administrator under Biden and ran EPA's Office of Air and Radiation during Obama's second term. 'The trajectory is always in the right direction.' Freeman, who is now at Harvard Law School, said federal regulations plus state laws requiring renewable power to comprise portions of the electricity mix helped justify utility investments in clean energy. That, in turn, accelerated price drops for wind and solar power, she said. Clean energy advocates point to those broader market shifts, calling a cleaner power grid inevitable. 'There are people in each of these industries who wouldn't have taken the climate problem seriously and cleaner technology seriously, and invested in it, if it weren't for the pressure of the Clean Air Act and the incentives that more recently had been built into the IRA,' said David Doniger, senior attorney and strategist at the Natural Resources Defense Council. 'So policy does matter, even when it's not in a straight line and the implementation is inadequate.' But even if those economic trends continue — an open question given the enormous new power demand from data centers — it will not bring the U.S. closer to cuts needed to keep the world from overheating, multiple climate studies have concluded. And the greatest chunk of the emissions decline since 2005 comes from shifting coal to natural gas, another fossil fuel, which fracking made cheap and abundant. Biden's power plant rule, now being shelved by Trump's EPA, would have imposed limits on both coal-burning power plants and future gas-fired ones, requiring them to either capture their greenhouse gases or shut down. Staving off regulations may well keep coal-fired power plants running longer than anticipated to meet forecast demand growth, belching more carbon dioxide into the air. The Trump administration has even sought to temporarily exempt power plants from air pollution rules altogether and is trying to use emergency powers to prevent coal generators from shuttering. Without federal rules that say otherwise, power providers would also be likely to add more natural gas generation to the grid. Failing to curb power plants' pollution, scientists say, means temperatures will continue to rise and bring more of the floods, heat waves, wildfires, supply chain disruptions, food shortages and other shocks that cost the U.S. hundreds of billions of dollars each year in property damage, illness, death and lost productivity. 'I don't think the economics are going to take care of it by any means,' said Joe Goffman, who led the Biden EPA air office. 'The effects of climate change are going to continue to be felt and they're going to continue to be costly in terms of dollars and cents and in terms of human experience.' Some state governors, such as Democrats Kathy Hochul of New York and Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, have vowed to go it alone on climate policy if need be. But analyses have shown state actions alone are unlikely to achieve the greenhouse gas reductions at the scale and speed needed to avoid baking in catastrophic effects from climate change. The Sierra Club, for example, has helped shutter nearly 400 coal-fired units across the U.S. since 2010 through its Beyond Coal campaign, which has argued the economic case against fossil fuel generation in front of state utility commissions. While Joanne Spalding, the group's legal director, said it can continue to strike blows against coal with that strategy, she acknowledged that 'gas is a huge problem' — and left no doubt that the Trump administration's moves would do damage. 'Given what the science says about the need to act urgently, this will be a lost four years in the United States,' she said.
Hamilton Spectator
33 minutes ago
- Hamilton Spectator
Senate rejects effort to block arms sales over Trump's dealings with Qatar and UAE
WASHINGTON (AP) — Senate Republicans have blocked an effort by Democrats to temporarily block arms sales to Qatar and the United Arab Emirates in response to President Donald Trump's dealings in the region. Democrats forced two procedural votes Wednesday to protest Qatar's donation of a $400 million plane to be used as Air Force One and a $2 billion investment by a UAE-backed company using a Trump family-linked stablecoin, a form of cryptocurrency. Sen. Chris Murphy, who led the Democratic effort, said the U.S. Senate should not 'grease the wheels' for Trump. 'We can do that by voting to block these two arms sales to Qatar and to the UAE — not permanently, but until both countries commit to deny Trump's requests for personal enrichment as part of the bilateral relationship,' Murphy said. Trump's administration is still sorting out the legal arrangement for accepting a luxury jet from the Qatari royal family and how the plane would be modified so it is safe for the president, who has called the arrangement a 'no brainer' as a new Air Force One has faced delays at U.S.-based Boeing. Trump said he wouldn't fly around in the gifted Boeing 747 when his term ends, but Democrats, and even some Republicans, have strongly questioned the ethics of the arrangement. At a hearing on Wednesday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth refused to provide details on plans for his department to accept the jet. He said budgeting and schedules for security upgrades to turn the plane into the president's aircraft are classified. 'A memorandum of understanding remains to be signed,' Hegseth said. Democrats have also raised ethical questions about the Trump family's stake in World Liberty Financial , a cryptocurrency project that has launched its own stablecoin, USD1. Earlier this year, World Liberty announced an investment fund in the United Arab Emirates would be using $2 billion worth of USD1 to purchase a stake in Binance, the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange. Murphy forced the votes under a mechanism known as a joint resolution of disapproval that allows the Senate to reject arms sales. The procedural vote Wednesday blocked a Democratic motion to discharge the resolution from the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and move to an up-or-down vote on the Senate floor. The effort was mostly symbolic, as the measures would have had to pass both chambers of Congress and withstand any presidential veto to become law. But Murphy said the Senate should exercise its powers to oversee arms sales around the world. 'We place immense trust in the president not to abuse these incredible authorities that are given to him,' he said. Error! Sorry, there was an error processing your request. There was a problem with the recaptcha. Please try again. You may unsubscribe at any time. By signing up, you agree to our terms of use and privacy policy . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google privacy policy and terms of service apply. Want more of the latest from us? Sign up for more at our newsletter page .
The Hill
36 minutes ago
- The Hill
Schumer says 16 Republicans have ‘discomfort' with green tax credit rollbacks
Democrats are working to convince some 16 of their Republican colleagues to oppose the GOP's policy bill because of its rollbacks to climate-friendly tax credits, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) said Thursday. 'We have a group…of seven or eight Democrats who are talking to their Republican colleagues…and we're getting some vibes that people realize this bill went too far and we're hoping they can all go together to [Majority Leader] John Thune and to [Senate Finance Committee Chair Mike] Crapo and say 'change it. We can't be for it the way it is,' Schumer told reporters Wednesday. 'We have a list of 16 Republican senators who have shown some discomfort with this and that's the main group we're focused on,' he added. The version of the 'big, beautiful bill' passed by Republicans makes major cuts to tax credits for climate-friendly energy sources, making it so that any project that is not already under construction within 60 days of the law's enactment is ineligible for the tax credits. This provision, among others, is expected to bar many projects from eligibility and could ultimately lead to less low-carbon energy development. At least some Republicans have publicly expressed skepticism of a rapid end to the credits with Sens. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), Thom Tillis (R-N.C.), John Curtis (R-Utah) and Jerry Moran (R-Kan.) warning against a 'full scale' repeal. However, House Republicans who have championed the cuts are pushing for them to stay in their current form, with members of the Freedom Caucus board recently saying it will 'not accept' changes that water down the cuts.
