Dear Friend,

We’re on the highway and headed back to Tallahassee for one final week of committee meetings before the 2023 session of the Florida Legislature begins on March 7. 

But before this week’s battles begin, I wanted to give you an update on last week, which was the fifth of six committee weeks. Lots happened, especially as Gov. Ron DeSantis ramped up what can only be described as an all-out war on public education. 

As always, I encourage you to pay attention and make your voice heard as we have these debates. You can watch hearings and floor sessions live on the Florida Channel. And be sure to follow us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube for extra updates in real-time. 

Now, onto this week’s newsletter.

Onward, 

Rep. Anna V. Eskamani

 The Governor’s War on Public Education 

Gov. Ron DeSantis’ assault on our system of public education is growing more unhinged by the day. He’s attacking so many institutions at once, it’s hard to know where to begin.

After the College Board called out DeSantis’ lies about a new Advanced Placement course on African American studies, the governor threatened last week to cancel all AP courses in Florida. This would needlessly harm students all across Florida, but especially kids from lower- and middle-income families who might not be able to afford college without the help of AP credits.

This crazed governor, who is now openly threatening to cancel any company or organization that doesn’t submit to his partisan indoctrination, is even threatening to replace the SAT, which the College Board also administers, with an explicitly Christian religious test.

Meanwhile, Chris Rufo, the racist, homophobic and transphobic grifter who has become of DeSantis’ top education advisors, began attacking the University of Central Florida, even targeting merit-based scholarships for students of color.

We’re also learning more about the grifters and cronies that DeSantis has been installing in positions of power across our public education system. For example, it turns out that Rufo, whom DeSantis put on the board of trustees at New College of Florida, has been lying about having a degree from Harvard University.

Of course, Rufo and DeSantis’ other crazed trustees at New College recently hired Richard Corcoran, an unqualified former elected official who is friends with the governor, to be president of New College – and gave Corcoran a $699,000 a year salary, with an $84,000 a year housing allowance and $12,000 a year car allowance.

 And now that DeSantis has Corcoran in control at New College, the a legislative committee voted last week to give Corcoran an extra $15 million to spend on “institutional restricting” as the DeSantis administration tries to turn New College into an overtly conservative Christian school.

Political interference in our K-12 schools, too

We also saw more DeSantis interference last week in our K-12 public schools.

For example, under pressure from the governor’s administration, school districts in Orange and Duval counties announced they would pull out of an important public health survey conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The federally funded Youth Behavior Risk Survey collects data on subjects such as exercise, substance use, sexual activity, sexual orientation, mental health and suicidal thoughts. The most recent survey found that approximately 20 percent of students in Orange County have thought about suicide.

But the DeSantis administration wants to stop gathering those data in a way that it could be used to make meaningful comparisons with other states around the country.

Meanwhile, a substitute teacher in Jacksonville was fired after posting a video online that showed empty bookshelves in a Duval County school as officials try to comply with book-banning edicts from the DeSantis administration.

The teacher posted the video three weeks ago. But he wasn’t fired until Ron DeSantis was personally embarrassed by it after a reporter asked the governor a question about the video during a live press conference.

In addition, after the Florida High School Athletic Association backed down from its dystopian plan to make students provide the state with details about their menstrual cycles (they are still targeting trans kids though), the governor wants to take over that agency, too.

A committee in the House based a bill last week that will give DeSantis the power to point every single member of the FHSAA board.

Sadly, that’s not all. DeSantis is also pushing the Legislature to inject even more partisan politics into our K-12 schools.

Specifically, the governor wants lawmakers to put a constitutional amendment on the 2024 ballot that would change our traditionally nonpartisan school board elections into partisan races.

The House Choice & Innovation Subcommittee passed the proposal (HJR 31) last week by a 13-5 vote.

Also important to stress that House Bill 1 — the major privatization bill of public education — will be heard in the House this Thursday. You can click here to contact members of the PreK-12 Appropriations Subcommittee and ask that they vote no on HB1.

Finally: A lot of folks have asked us how they can help fight back against book bans in Florida. I encourage you to check out both the Democratic Public Education Caucus and the Florida Freedom to Read Project.

Doing the bidding of corporate lobbyists

While Ron DeSantis’ anti-education crusade is getting lots of attention, he also continues to do the bidding of corporate lobbyists and billionaire donors. 

This past week, for instance, the governor called on the Legislature to pass a package of bills that would make it much harder to sue businesses whose negligence leads to an innocent person being hurt or insurance companies who refuse to pay legitimate claims. 

The governor’s proposed restrictions on civil lawsuits would prevent Floridians from holding bad corporate actors accountable. And they would be a gift to the state’s biggest businesses – companies like Publix and Disney – who have been lobbying for this kind of tort reform for more than a decade.

Corporate lobbyists also want to make it harder for citizens to amend the state constitution through petition drives. And both DeSantis and many of my Republican collogues in the Florida Legislature want to help them there, too.

The House last week began moving forward with HJR 129, which would put an amendment on the 2024 ballot that would require most future constitutional amendments to pass with 66.67 percent support – up from 60 percent right now.

This is entirely designed to block future citizen’s initiatives that would do things like expand public health insurance to cover more Floridians. If this had been in place two years ago, it would have blocked the constitutional amendment to raise the state’s minimum wage – which passed with 61 percent of the vote.

The House Ethics, Elections & Open Government Subcommittee approved HJR 129 by a 12-6 vote.

Exactly one person testified in support of the idea: A lobbyist for the Florida Chamber of Commerce.

The ‘freedom’ governor cuts off free speech

We’re less than three weeks from the start of a legislative session where DeSantis and Tallahassee Republican leaders want to ban abortion, erase Black history, allow anyone to carry guns without a permit, gut funding for public schools, put transgender Floridians in danger and strip healthcare insurance from more than 1 million Floridians.

But before they do all that, the DeSantis administration is rushing a cowardly rule into place to keep protestors out of the state Capitol. 

The proposed rule, which would give police more discretion to remove people from the Capitol building and charge them with trepassing, was published last week.

It’s scheduled to go into effect on March 1 – less than a week before session begins. 

A bit of good news!

It wasn’t all bad news last week, though.

Environmental groups won a key legal victory when a state appellate court ruled that the DeSantis administration must do take more action to clean pollution in our state’s springs.

The director of the Florida Springs Council called it the “biggest legal win for Florida’s environment in recent memory.” 

My committee meetings

Three of my committees met last week.

In the Ways & Means Committee, which hears bills dealing with tax policy and where I serve as the ranking Democrat, we passed three bills.

 One of those bills was HB 101, which would expand a property tax exemption for spouses of first responders who are killed in the line of duty. We already provide this tax break to surviving spouses of local and state first responders, like a city police offer, county firefighter or state highway trooper. HB 101 would expand to include the surviving spouses of federal first responders, like FBI agents or U.S. Marshalls.

The other bills (HJR 159 and HB 161) would expand another property tax break for low-income seniors who have lived in their homes for many years. These bills would expand that property tax break to cover more seniors.

As the ranking member of the Ways & Means Committee, I was happy to support both of these tax breaks, which directly benefit Floridians who need our support.

But everyone should be aware: Ron DeSantis and some legislators are also working behind the scenes on much bigger tax breaks for giant corporations. You can bet that I’ll be there to fight hard against those once they finally show up in public.

Watch the House Ways & Means Committee here.

In the Infrastructure Strategies Committee, we got a briefing from the Florida Department of Transportation on the agency’s environment policies and processes.

 This includes things like building wildlife crossing overpasses and incorporating natural shoreline buffers around bridges and causeways. But it also means thinking intentionally about and adapting proactively to the impact of rising sea levels, which we know are climbing rapidly because of climate change.

Hardening our infrastructure against the impacts of climate change is obviously important. But we as a state should also be doing far more to combat the underlying causes of climate change, by reducing our reliance on fossil fuels and doing more to foster the spread of renewable sources of energy.

Watch the Infrastructure Strategies Committee meeting here.

And in the Select Committee on Hurricane Resiliency & Recovery, we heard another series of presentations.

Among the folks we heard from this week were the Florida Housing Finance Corporation, which administers several hurricane-assistance housing programs, and the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Committee. We also discussed the use, and environmental impacts, of seawalls. 

We’ve heard a lot of testimony in this committee over the past month. My hope is that we’ll turn some of what we’ve learned into meaningful policy soon. 

Watch the Select Committee on Hurricane Resiliency & Recovery meeting here.

A shout-out to my super hip twin!

Lots of people know my twin sister, Ida, is an amazing, tireless and tender warrior for social and economic justice in Florida. 

But did you know she’s also a super hip music writer for our local alt weekly newspaper, too? 

Check out here latest piece, about punk rockers Rise Against, here.

Meetings from Orlando to Tallahassee and back

As always, we had another full slate of meetings and events, both in Tallahassee and back home in the district. Here’s just a sampling: