Dear Friend,

The first week of the 2023 legislative session is in the books and, just like we expected, it was a tough week. 

Bullied by Gov. Ron DeSantis, Republican leaders in the Legislature are trying to ban abortions and books, strangle academic freedom in universities and force high schools to teach anti-science sexual health education, defund public schools, destroy public-sector unions and deny the very existence of LGBTQ+ Floridians. All while handing taxpayer subsidies to big companies while doing nothing to protect renters from predatory lenders, bring down the cost of property insurance or help the million-plus Florida families who are about to be kicked off their health insurance. 

But as grim as things look right now, we’re already seeing signs that your advocacy works. Tallahassee Republican leaders were already forced to delay a regressive education bill that promotes more book banning and antiquated notions of gender roles.  

All of these fights have just begun and we need to keep the pressure on! 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. 

Onward,

Rep. Anna V. Eskamani

An extreme abortion ban appears

We’ve been warning about this since before the election: Literally minutes before the session started, Republican leaders filed what would be one of the worst abortion bans in the nation. Gov. Ron DeSantis has already expressed support for it.

This legislation is extreme and dangerous: It would ban abortions after six weeks – even though most people don’t even know they are pregnant at six weeks.

It includes very narrow exceptions – exceptions that don’t actually work in real life. The majority of sexual assault survivors, for instance, don’t ever report that they are victims, let alone go through all the legal and political scrutiny that Republicans want them to before they can access an abortion. 

The reality is that this legislation (House Bill 7 and Senate Bill 300) will become an all-out abortion ban. Even the few people who discover they are pregnant in time and qualify for one of the tiny exceptions won’t be able to find a doctor – because most abortion providers will have been forced to leave the state just to stay in business.

You can read my full statement on this abortion ban here.  

All of us are going to have to work together to fight this assault on our healthcare.

Fighting to keep Floridians housed

Just one day after the session began, the Florida Senate passed its plan to build more affordable housing. 

The Senate plan (Senate Bill 102) would give more than $1 billion in public subsidies to developers who build affordable apartments. But the legislation does nothing to directly help renters. It does not grant renters a single new right or a single new protection from predatory lenders.

And it takes direct aim at the voters of Orange County by preventing any city or county in Florida from ever enacting any form of rent control. This provision is intended to kill Orange County’s rent stabilization ordinance, which passed last year with nearly 60 percent support.

My Democratic colleagues and I are fighting like hell to make this bill better. We heard the House version of the legislation (House Bill 627) last week in the House State Affairs Committee, where we proposed a series of amendments designed to provide direct help to renters – from requiring landlords to give tenants more notice before raising the rent to protecting tenants who are pregnant or the victims of domestic or sexual violence to ending Florida’s pay-to-play eviction court system.

 Unfortunately, Republicans rejected every single amendment. You can read more about each amendment here. You can also read our statements on Republicans’ refusal to consider them here. 

And you can watch the full House State Affairs Committee meeting here.

We’ll be forcing more debates and votes on these issues as session goes along. I’m also sponsoring the “Keep Floridians Housed Act” (House Bill 1407), one of the most comprehensive housing reform packages ever proposed in Florida that would directly help everyday Florida families searching desperately for a place to live or struggling to stay in the home they already have.

The Keep Floridians Housed Act has been referred to the State Affairs Committee but hasn’t been scheduled for a hearing yet. You can call or email the committee chairman – Rep. Lawrence McClure (R-Dover) – and urge him to hear the bill. Find Rep. McClure’s contact information here.

https://twitter.com/AnnaForFlorida/status/1634729812626472962?s=20

 One of the provisions in the Keep Floridians Housed Act – and also one of the amendments that Republicans rejected last week – would reduce the barriers to entry posed by security deposits, by capping security deposits at no more than one month’s rent and giving renters the right to spread the deposit out over equally monthly installments.

 Unfortunately, lobbyists for companies that profit off tenants are urging Republicans to go the other way. The Senate Judiciary Committee last week advanced a bill (Senate Bill 494) that would allow landlords to replace security deposits with unlimited, never-ending and nonrefundable fees – which might not even provide protections against damage.

Defunding public schools, injection partisan politics into School Boards, and teaching Stone Age sex-ed

Both the House and the Senate continue to rush their reckless expansion of private school vouchers through the process.

The legislation (House Bill 1 and Senate Bill 202) would create a universal voucher scheme, in which Florida taxpayers would give what are essentially $8,000 educational coupons to everyone – including multimillionaires who send their kids to expensive private academies.

And it would also let people spend these taxpayer-funded coupons at completely unregulated private schools, some of which teach false history (like humans and dinosaurs once lived together) and others that discriminate against LBGTQ+ families or kids with disabilities.

What makes this plan especially dangerous is that it would gut funding for Florida’s public schools – to the tune of $4 billion, according to the Florida Policy Institute. That’s enough money to pay the salaries 45 percent of public-school teachers in the entire state.

The result would be a grotesquely unequal system of elite private academies for the very rich – and financially crippled public schools or utterly unregulated private ones for everyone else.

Unfortunately, this is not the only attack on public education we’re seeing. Last week, the House Ethics, Elections & Open Government Subcommittee advanced a bill that Gov. Ron DeSantis wants that would inject more partisan politics into our school system.

The bill (House Joint Resolution 31) would put a constitutional amendment on the 2024 ballot that would turn traditionally nonpartisan elections of local School Boards into partisan, party-driven campaigns.

But there is some good news: We managed to slow down a regressive education bill that tries to take sex education in Florida schools back to the Stone Ages. 

The House Education Quality Subcommittee was forced to postpone a hearing on House Bill 1069, which would expand DeSantis’ book-banning campaign by allowing anyone in a county to object to school materials because they “depict or describe sexual conduct.” It bans teaching about HIV, sexually transmitted infections or any kind of sex-ed before the 6th grade. And it denies the very existence of LGBTQ people, intersex folks and even invitro fertilization treatments by claiming that “reproductive roles are binary, stable and unchangeable” – despite widespread scientific consensus –

In a time-limited, two-month legislatives session, every delay of a terrible piece of legislation is a victory.

Of course, we’re also seeing these extremist attacks on our higher education system, too. On Monday, one of my committees – the House Postsecondary Education &  Workforce Subcommittee – will hear House Bill 999, an assault on academic freedom that would exert state control over what university students can learn and allow the governor’s political appointees to get rid of individual professors they don’t like. It would even ban women and gender studies majors.

As a women and gender studies major myself, this is personal to me. Read my column about it in the Orlando Sentinel: Eskamani: DeSantis’ attempt to corrupt public schools is personal | Commentary

The DeSantis book bans are getting worse

The governor claims everyone is lying about his book bans. But why do he and his acolytes keep banning books?

The Washington Post revealed this week how DeSantis’ intentionally vague book-banning edicts are allowing a tiny minority people to force school districts to remove titles by well-known authors like Jodi Picoult, Toni Morrison and James Patterson.

Suppressing worker power

Despite overwhelming opposition for workers, a Florida Senate committee narrowly approved Gov. Ron DeSantis’ proposal to suppress public-sector workers. 

The Senate Government Oversight and Accountability voted 5-3 for the legislation (Senate Bill 256) which is an attempt to defund unions representing employees all across state and local governments – teachers, custodians, bus drivers, healthcare workers and so many more. It would also impose intentionally burdensome regulations that are solely to designed to make it harder for employees to band together and fight for better wages and working conditions.

This is ugly union-busting, pure and simple. And it comes straight from the playbook of far-right, dark-money groups funded by anti-worker billionaires like Charles Koch.

The House version of the bill (House Bill 1445) hasn’t been heard yet. But we expect it to start moving soon.

Using state influence to prop up fossil fuels and private prisons

A Republican plan to have the state of Florida interfere in private capital markets started moving forward last week, when the House Commerce Committee approved legislation that tries to punish investment managers and banks who consider the environmental and social impacts of the businesses they invest in or provide financing to.

This legislation (House Bill 3) is part of a nation-wide, right-wing attack on “emotional, social and governance” investing, or ESG. The people pushing anti-ESG like to claim they are trying to take politics out of investing. That’s not true. What they are really doing is trying to use state power prop up a handful of dying or destructive industries like oil and gas drilling and private prisons.

Lowering the standards for death sentences

Both the House and Senate are moving forward with bills to make it easier to sentence people to death.

Right now, a person can only be sentenced to death if all 12 members of a jury agree. But a bill that passed the Senate Criminal Justice Committee last week (Senate Bill 450) would lower the threshold to eight of 12 jurors.

And a bill approved by the House Criminal Justice Committee (House Bill 555) goes even further: It would not only lower the death-sentence threshold to eight of 12 jurors, it would also forbid a judge from ever rejecting the jury’s recommendation and sentencing a defendant to life in prison instead.

Denying everyday people the power to hold big corporations accountable 

Both chambers of the Legislature are also plowing ahead with Gov. Ron DeSantis’ plan to weaken corporate accountability in Florida.

The Senate Banking and Insurance Committee and the House Judiciary Committee each approved so-called “tort reform” bills (Senate Bill 236 and House Bill 837) that would make it much harder to sue any kind of insurance company at all, eliminate incentives meant to make sure insurer companies pay claims quickly and completely, and change the information that is provided to jurors in civil trials in order to suppress the size of jury awards to victims.

Civil lawsuits are one of the only ways that everyday workers and consumers have to hold big businesses accountable when they are unfair or unsafe. This is why giant corporations like Disney, Publix and State Farm have been lobbying so hard for legislation like this.

 And in case you’re wondering why this important, I would encourage you to read a new investigation published this weekend by the Washington Post that finds insurance companies are inappropriately altering and reducing claims filed in the wake of Hurricane Ian: 

Insurers slashed Hurricane Ian payouts far below damage estimates, documents and insiders reveal

Silencing dissent and helping developers pave over paradise

Some really bad, pro-developer, environmentally destructive bills have been filed this session.

The House Civil Justice Subcommittee approved one of them last week: House Bill 359, which is attempt to silence local residents and environmental groups by scaring them out of challenging comprehensive plan amendments granted for a real-estate developer.

The legislation would put anyone who sues to stop a comp plan amendment approved by a local government at risk of paying exorbitant legal fees if they lose – not only the legal fees of the local government but also of any developers who intervene in the case, too.

A good bill! Keeping our most vulnerable children safe at school

A few days before session started, I filed my seventh and final bill: House Bill 1429, which is designed to ensure special-needs children are kept safe in public schools.

The legislation would require all school districts to have School Staff Assistance for Emergencies (SAFE) Teams and that each school have elopement plans include search grids of the school, established procedures for school personnel to notify administrators if a student with disabilities elopes and to immediately begin searching; and coordinated responses plans that include announcing a “Code Gray” and immediately contacting the student’s parent. 

Special-needs kids are some of the most vulnerable folks in our families and this legislation would absolutely save lives. You can read more about it here.

My other committee meetings last week

In addition to the housing battle we had on the House State Affairs Committee, four more of my committees met last week, too.

In the House Infrastructure Committee, we approved three bills – including one (House Bill 915) that would increase funding for a statewide network of bicycle and pedestrian trails and build more trails through the “Florida Wildlife Corridor” conservation area.

Another bill (House Bill 109) would give Florida residents the first chance to reserve campsites and cabins in our state parks.

Watch the House Infrastructure Strategies Committee meeting here.

In the House Postsecondary Education & Workforce Subcommittee, we heard four bills.

Unfortunately, one of them was very bad: House Bill 931. This bill is yet another attempt to attack academic freedom and demonize the concepts of diversity and inclusion – all based on an unsupported, right-wing lie that our universities are somehow homogenous monoliths that don’t support intellectual debate. 

Among other things, it would force universities to give platforms to fringe groups potentially including anti-semites and others spewing hate speech – universities might even have to pay them to speak. 

It even speaks to pressure the Florida Student Government Association into toeing the Tallahassee line by giving the chancellor of the State University System – an unqualified former Republican elected official put into the job last year by Gov. Ron DeSantis – the power to designate an entirely new entity to be the advocacy organization for Florida students. 

I voted no, but the bill passed the committee on a 12-5 vote. 

Watch the House Postsecondary Education & Workforce Subcommittee meeting here.

In the House Transportation & Modals Subcommittee, we heard five bills. Unfortunately, one of those bills was bad, too: House Bill 1071, which would handcuff cities and counties when it comes to regulating drone-delivery companies.

Not only that, the bill would completely exempt these companies from having to comply with the Florida Building Code or the state’s fire-prevention code when building their “drone ports.”

This is a lobbyist-driven bill: It comes from a company called DroneUp that has been hired by Walmart to do drone deliveries from its stores. I voted no, but the bill advanced on a 13-3 vote.

Watch the House Transportation & Modals Subcommittee meeting here.

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

The presenters this time included the city of Mexico Beach, the small Panhandle town that took a direct hit from Category 5 Hurricane Michael in 2018, and the Seminole Gulf Railway, a small freight railroad that operates in southwest Florida, where Hurricane Ian came ashore last year.

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

Yet another full slate of meetings and events

In between all the battles in the state Capitol, we always make sure to fit in as many meetings and community events as we can, both in Tallahassee and back home in the district. Here’s a look at what we were up to last week.