Dear Friend,

This is it.

We’re about to head into the ninth and final week of the 60-day legislative session.

There are so many important issues up in the air right now – from attempts to roll back child-labor laws and reduce wages for working Floridians to continued attacks on academic freedom and the criminalization of homelessness.

We spent all of last week on the floor debating those issues and more, as Tallahassee Republican leaders try to get bills into position for final passage. We’re still fighting every step of the way, though, offering amendment after amendment that try to improve bad bills.

And here’s the encouraging news: Some of this pressure is working. Just last week, for instance, a dangerous bill stalled that would have established a fetal personhood law in Florida – the same kind of law that judges in Alabama recently used to stop women from undergoing in vitro fertility treatments.

Even this late in session, your voice still matters. So make sure to keep reaching out to your representatives and senators and let them know what you think about many of the bills whose fates will be decided over the next five days.

You’ll find updates on many of those bills in our Week 8 recap below. As always, if you aren’t already, please make sure to connect us with on social media channels like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube.

We use those channels to provide lots of information and updates in real-time. And things move very fast during the final week of session.

Onward,

Rep. Eskamani

Criminalizing homeless

With session getting so close to the end, we basically spent the entire week on the floor passing bills – including a bunch of really bad ones.

Let’s start with with House Bill 1365, which would basically make it illegal for homeless people to sleep on public property outside of secured camps set up by local governments.

It’s an implicit criminalization of homelessness that’s being supported by a right-wing think tank founded by a tech billionaire in Texas. The bill passed on an 82-26 vote. You can see how every member of the House voted by clicking here.

I voted no. Click here to watch my debate against the bill.

Before the bill passed, I offered an amendment that would have made it better. My amendment would have removed the part of the bill making it illegal to sleep on public property, which leaving in the part of the bill giving local governments the options to set up up encampments. Republicans rejected it.

Click here to watch me present that amendment.

Erasing trans folks

The Florida House of Representatives also passed House Bill 1639, yet another attempt to target trans people for no reason other than politics.

The bill would stop transgender Floridians from being able to change the gender listed on the driver license. It would force health insurance companies to charge higher prices for policies that cover gender-affirming care. It would even require health insurers to pay for so called “conversion therapy” – a debunked and dangerous form of coercion that attempts to force queer people to hide their true identities.

The bill passed 76-35. Click here to see how every member of the House voted.

I obviously voted no. Click here to watch my debate against this bill.

There’s no similar bill in the Senate right now. But we’re going to be on guard all week for any last-minute amendments that might try to sneak this bill through that chamber, too.

Before the bill passed, I offered an amendment to remove the part of the bill requiring coverage for conversion therapy. Republicans rejected it.

Click here to watch me present that amendment – and respond to some ignorant comments by colleagues.

Slashing wages for workers

The House also passed one of the most anti-worker bills we’ve seen in years in Tallahassee: House Bill 433.

The bill would preempt local living wage ordinances, which would allow government contractors to slash pay for tens of thousands of workers in places like Miami, St. Petersburg and Orlando.

The bill would also preempt any local ordinances requiring businesses to provide workers with any kind of benefits at all, which would prevent any communities in Florida from doing things like adopting “Fair Work Week” laws.

The bill would even block local governments from setting heat protection rules that would require employers to provide things like cool drinking water and regular, shaded breaks to employees that work outside in extreme heat. This would prevent communities like Miami from passing local laws meant to help people like farmworkers, roofers and construction crews.

The bill passed 79-33. I voted no. See how everyone else in the House voted by clicking here.

I tried to change this bill completely. I offered an amendment that would have rewritten it to require the Florida Department of Commerce to develop statewide heat-protection rules – rules that take into account climate change and the impact that will have in the future on the number of high-heat days we have each year.

My amendment would have named the rewritten bill after Fernando Antonio Cuellar, a farmworker who died after working in extreme heat. His story was shared with many of us by his daughter, Laura Munoz, who delivered powerful testimony against HB 433 when it was being heard in committees.

Republicans rejected this amendment, too.

Click here to watch me present the amendment.

A couple of days before we passed HB 433, the House also passed a similar, though narrower, bill.

House Bill 705 would prevent cities and counties from requiring their construction contractors to pay higher wages or provide better benefits to their workers – even when they are building projects funded entirely with local tax dollars.

HB 705 passed 80-32. I voted no on that one, too. Click here to see how everyone else voted.

Lots of tax cuts for businesses but few for consumers

The House also passed House Bill 7073, a collection of tax cuts that everyone calls the “tax package.”

I was really pleased with our tax package last year, which included a bunch of big tax cuts for consumers – including a permanent sales tax break on diapers and adult incontinence products that I pushed really hard for.

Unfortunately, this year’s tax package is much worse. It gives the biggest tax breaks by far to businesses and corporations while cutting way back on tax cuts for consumers – including reducing the back-to-school, Freedom Summer, and disaster-preparedness tax holidays.

The one major consumer element in the House’s tax package is an insurance tax cut. But even that would only save homeowners around $20 on their insurance premiums. That’s not nearly enough.

So I voted no on this year’s tax package, which passed the House on an 88-17 vote. You can see how every member voted by clicking here.

Before the final vote, I proposed one big change: A tax reform policy known as “combined reporting,” that would close loopholes in our corporate tax that the world’s biggest companies are using to skip out on hundreds of millions of dollars a year in Florida taxes.

Most other states have already closed these loopholes, which basically let corporations use accounting gimmicks to get away with tax dodging. But Florida has refused to address the problem.

Unfortunately, Republicans refused once again to close these loopholes. But we’re going to keep trying, year after year. This issue is too important – both to raise needed revenue for investments in things like healthcare and early childhood education but also to level the playing field for small, Florida-based businesses that can’t avoid taxes simply by shifting profits to Delaware or Ireland.

Click here to watch me present the combined reporting amendment.

Pretending racism isn’t real

Though the courts have already blocked the original law because it is unconstitutional, the Florida House of Representatives doubled down yet again on the “STOP WOKE Act” by passing House Bill 1291.

This bill would extend the state’s censorship of teaching about things like systemic racism and gender inequality to educator prep programs – the courses that students take when they are studying to become teachers or school administrators.

The bill passed 81-31. Click here to see how the full House voted.

I voted no. Click here to watch my debate against the bill.

Going backwards on gun safety

The House also passed House Bill 1223, which would lower the legal age to buy a gun in Florida from 21 to 18.

This bill would do a major – and bipartisan – gun-safety reform that Gov. Rick Scott and the Florida Legislature made in 2018 after the tragic mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland.

HB 1223 passed 76-35. Click here to see how everyone voted.

Pulse nightclub is in our district, and I’ve seen firsthand the devastation that gun violence has on communities. I voted no on this really dangerous bill.

Click here to watch my debate against it.

Raising insurance rates on snowbirds

Among the many bills that passed the House was one big property insurance bill – but not a good one.

House Bill 1503 would allow unregulated “surplus lines” insurance companies – which charge even higher rates than regular insurers – to take over policies from Citizens Property Insurance Corp. covering people like snow birds and other second homeowners.

This is going to lead to much higher prices for some senior citizens who spend their winters in Florida.

HB 1503 passed 81-28. I voted no. Click here to see how all members voted.

Denying IDs to immigrants

Finally, while the House hasn’t actually passed this bill yet, we did debate House Bill 1451, an expansion of last year’s anti-immigration Senate Bill 1718.

Last year’s bill prevented local governments from providing any support to nonprofit organizations that provide community IDs to undocumented people, which helps make everyone safer.

HB 1451 goes even further. It would stop cities and counties from accepting or recognizing community IDs.

I tried to amend the bill to make an exception during states of emergency. This is a safety issue, too: When a hurricane is coming and local governments provide free sandbags to help people protect their homes against flooding, they usually require people to show IDs to provide their residency.

HB 1451 would prevent anyone who relies on a community ID from being able to protect their homes – even though they pay taxes like the rest of us.

Unfortunately, Republicans rejected this amendment, too.

Click here to watch me present this amendment.

The Senate passed some problematic bills, too

The Florida Senate also spent most of its week in day-long floor sessions, where senators passed several problematic bills, too. Among them:

Senate Bill 738, which would make it much harder to hold corporate polluters accountable when their pollution makes people sick or poisons plants and wildlife. SB 738 passed on a 26-7 vote. Click here to see how every senator voted
House Bill 917, which would weaken child-labor laws and allow homebuilders to use more 16- and 17-year-old teenagers on construction sites. HB 917 passed on a 32-0 vote. Click here to see how every senator voted.
Senate Bill 1084, which would both ban the sale of lab-grown meat and prevent local governments from requiring real-estate developers to plan for electric vehicle charging stations. SB 1084 passed on a 26-10 vote. Click here to see how every senator voted.
Senate Bill 1264, which could lead to schools being forced to teach political propaganda disguised as “communist history” to kids as young as kindergarten. SB 1264 passed on a 25-7 vote. Click here to see how every senator voted.

All of these bills will still have to pass the House, so I will probably see each of them sometime in the final week of session.

A last-minute ban on gas-powered leaf blowers

Hours after the Winter Park City Commission voted to ask their voters whether they want to ban the use of gas-powered leaf blowers, Republican leaders in Tallahassee pulled a last-minute trick to prevent any ban from taking effect, no matter what local voters say.

The legislation preempting local restrictions on gas-powered blowers will be slipped into a budget-related bill, after the House and Senate agreed to the idea within a few hours last week. It’s going into the part of the budget that’s overseen in the Senate by Republican Sen. Jason Brodeur, who represents Winter Park and had already threatened before to block the city’s proposed ban.

This is the exact same trick that the Florida Legislature used last year to sneak a last-minute bill through that stopped local communities from imposing any additional limits on the use of lawn fertilizer during the summer, when heavy rains wash it into lakes where it fees algal blooms.

The budget is no place for important policy decisions like this.

And a last-minute attempt to block a rural boundary in Orange County

The Senate also snuck a last-minute amendment into a different bill that’s aimed at voters in Central Florida.

This amendment would stop voters in Orange County from deciding whether to establish a rural boundary that would limit high-density housing projects in some undeveloped areas. A potential rural boundary is an idea being considered by Orange County’s citizen-led Charter Review Commission, which will put potential charter amendments on the ballot for voters to decide. It is not finalized yet, but this amendment would potentially block a rural boundary in Orange County, It was added to Senate Bill 1420, which then passed the Senate on a 38-1 vote. Click here to see how every senator voted.

DeSantis vetoes HB 1 – but may sign a very similar bill

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis on Friday vetoed House Bill 1, which would have banned kids under 16 from social media platforms like TikTok and Instagram.

But the governor agreed to support a revised version of the social media ban that really isn’t all that much different.

Under the new proposal, which the Florida Senate will add to House Bill 3 on Monday, kids under 14 would be banned from social media platforms. Kids who are 14- or 15-year old could have social media accounts if a parent or guardian consents.

But if a court then rules the bill unconstitutional because of that parental consent provision, HB 3 would automatically become a full ban for all kids under 16 again.

This bill is going to have come back to the House before it passed.

Fetal personhood is dead in Florida…for now

In a bit of good news, Senate President Kathleen Passidomo (R-Naples) said a terrible bill that would establish fetal personhood in Florida will not pass this session.

The news came after the Alabama Supreme Court used a similar law in that state to shut down in vitro fertility treatments by declaring that frozen embryos in test tubes are children.

It’s the inevitable consequence of extremist anti-abortion and anti-reproductive freedom laws that we’re seeing passed in Republican-controlled states all around the country – including right here in Florida, where Tallahassee Republicans passed a six-week abortion ban just last year.

It’s also why Amendment 4 on this year’s ballot – which will enshrine reproductive freedom into our state constitution – is so critical.

DeSantis’ war on academic freedom continues

Lastly, the DeSantis administration continues to interfere ever more deeply in Florida’s universities.

The University of Florida – which is now run by former Republican U.S. Sen. Ben Sasse of Nebraska, who was installed in the job DeSantis and his allies – last week fired its entire diversity, equity and inclusion staff.

It’s yet another example of our governor’s attempt to turn our state universities into homogeneous, conservative indoctrination camps.

2024 Legislative Session Review from Team Anna: Week 8