For six years, Governor Ron Desantis de Florida could count on Republican state legislators who incline their will, giving rapid approval to their ambitious legislative priorities with just a smell of protest.
Those days seem to have finished.
On Monday, in a remarkable sequence of events in the State Capitol in Tallahassee, Republican Legislative Legislatives affirmed their independence. They rejected Mr. Desantis for a special session on illegal immigration, they were called one of theirs and, in an extremely rare movement, he annulled one of his budget vetoes.
They even pointed to a public audience on their way.
“I think that special sessions should be used in moderation and should not be acrobatics to generate headlines,” said Daniel Pérez, the new speaker of the house, from the floor of the camera.
Mr. Pérez and Ben Albritton, the new president of the Senate, presented their own immigration bill, characterizing it as a way of supporting President Trump in illegal immigration, as well as Mr. Desantis when he made his own proposals.
But the reproach of Mr. Desantis legislators was not really about the immigration policy. The incoming leaders, who talked simultaneously to their respective cameras, were organizing a dramatic break with a governor who, from the moment he assumed the position in 2019, had methodically expanded his executive powers, often, apparently, at the expense of a Flexible Legislature
“Sometimes, leadership is not about being in front of a subject,” Albritton said on the Senate’s floor. “It really is to follow the leader in which you trust. I trust President Trump. And I trust the Florida Police. “
Mr. Pérez and Mr. Albritton said they would not impose criminal sanctions to local police officers who did not help with the federal immigration application, as Mr. Desantis had wanted. Nor did they accept to expand a Desantis program that in 2022 paid to recruit and fly several dozen undocumented immigrants to Martha’s Vineyard, in Massachusetts.
The leaders said they would set aside $ 500 million for local agencies to help with the application of immigration (as Mr. Desantis had requested), certain criminal sanctions would increase (although not as many as Mr. Desantis wanted) and create a New state office to coordinate application efforts (but not under the power of Mr. Desantis).
The leaders of Mr. Desantis’s own party had not dared to challenge him so directly since his actions at the beginning of the Coronavirus pandemic in 2020 made the governor a national republican hero. Mr. Desantis took advantage of his new position to boost the long -range proposals that made Florida a right -wing policy laboratory, and won re -election in a defeat in 2022. He announced that he was running for president.
But at the beginning of last year, Mr. Desantis’s campaign failed when Trump came forward. Mr. Desantis did not advance so great during the legislative spring session. His relationship once closed with Trump was tense.
The governor successfully defeated a couple of state voting initiatives in November that would have guaranteed the rights of abortion and legalized marijuana in Florida. But he is limited to term after 2026, and jockeing to happen it has begun.
On Monday, the new legislative leaders, who will preside over their cameras until the end of Mr. Desantis, seemed to declare their independence from a governor office that has wielded so much power that the legislative sessions have become a large rubber stamps predictable.
Legislators will still focus on illegal immigration this week, as Mr. Desantis had wanted. But Republican leaders dismissed many of the policies proposed by the governor, and rejected, at least for now, other changes that Mr. Desantis was looking for, such as making citizens obtain constitutional amendments on the ballot.
Proposals like that can wait until the regular session in March, said Mr. Pérez, the president of the Chamber. The special session is expected to end on Tuesday night, he added.
Among other things, Mr. Pérez called several of the immigration proposals of the “bureaucratic” governor.
The use of such blunt language against Mr. Desantis or his priorities had been very unusual among the Republicans of Florida, who have supermayorities in the chamber and the Senate. Only privately they complained in recent years about Mr. Desantis’s suffocating approach.
But on Monday, the Chamber and the Senate unanimously annulled some of its budget veins, restoring around $ 57 million for legislative operating expenses. The last time the Legislature annulled a Governor of Florida It seems to have been in 2010.
In response to Monday’s developments, Mr. Desantis wrote in x He was happy that the legislators “were finally agreed to enter and do their job”, two weeks after he asked for a special session. But he called his proposed bill “substantially weaker” of what he had wanted.
“The bill of the Legislature is a bait and switch tactics that tries to create the illusion of illegal immigration that has energetic measures, when it does something less,” wrote Mr. Desantis. “It is an insult to name such a weak bill after President Trump, which has been so strong on this issue.”
Shortly after Mr. Desantis called the special session, Republican leaders said the measure was premature, the first idea that they intended to go back to the governor. Mr. Desantis then dedicated several public appearances throughout the State to embarrass legislators, suggesting that they were typical politicians who campaigned on difficult issues, but then preferred not to legislate on them.
“You can see me, how, a dog that has you in the ankle of immigration,” Mr. Desantis told reporters last week, adding that he would not only let the problem go.
Mr. Pérez said the issue of immigration became relevant to the legislature once Trump assumed the position and signed a series of executive orders on the federal immigration policy. The bill that state representatives will consider between Monday and Tuesday is entitled “to address and reform the Illegal Migration Policy Law”, that is, Trump’s law.
The bill would identify and finance new detention spaces for unauthorized immigrants and appoint the Florida Agricultural Commissioner, Wilton Simpson, as the State Immigration Director. Giving that title to Mr. Simpson, which is not close to Mr. Desantis, was seen as another challenge for the governor. In X, Mr. Desantis described the unconstitutional proposal.
Mr. Desantis and Republican legislative leaders want to stop allowing registration rates in the state for students who were illegally taken to Florida as children. That policy has been in force since 2014, when it was defended by Jeanette M. Núñez, who was then a state representative of Miami. Now he is the lieutenant governor of Mr. Desantis.
Mrs. Núñez He said in x During the weekend, that “our country looks very different today than what he did then.”
“Florida will not encourage illegal immigration through this law or any other,” he wrote.
State representative Fentrice Driskell of Tampa, the leader of the Democratic minority of the House of Representatives, told journalists that Mr. Desantis and republican leaders did not disagree with politics.
But, he added, it favors a stronger separation of powers: “It is healthy, that reject the governor.”
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