‘Bad blood’: Florida Republicans defy DeSantis

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is facing resistance to some of his biggest election-year plans from an unlikely source: His own Republican colleagues in the state Senate.

The GOP-controlled Florida Senate and its Republican president, Wilton Simpson, bucked DeSantis recently on a series of high-profile priorities for the governor. They have refused to go along with DeSantis’ proposed congressional maps, resisted fulfilling his $100 billion-plus state budget and rejected his attempts to reign in tech and social media companies.

In a sign of how personal the clash has become, Republicans haven’t agreed to fund a $100 million request from the governor’s wife for cancer research. DeSantis’ wife, Casey, was diagnosed with breast cancer last year and recently completed chemotherapy.

According to more than a dozen state lawmakers, members of the governor’s administration and Florida political operatives, the conflicts stem from DeSantis using hard-nosed tactics to strong-arm the Legislature, disagreements between lawmakers and the governor’s new chief of staff and DeSantis’ lobbying campaign to pressure Simpson to pass a long-stalled anti-union bill. That effort peaked after conservative groups contacted by the governor’s team bought $75,000 in ads against Simpson in his own district.

“It’s really not hard to see,” said one Republican senator who was granted anonymity to speak freely. “There is bad blood between [Simpson and DeSantis] right now. It will likely work itself out in the end, but right now they are not in a good place.”

The feuds are all the more surprising because the GOP-controlled Legislature has consistently helped pass DeSantis’ legislative priorities, and many expected this year would be no different as the governor runs for reelection this November. DeSantis' first three years as governor were marked by few headwinds from Republican leadership eager to hand him legislative wins and fuel a national rise that has him on the short list of possible 2024 presidential hopefuls. And while there is still time for the two sides to hammer out differences, time is growing short with just three weeks left in the state’s 2022 legislative session.

DeSantis’ office would not respond to questions about tensions with the Senate, even as it lobbied conservative groups to attack Simpson and released public statements openly critical of the Senate president’s newly emerging budget priorities.

“The Governor’s Office continues to work in close cooperation with the Legislature and we look forward to having a successful session with their partnership,” said Taryn Fenske, the governor’s communications director, when asked about the conflicts.

Antagonistic tactics

Much of the tension has been behind the scenes, but increasingly over the past week the disagreements have spilled out into public view. The Florida Legislature has a long-standing tradition of downplaying intra-party rifts and few lawmakers are willing to discuss the friction publicly.

But one former Republican Senate president said that, while there have been few disagreements between the Legislature and the governor in recent years, it’s “quite customary by historical standards” to have some discord.

“Our state is too diverse and the issues are too complex to expect that every Republican or Democrat is going to concur with their party on every issue,” former Florida Senate President Tom Lee, who served on and off in the Senate for more than two decades, said in an interview. “While some may fantasize about the impacts of such debate on party unity, as long as the debate remains about policy and is respectful, I think it’s healthy for the party and Floridians.”

By several accounts, DeSantis’ most direct attack came in early January, when his top staffers began lobbying conservative groups to hit Simpson over his opposition to the so-called Paycheck Protection Act. That legislation would ban the automatic deduction of union dues from an employee’s paycheck. Florida House lawmakers have approved the proposal for years, but the Senate often rejects it. This year, DeSantis tried to use his sway with conservative groups to pressure Simpson.

DeSantis’ chief of staff, James Uthmeier, an outsider conservative attorney who’s clashed with Senate negotiators, and Stephanie Kopelousos, the governor’s legislative affairs director, started calling deep-pocketed national conservative groups shortly after the January 10 start of the legislative session asking them to make some “noise” to get the bill heard by Simpson, said a person who was also on one of the calls. That person declined to speak on the record for fear of reprisals from the governor and Simpson.

Simpson, who declined to comment for this story, was unaware the governor’s office was making the calls.

“They want this bill and reached out to stakeholders asking that they make a lot of noise in hopes the bill would get up,” the person said.

The following week, Club for Growth announced it was spending $75,000 on TV and digital ads and mailers in Simpson’s central Florida district asking voters to call him and urge the Senate to “hear the bill now.” Club for Growth’s vice president of government affairs is Scott Parkinson, who served as DeSantis’ chief of staff when he was in Congress.

“Club for Growth supports the House and Gov. DeSantis in moving the Paycheck Protection bill, and we hope Senator Simpson will, too,” said Joe Kildea, the group’s vice president of communications.

The ads did little more than annoy Simpson, who last week told reporters that the bill’s chances of passing his chamber this session is “pretty bleak at this point.”

“It’s the same for everyone else in the room,” Simpson said when asked about the Club for Growth ads. “Just spell my name right.”

DeSantis’ aggressive style, though, is increasingly irritating veterans of Florida’s legislative process, which is accustomed to mutually-respectable deal-making and shared victories rather than the win-at-all-cost mentality that plays well in conservative political circles — corners of which hold up DeSantis as “America’s governor” and a potential heir apparent to Donald Trump.

The pivot to antagonistic tactics was punctuated by DeSantis elevating Uthmeier to chief of staff. Uthmeier had previously served as DeSantis’ top attorney helming the administration’s legal strategy as it attempted to use the courts to achieve wins in culture war issues like fighting over pandemic-era vaccine and mask mandates.

“It appears the governor has lost a lot of institutional knowledge about the process when he got his new chief of staff,” said one veteran Republican operative. “His former chiefs of staff understood the legislative process. It feels like James Uthmeier does not understand that as much and thinks everyone is on his pace.”

Those types of internal gripes have been quietly happening for weeks. But they burst out publicly last week when the Senate tied a controversial water bill championed by Simpson to a huge chunk of the Senate’s budget. The issue immediately became a point of contention with DeSantis, who has policy and political motivations to oppose the measure because it is supported by the state’s powerful sugar industry, a longtime political foe of DeSantis’ going back to his three terms in Congress.

The underlying bill originally required the South Florida Water Management District, whose board is appointed by DeSantis, to certify that recommendations to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers do not reduce the water supply available to existing users. This means that they would guarantee agriculture interests like sugar companies get the water they need from Lake Okeechobee even when those water levels are low.

DeSantis joined opponents, publicly arguing the proposal could setback Everglades restoration efforts. He was also critical because the issue was injected late in the process, and his administration was not part of negotiations.

“Rather than advancing legislation seeking to affect a major change in policy, [the bill] is being rammed through the budget process, short-circuiting public engagement and leaving affected agencies in the dark,” DeSantis said last week.

Hours later, Simpson swiped back, issuing his own statement backing the plan, which Senate supporters have said is being misunderstood by opponents.

“Our Senate bill does not in any way reverse or hinder Everglades restoration and is entirely consistent with current policy,” Simpson said in his statement. “In fact, the bill protects existing state funding for the [Everglades Agricultural Area] Reservoir and cements into state law current successful water management practices that Joe Biden’s federal government is looking to change.”

The Senate late Wednesday night filed an amendment that made some concessions to DeSantis’ office, a move state Sen. Ben Albritton, a Republican who writes the chamber’s environmental budget, said comes even as he maintains there has been “purposeful misinformation” surrounding the bill.

Fenske, however, said there is “no current ‘deal’” even after the amendment was filed, signaling the two sides are not yet on the same page.

“We just received [the amendment] and are reviewing,” she said. “We remain committed to protecting the Everglades.”

The mid-legislative session public spat between two of the state’s most powerful Republicans drew immediate attention because such displays have been so rare during DeSantis’ first few years in office.

“When you have a strong leadership team, there are some healthy discussions on differing priorities, but the ability of the governor, Senate president, and speaker to collaborate is unprecedented,” said state Sen. Dennis Baxley, an Ocala Republican who chairs the Senate Ethics and Elections Commission, which handles confirmation hearings for DeSantis appointees.

The feud comes ahead of a big election cycle that will see DeSantis run for re-election and Simpson make a statewide bid for agriculture commissioner. Trump has endorsed Simpson, but the Senate president has not yet gotten the blessing of DeSantis, who is wildly popular with the GOP base. A Mason-Dixon poll released Tuesday had DeSantis’ approval rating at 53 percent, a number that jumped to an eye-popping 89 percent with Republicans.

More than policy fights

The water policy fight has become a major flash point between the two sides. But the Senate’s budget more broadly ignores several of DeSantis’ top-tier priorities.

Both the Florida House and Senate have not yet decided how to dole out an expected $3.5 billion in federal pandemic money from the Biden administration. That leaves in limbo top DeSantis priorities like a $1 billion gas tax cut and huge teacher and law enforcement pay increases and bonuses. The House, so far, does not fund many of the governor’s priorities but it has created a $2 billion fund the governor could use to offset costs related to price inflation. Inflation has become a big point of political emphasis for Republicans as the Biden administration struggles to rein in increasing costs.

The governor on Tuesday signaled he was more in line with the House’s budget plan, praising that chamber for trying to punish school districts that defied his ban on mask mandates for students. He publicly thanked House Speaker Chris Sprowls and the chamber’s top education budget writer, state GOP Rep. Randy Fine, by name.

But DeSantis’ has not yet extended a similar public olive branch to the Senate as the end of session fast approaches with huge budget and policy priorities left unresolved.

“The relationship is clearly strained. For years, the Senate has leveraged the governor’s office, but they underestimate this governor’s power,” said one GOP consultant who has worked with both sides. “He can’t be leveraged and now Senate Leadership finds themselves in a weird position because DeSantis holds the cards.”

Outside of traditional policy fights, DeSantis and senators have also been at odds over the once-a-decade redistricting process. The Senate approved a congressional map that DeSantis and many outside Republican groups did not view as aggressive and advantageous enough for the GOP. As a result, the governor’s office took the unprecedented step of drafting its own congressional map, a move that irked some legislative leaders who are more accustomed to leading the redistricting process.

The Senate ignored DeSantis’ map, in part because it would break up Rep. Al Lawson’s (D-Fla.) 5th Congressional District, a north Florida seat that has long allowed Black residents to elect a candidate of their choosing. In what also amounts to a high-profile loss for the governor, the conservative-leaning Florida Supreme Court last week denied his request for an opinion about whether he could break up the seat.

Simpson, unprompted, weighed in on the issue when asked by reporters how he would describe his relationship with DeSantis.

“I think it is very strong. I think the governor did a great job leading us through pandemic,” Simpson began. “Now we are in session, and I think it’s healthy to have debates in all the chambers, we have a Senate House and governor's office.”

“The judiciary did its part today,” Simpson added.