We’ve got a three-way standoff when it comes to cost-saving proposals for Floridians, and with less than three weeks to go until Session ends, it’s still not clear what package will emerge.

First, Gov. Ron DeSantis proposed eliminating property taxes. Logistical hurdles aside (there is no state property tax, only local governments establish them, and it’s unclear how to make up all of the revenue lost here), there are some flaws to this path.

Yes, it would bring significant relief to Florida property owners who have been hit hard in recent years by surging insurance costs. And for those who bought high as prices propelled through the roof, it would give some reassurance as the market has begun to cool.

But not everyone owns property. So if we’re trying to provide relief for increasing costs — from housing, to inflation, to grocery prices — what relief does this bring to renters?

The argument from the Governor and other proponents is that landlords would get the benefit of a lower property tax, and they would pass those savings to consumers.

Yes, landlords, that notoriously generous lot.

See, markets aren’t set strictly by the basic needs of producers and owners to make a profit. No, the market is largely set by the price someone is willing to pay. And rent has already skyrocketed. Consider us skeptical that some drop to pre-COVID prices would ensue under this plan.

The most likely benefit is, with expenses for owners dropping, that would slow or halt outright the increase in rent. That’s something, but it wouldn’t necessarily provide immediate relief.

Enter House Speaker Daniel Perez, who favors shaving 3/4 of a percentage point off of Florida’s 6% sales tax, dropping it to 5.25%.

Everyone can benefit here, and this is more direct relief to lower income Floridians, whose budgets are consumed by a larger share of need-to-but items than those of the state’s richest residents.

Ah, but another snag. This would also benefit out-of-staters and foreign tourists visiting the state. It’s fun bilking them to beef up the state’s coffers! So again, some good, some bad.

Senate President Ben Albritton believes he has found a middle ground, eliminating sales tax entirely, but only for clothing and footwear under $75.

Again, that’s targeted to Floridians who need financial help. And it’s also focused on items that residents are far more likely to buy than tourists. Sure, you still have tourists coming in to pockets of the state to shop for these goods. But no plan is perfect.

Albritton is also offering up a property tax ballot initiative, where Floridians in 2026 might be offered the chance to weigh in on the issue as well.

Do any of these plans go through as is? Is some sort of hybrid deal in the works? All the more reason to keep an eye on Florida Politics during Session’s closing stretch. We’ll keep you posted.

Now, it’s onto our weekly game of winners and losers.

Winners

Honorable mention: Cory Mills’ consultants. When the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) released its list of Republican-held seats in Florida the group would target in 2026, some familiar names made the list.

Republican U.S. Reps. Anna Paulina Luna and María Elvira Salazar were both there. That’s not surprising, as they’ve been targeted by Democrats in the past. Both were on last cycle’s list and were likely already prepping for another expensive election cycle up ahead.

But the third name on that list raised some eyebrows: Mills, who has won his last two General Election contests by a combined 30 percentage points.

That’s not to say Mills doesn’t have some serious issues, as we’ve spotlighted. And with Democrats putting in double-digit overperformances in two Special Elections earlier this month, maybe there’s a Hail Mary path here.

Plus, Mills has promised to run for Senate, so if this seat is open, that only helps Democrats’ chances.

But if Mills just decides to stay put in the House, make no mistake: He’s the favorite here, even with Democratic attention and money being poured into this contest.

All that means is that Mills’ consultants just earned themselves a nice payday now that they’ll be in a contested race. Get your invoices ready.

Almost (but not quite) the biggest winner: Pensacola legislative delegation. This week saw two Republican House members from this region at the center of attention.

Republican Rep. Alex Andrade may be taking on the mantle of the top House Republican critic of the Governor.

Earlier this month, Andrade was hitting the DeSantis administration over word that the Agency for Health Care Administration (AHCA) misallocated $160 million the Legislature had sent the agency to settle a Medicaid funding discrepancy with the federal government. That got attention as AHCA asked the Legislature this year for $160 million more to cover the expense.

This week, Andrade took the lead on criticizing a $10 million donation to Hope Florida, First Lady Casey DeSantis’ main project during her husband’s tenure. We’ll have more on that in a bit, but Andrade grilled new AHCA Secretary Shevaun Harris on the allocation and has argued that it could be illegal.

That’s tough talk for an administration led by a fellow Republican.

As for Salzman, she took aim at one of our favorite targets, perennially failing congressional candidate Anthony Sabatini.

After getting run out of the Legislature, Sabatini has played the role of internet edgelord begging for Donald Trump’s attention as he ran for Congress in two different districts (and teased a run in a third). But Trump has consistently backed Sabatini opponents (including Mills), meaning Sabatini has now tried to throw his lot in with DeSantis amid an intrastate schism among the GOP.

That hasn’t played well with legislative Republicans who already loathe Sabatini and are exercising more independence from the Governor.

Sabatini took aim at Salzman as she pushed for more transparency regarding the Governor’s university Board appointments.

Sabatini pulled out the only trick he has: using insults that 12-year-olds would consider savage while playing Xbox online. He called Salzman “braindead,” a “lying schmuck,” “servile stooge” … you get the picture.

Salzman fought back on social media, arguing her critics were deliberately gaslighting about the bill’s contents. But she added an extra shot at Sabatini, writing on social media, “Come say that to my face you coward, I’ll bring the step stool,” taking a shot at Sabatini’s unfortunately diminutive stature.

She followed that up with a trolling effort straight from the House floor, posting a picture of her holding a stool and tagging Sabatini.

We’re sure Sabatini will try really hard to cook up some more cringe-inducing insults. But with voters repeatedly rejecting him, is anyone even listening?

The biggest winner: Gator Nation. Congratulations to the national champions.

The University of Florida won its third national championship in men’s college basketball. That gives UF three titles each in men’s basketball and football, joining an exclusive club with esteemed collegiate powerhouses … well, nobody. UF is the only school in the country to accomplish that feat.

This season will be marked by UF, time and again, coming through in big games. You could argue Duke had more talent or other teams had more consistency. But with juggernauts Alabama and Auburn in the same conference, UF showed up and won the SEC tournament, then followed through with six straight wins in the NCAA Tournament.

Walter Clayton Jr. has cemented his status as a Gator legend, and alumni everywhere got to go along for yet another championship ride.

Even Secretary of State Marco Rubio, a Gator himself, was doing the Gator chomp during a Cabinet meeting this week. Hard to top that in terms of putting your brand on the map.

Losers

Dishonorable mention: Gary Farmer. We covered Farmer’s absurdly unprofessional comments from the bench late last year, which landed him a reassignment from the Broward Circuit criminal division to its civil court. Now, he may be suspended from the bench entirely.

The Florida Supreme Court is now weighing a recommendation from the Florida Judicial Qualifications Commission Investigative Panel that Farmer be suspended after he didn’t even show up to a hearing about those remarks.

A reminder, Farmer joked from the bench about gay sex and told a defendant who had fathered children from multiple mothers not to get his new Public Defender pregnant. Per the newest review, Farmer also repeatedly misconstrued or misunderstood legal precedent or his authority as a Judge.

“(Many) of the so-called jokes were actually demeaning and potentially humiliating comments aimed at individual attorneys, court staff, litigants, and others over whom Judge Farmer held significant authority,” JQC General Counsel Alex John Williams said.

“Moreover, many of his comments … could be viewed as discriminatory, or evincing a bias for or against parties, or controversies already in front … or likely to come before him.”

As we said in September, this Judge position was a solid place for Farmer to land after his unceremonious exit from the Legislature. But apparently he can’t keep his mouth shut enough to stay out of trouble even there.

Now, the Florida Supreme Court will have a final say about his future. Per POLITICO’s Gary Fineout, Farmer has until April 21 to tell the court why he shouldn’t be suspended.

Almost (but not quite) the biggest loser: Scott Yenor. Yenor, rightfully, is out as Chair of the University of West Florida’s (UWF) Board of Trustees.

But for the Governor’s stubborn refusal to ever admit he’s wrong, Yenor should have been gone much earlier. He never should have been there in the first place.

Yenor has a record of making clearly misogynistic comments that DeSantis tried to downplay. After those remarks were reported, new stories came out about Yenor’s anti-Jewish comments, which garnered Yenor another round of pushback.

Yet DeSantis sat on his hands, possibly hoping the storm would blow over. Only when it came time to put Yenor’s name up for confirmation in the Senate did Yenor finally see the writing on the wall and step aside.

Team DeSantis should have found these disqualifying remarks while vetting Yenor. That they didn’t is a failure. If they did find them, and didn’t care, then it’s a failure of judgment.

Yes, we understand with Republicans running roughshod electorally over Florida, that they’ve begun to push the state’s education institutions rightward. But can that be accomplished without nominating people who hold such outright inflammatory views such as Yenor’s?

This nomination was so bad, it’s even causing headaches for other Board nominees still before the Senate. If that’s not a crystal clear sign Yenor should have never come near this position, we don’t know what is.

The biggest loser: Casey DeSantis, Hope Florida. We don’t have a habit of placing the First Lady on our loser’s list. She’s not an elected, and no one would fault her for sticking by her firebrand husband. And until the drip, drip, drip of controversy surrounding Hope Florida started coming out, we mostly felt that Casey DeSantis had done good, uncontroversial work in the role.

But as our publisher, Peter Schorsch, said this week, it’s looking increasingly likely that the First Lady’s 2026 campaign is dead before it began.

Byron Donalds’ dominance early on in this contest is reason enough to wonder if DeSantis has the juice to secure the Republican nomination. Now, her opponents might have a cudgel with which to lower her standing further.

As we said above, even Republicans are questioning whether that $10 million contribution to Hope Florida from Centene as part of a Medicaid settlement was even legal. The Governor, of course, is defending it as a media hit job. But that framing falls flat when members of your own party are sounding alarms.

And that’s especially true given the latest in the saga to break Friday: that a pot of money moved from Hope Florida to organizations that then turned around and put up big funding to the Governor’s anti-recreational pot push last cycle.

Nothing to see here!

As we said earlier this week, what had been known was just “the tip of the iceberg” and part of a “ticking time bomb.”

Tick, tick, tick.

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The next stop for bills promoting the “Gulf of America” name is Gov. Ron DeSantis’ desk.

DeSantis was the first state official to use the new name in an executive order declaring a state of emergency over a Winter storm last month. That order said the inclement weather was headed to Florida across the “Gulf of America.”

On Friday, he received the bills that would change 92 statutory references in Florida law to refer to the body of water along Florida’s west coast as the new name (HB 575) and put “Gulf of America” in K-12 instructional materials (HB 549).

The Senate substituted the House bills that had passed earlier this month for its own product.

Republican Sen. Nick DiCeglie, who sponsored the Senate version of the reviser bill, said the “Gulf of America is patriotic” and that the “long overdue” bill “is about patriotism.”

Not everyone was sold.

Democratic Sen. Lori Berman said that these bills “divert attention and resources from urgent issues that affect the lives of all Floridians.”

DiCeglie said that he and other legislators could “walk and chew gum at the same time” ahead of the 28-9 vote for the reviser bill.

Republican Sen. Joe Gruters, who carried the Senate version of the bill requiring new instructional materials as they come up for replacement to reflect the “Gulf of America” name, said the bill would align Florida with President Donald Trump’s executive order before the 28-9 vote for his measure.

Leadership backs the bills.

“Ever since President Trump entered the Oval Office, he has fought for America first policies that honor our country’s greatness,” said Senate President Ben Albritton. “Mr. President, I’m proud to say that the Florida Senate stands with you in the fight to recognize the Gulf of America and celebrate American exceptionalism.”

Tallahassee Republicans have quickly embraced the new name for the body of water that was called the Gulf of Mexico without controversy until earlier this year.

Agriculture Commissioner Wilton Simpson is backing the President’s preference regarding government documents, pushing for changes on behalf of the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services.

Simpson’s goal is to rename the body of water as the Gulf of America “as quickly as possible … in all department administrative rules, forms, maps, and resources.”

While there’s more controversy outside Tallahassee (The Associated Press and Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum haven’t accepted the Gulf of America designation), that’s not germane to the legislative process in the Sunshine State.

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Anna Paulina Luna was at her Florida home in fall 2023, caring for her newborn son and turning over a question in her mind as a member of Congress:

“How do I change this?”

Luna, then a first-time mom and first-term lawmaker, could no longer fly to Washington to cast votes in the U.S. House, a crucial part of the job, due to complications from childbirth — which she blamed at least partially on her hectic schedule, having flown to and from the capital during most of her pregnancy.

Luna began reading House rules and found what seemed like a simple solution: allowing proxy voting for new moms.

What Luna considered a minor rule change, affecting just a few — only about a dozen women had given birth while serving in Congress — over time escalated into a standoff against her own Republican leadership and her allies in the hard-right Freedom Caucus.

In a matter of months, it became a highly charged debate that crossed party lines, united a younger generation of lawmakers and raised fresh questions about how a more than 200-year-old institution accommodates working parents in the 21st century. The conflict turned on weighty history and thorny procedures, highlighting the difficulties of abiding by documents and rules written long before air travel and Zoom screens — and long before women served in Congress.

“When the Constitution was written, this was not really a topic,” Luna said.

How GOP leaders came to loathe proxy voting
When Luna was about to become a new mom, planning for the big change ahead, she asked then-Speaker Kevin McCarthy how she would be able to vote in the days after giving birth. That was 2023, and she didn’t realize she was stepping on a political landmine.

At the start of the pandemic, more than two years before Luna was elected, Democrats in the majority had created a proxy voting system to contain COVID-19 and avoid overcrowding in the chamber.

McCarthy had called the practice “a dereliction of duty,” an excuse for members to skip out on work, and the resolution creating the system passed without a single Republican vote.

When Republicans won the House majority in 2022, McCarthy abandoned proxy voting — and for a time, there was no talk of bringing it back.

Rep. Luna returns and begins her push
Once Luna was cleared to fly and returned to Washington, she kept the proxy voting proposal to herself. It wasn’t the right time: The House was in turmoil, having just ousted McCarthy from the speaker’s job and choosing Rep. Mike Johnson of Louisiana as his replacement.

But a few months later, Luna made her move.

She introduced a bill in January 2024 that would allow a mother to designate a proxy for six weeks, but by autumn, her legislation had gone nowhere, languishing in committee. Luna decided to launch a discharge petition — a workaround that allows legislation with 218 supporters to force a vote on the House floor. But she got just a handful of signatures.

“I went through every and exhausted every avenue,” Luna said.

Then she turned to Democrats, drafting a new proposal this year with Reps. Brittany Pettersen of Colorado and Sara Jacobs of California that would extend proxy voting to not just moms but all new parents for 12 weeks, double the time Luna had initially proposed.

Pettersen, who was previously the first member of the Colorado legislature to give birth and take leave, said she “came to Congress wanting to work on this.”

In a matter of months, Republican Rep. Mike Lawler of New York, a father to two young girls, became the 218th member to sign the discharge petition, the tally needed to force a vote.

But only a dozen signatures came from Republicans.

A standoff with the GOP leaders and the House Freedom Caucus
Pushback was fierce, from members of the Freedom Caucus and from the speaker himself. Johnson repeatedly called proxy voting “unconstitutional.” Herself among the more far-right conservatives in the House, her desk adorned with a model of President Donald Trump on Mount Rushmore, Luna resigned from the Freedom Caucus, accusing them of working against her.

Luna felt that she had done everything she could to address Johnson’s concerns. She agreed that members had abused the practice in the past, but said her proposal included “guard rails.”

Johnson tried to snuff out Luna’s discharge petition with a rare legislative maneuver, linking it to a vote that was needed to advance one of the GOP priorities, a voter ID bill.

The aggressive move angered several Republicans, including some who didn’t even support Luna’s proposal. Johnson’s gambit failed on the floor.

Johnson called the outcome “unfortunate” and reiterated the argument that proxy voting for moms was a “Pandora’s box” that would open the door for members who’d rather not show up to work. Then he sent lawmakers home for the week.

That’s when Luna had a talk with Trump.

“I think she’s great, Anna,” Trump said aboard Air Force One.

The president recalled that he had spoken to her the previous day. When it came to proxy voting, Trump wondered why the idea was “controversial.”

Johnson sprang into action and quickly posted on social media that he had also spoken with Trump, quoting him saying, “Mike, you have my proxy on proxy voting.”

Meanwhile, a political storm was brewing against Luna. Right-wing influencers flooded Twitter to accuse Luna of holding up Trump’s agenda as House floor action stalled. She faced attacks from fellow Republicans.

Luna reaches a deal — to mixed reviews
On a Sunday afternoon this month, Luna announced that she and leadership had reached an agreement.

They would resurrect a well-worn congressional procedure that “pairs” two members of Congress who plan to vote on opposite sides of an issue, canceling out their votes — a way to accommodate the absent member.

“If we truly want a pro-family Congress, these are the changes that need to happen,” Luna posted on X.

The plan was quickly tucked into an upcoming procedural vote. This time, it succeeded.

Reviews were mixed.

Rep. Jeff Van Drew called the solution “bizarre” and said it was unlikely any member would voluntarily participate, essentially nulling their own vote, when the margins were so narrow in Congress.

But GOP Rep. Chip Roy of Texas, a member of the Freedom Caucus who opposes all proxy voting, said he would consider participating in pairing.

“We want to make it to where people can, you know, deal with whatever life curveballs they get,” Roy said.

Not everyone, though, is satisfied.

The day that Congress voted on vote-pairing, Pettersen stood outside the House chamber, cradling her son in her arms. “What Republican would be willing to vote present for me this week?” she asked. “Nobody.”

___

Republished with permission of the Associated Press.

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