Today is the day Ron DeSantis turns into a pumpkin

There’s a moment in every Cinderella story when the magic runs out. The coach reverts to a gourd, the footmen scurry back into mice, and the girl who held the whole ballroom’s attention is suddenly just another barefoot kid running down the steps. Midnight doesn’t negotiate.

Today is Ron DeSantis‘ midnight.

He’s expected to sign the state budget Monday — the last one he’ll ever sign — and the moment the ink dries, the spell breaks. Not the title; he keeps that until Jan. 5. What breaks is the thing underneath the title, the only enchantment that ever mattered in Tallahassee: leverage.

Until the ink dries, DeSantis is still holding the most powerful pen in Florida. The line-item veto is the glass slipper that fits no one else. He’s spent two terms making sure everyone in the building knows it, and this spring, he said the quiet part into a microphone.

Addressing the Federalist Society in May, DeSantis acknowledged that he strikes money for projects backed by members who cross him because, as he put it, “that helps you to be able to advance a legislative agenda.”

Translation: Behave, or your hometown’s water project dies in a red-pen stroke. The lobby corps understood. They always understood. They just had to keep understanding until he signed.

After he signs, they don’t.

For DeSantis, it was never going to be a clean exit, because nothing about this budget was clean. For the second straight year, the Legislative Session ran into overtime, the 60-day calendar blown past while the chambers argued. Last year, the fight was about tax cuts. This year, House Speaker Daniel Perez and Senate President Ben Albritton couldn’t agree on a number at all.

“We have a fundamental disagreement on what the budget should look like for the state of Florida,” Perez said. “The House believes we should spend less money; the Senate believes we should spend more money.”

The House opened at $113.6 billion, the Senate at $115 billion, and the $1.4 billion between them swallowed the Spring.

Both chambers’ tax packages collapsed under their own weight, leaving a tax-cut deal worth roughly $300 million. When the gavel finally fell around Memorial Day, lawmakers had landed on a $114.5 billion budget — the Senate passing it unanimously, the House 99-6 — and then bolted for the airport, only to be hauled back days later for a Special Session on the Governor’s property tax plan.

Through all of it, DeSantis hovered with the veto pen and the threat of at least $800 million in cuts. Every member project — the water lines, the senior meals, the road money — was a lever. The property tax fight, dropped into the middle of budget season, was the same lever by another name: vote my way, or find out.

That’s the part that ends the moment he signs. Once he does, the vetoes are in, or they aren’t, the turkeys live, or they don’t, and there’s not much left in the drawer to threaten anyone with.

Here’s the thing nobody in The Process will say on the record but everybody knows: Most of the lobby corps never liked him. Not 51%. More like 90%. DeSantis was never the backslapper who worked a reception, remembered your kid’s name, or took the meeting because relationships are the coin of the realm. He made you wait in the hallway. He made you grovel a little, and then a little more.

Everyone in The Process indulged him anyway, because he had the pen.

And the lawmakers indulged him, too — at least the ones still angling for an appointment, a judgeship, a Board seat, a soft landing in the administration’s final months. For everyone not on that list, the calculation changes at midnight. The favor bank closes. The man who could make your client’s year, or end it, becomes a private citizen shopping for a moving truck.

He knows it, which is why he spent the weekend on X writing his own exit interview.

Florida has the fewest state workers per capita in the country, he posted, fewer than the day he took office in 2019. The fourth straight year of reducing the budget. A spending plan 44% the size of New York’s, a state with millions fewer people. It’s a real record, and he’s not wrong to be proud of it. But something is telling about a Governor polishing the legacy from his phone while the building empties around him — narrating the carriage ride to an audience already heading for the coat check.

A caveat, because this column would be dishonest without one: Losing the budget lever is not the same as losing all power. DeSantis will be wielding the executive pen until 11:59 p.m. of his last day in office, and he intends to use every minute of it.

He will keep filling the benches with judges who share his draconian worldview, long after the carriage is a pumpkin. He’ll make hundreds of appointments to state and local Boards, the water management districts and university trustees and licensing panels, stacking them with loyalists who’ll carry his agenda into an era he won’t be around to see.

And he will be extraordinarily visible, because the property tax fight is just beginning. DeSantis will lead the charge to pass Amendment 3, the homestead exemption measure his Legislature sent to voters, which needs 60% of the vote in November to take effect. That’s a statewide campaign with his name on it, his face on it, and a microphone wherever he wants one.

But the people along Adams Street no longer need to treat him as royalty.

Cinderella at least got to keep the slipper. DeSantis seems to have skipped ahead to the part where the carriage points home — and he scouted the destination months ago.

In April, Gary Fineout noted, the Governor unveiled a statue of Calvin Coolidge at Bok Tower Gardens in Lake Wales and called it “a wonderful spot in Florida.” Coolidge himself gave the dedication address at that very spot in 1929, one of his last public appearances before leaving office — a rhyme DeSantis surely savored. It turns out he meant it.

DeSantis has placed an offer on a home in Mountain Lake, the gated 1914 enclave at the foot of Iron Mountain, with a closing expected in September. He was nominated for the club by former state Sen. JD Alexander. The man is relocating under the carillon, with Silent Cal — the patron saint of doing less — presiding over the exit.

Of all the wonderful spots in Florida, DeSantis picked one in Polk County. And Polk County is Grady Judd’s county.

Here’s my gut. When the House refused to fund the $8 million to $12 million a year it would take to keep a detail around the former Governor and his family after he leaves office — declining to treat him with kid gloves on the way out — somebody still has to answer the phone when a threat comes in. A Sheriff can do that. Move into Grady’s jurisdiction, and the round-the-clock coverage Tallahassee wouldn’t buy becomes a local courtesy.

And the timing of DeSantis’ budget signature is almost too perfect to invent. As Fineout also reported, the Capitol is about to go dark — not metaphorically. Renovations will cut power to the first five floors from July 2 to 12. The lights are going out on the DeSantis era, on schedule, whether the script called for it or not.

So sign the budget, Governor. Take the victory lap. The record is real, and the rainy day fund is full.

Just keep an eye on the clock. It’s nearly midnight, the coach is looking gourd-shaped, and somewhere down in Lake Wales, the carillon is warming up to play you home.

___

Ed. note: This story was drafted with assistance from AI. Editorial judgment, sourcing, and final review were performed by Peter Schorsch and the Florida Politics editorial team.