Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
‘State of the State’ more about DeSantis’ future
It seems quaint and old-fashioned, but a Florida governor’s annual State of the State speech used to be stuffed with policy details and the many challenges facing a huge, dynamic place. It had an eat-your-vegetables quality: Serious, even boring, but necessary and important.
That was before Florida had a governor who treated the office as a launching pad to the national political stage. Gov. Ron DeSantis’ third State of the State address, delivered Tuesday to a pandemic-restricted joint legislative session, will be remembered, if at all, for its partisan and self-congratulatory tone and its avoidance of critical pocketbook issues such as unemployment and rapidly-escalating property insurance costs.
DeSantis showed more fire and enthusiasm at his well-received weekend appearance at the Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC) conference in Orlando. The State of the State speech was mostly scripted red meat for the Republican base, not the meat and potatoes of public policy that Floridians have come to expect once a year from previous chief executives. It felt more like a speech to the quarterly get-together of the Republican Party of Florida.
To hear DeSantis talk, you can’t escape the sense that he’s just passing through.
His half-hour talk was filled with half-measures.
He offered a generous amount of detail about how well he has managed the pandemic over the past year, compared to other large states, but said nothing about how Florida will fix its broken unemployment system with its paltry weekly benefits of $275 for a maximum of 12 weeks.
DeSantis might have paid lip service to the fact that millions of Floridians saw the need to put a $15 minimum wage in the state Constitution in November, but he didn’t. He ignored the festering problem of soaring property insurance premiums, the pocketbook issue that could dwarf all others in 2021. It was Senate President Wilton Simpson, R-Trilby, a Pasco County egg farmer, who on day one of the session championed higher jobless benefits and pay raises for the lowest-paid state workers.
The governor rightly deserves praise for calling for greater investments in public schools and the state’s fragile environment, but he didn’t explain how he’ll pay for it except that the Florida economy has bounced back much faster than anticipated. He also made a pitch for his $1 billion resiliency program to help cities and counties cope with sea-level rise — another good idea.
The State of the State speech is the perfect moment to extend an olive branch to legislators. But he did not offer any hint to legislators, sorely in need of guidance from him on pressing tax issues, such as finally requiring collection of sales tax on internet purchases, a long-overdue change worth more than $1 billion a year.
But the collection of taxes on remote sales won’t happen if DeSantis threatens to veto it on the wrong-headed logic that it’s a tax increase — which it isn’t. It’s an existing tax that goes uncollected because Florida’s antiquated tax code doesn’t keep up with consumer buying patterns.
DeSantis emphasized the importance of keeping schools and businesses open, and did so paradoxically in a state Capitol largely shuttered and empty.
The public is barred from the Senate and lobbyists must make reservations to testify at House hearings to manage social distancing protocols. Other capitols — in Atlanta, for instance — are open. But Tallahassee is a ghost town.
Then, the Republican governor shifted to other familiar terrain and three specific issues that demonstrated where his head really is.
He spoke of the paramount need to preserve “law and order” in the face of unruly mobs of protesters, and pursuing “Big Tech” firms for clumsily regulating conservative speech, despite state government’s extremely limited oversight in that area. He called for greater “election integrity” by acting against non-existent issues such as “ballot harvesting” after an exceptionally smooth statewide election that his mentor, Donald J. Trump, won easily.
“We also cannot allow private groups to pour millions of dollars into the administration of our elections,” DeSantis’ speech read. “That is a public function and should be done free from this type of private interference.”
It sounded good, but the truth is more complicated. One leading recipient of private money was DeSantis’ own Department of State, which got $553,000, the agency confirms. The Palm Beach County Supervisor of Elections office received
$6.8 million, more than any other county elections office. Supervisor Wendy Sartory
Link, who ran an efficient and trouble-free election in 2020, was appointed to office by DeSantis himself.
Fact: DeSantis’ own appointees took the money he now says is poisoning the election system.
Link provided us with highly detailed documentation of how she spent the money for COVID-19 safety protections, outreach and education to increase voter participation. The impressive turnout in Palm Beach County speaks for itself. Yet DeSantis sees this as a threat to democracy.
But the larger question is this: Are these the problems that most concern everyday Floridians? Of course not.
But they are foremost in the minds of Trump’s loyal followers across Florida and beyond. They also will be critical to DeSantis’ re-election next year and in the early primary states in the next presidential election in 2024.
The extremely divisive anti-mob legislation (HB 1 and SB 484) would trample on First Amendment rights and has obvious racial overtones. The crusade against Facebook and other tech giants is the stuff of a CPAC rally or Tucker Carlson’s TV show. The pap about voting integrity is a thinly veiled strategy to make it harder for Democrats to vote by mail in the 2022 election, when DeSantis himself is on the ballot.
The State of the State was mostly about the state of DeSantis’ own future.
Editorials are the opinion of the Sun Sentinel Editorial Board and written by one of its members or a designee. The Editorial Board consists of Editorial Page Editor Rosemary O’Hara, Dan Sweeney, Steve Bousquet and Editor-in-Chief Julie Anderson.