It’s a Tuesday morning in Tallahassee, and a wood-paneled hearing room at the Florida legislature is packed. The state senate’s fiscal-policy committee is considering a bill to prohibit most abortions after six weeks of pregnancy, and dozens of citizens have lined up to testify: anguished young students in colorful hair and ABORTION IS HEALTH CARE T-shirts; little old ladies wearing cardigans and crosses. For hours they speak in emotional terms as the senators listen.
Yet an air of inevitability hangs over the proceedings. Governor Ron DeSantis supports this bill, and therefore it is destined to pass. In Tallahassee these days, what the governor wants, the governor gets. It is DeSantis who welcomed this fight, DeSantis who calls the shots, and DeSantis who will reap the credit—or blame—for his latest move in a frenzy of right-wing policymaking.
His dominance is hard to overstate. From school-board meetings to the Walt Disney Corp., the shelves of elementary-school libraries to local mask ordinances, everything bears his stamp. Having shepherded his state through the COVID-19 pandemic, bucking the political and medical establishments to follow his own read of the data, DeSantis has manipulated levers of power to enact a sweeping agenda. The week I landed in Tallahassee, he signed an expansive school-voucher law and a measure investing more than $700 million in affordable housing. The legislature was hearing his proposed ban on gender-affirming health care for minors, a bill to expand gun rights that would allow concealed carrying of firearms without a permit, another that would dramatically curtail union rights, and a bid to prohibit socially conscious investing. All would eventually pass. At DeSantis’ behest, legislators this year also eliminated diversity programs at public universities, made it easier to sentence criminals to death, and barred schools from using trans students’ preferred pronouns.
For a typical Republican governor, any of these policies might represent a signature achievement. For DeSantis, they’re the latest line items in an agenda he calls the Florida Blueprint. “We’ve had conservative leadership in Florida for the past 23 years, but we’ve passed more conservative bills in the past two years than the previous 20, and more this year than the past 22,” says GOP state senator Joe Gruters. “It’s a rocket ship, a steam engine.”
‘WE’VE SHOWN YOU DON’T HAVE TO DO IT THE LIBERAL WAY, AND WE’RE THE ENVY OF THE NATION.’
—RANDY FINE, GOP REPRESENTATIVE
Out of a combination of fear and mutual interest, legislators have put aside their own pet projects to do DeSantis’ bidding, passing bills to shield his travel records from the public and allow him to run for President without resigning the governorship. They’ve also been enlisted to clean up his messes, retroactively legalizing his migrant flights to Martha’s Vineyard last year and attempting to restore state control of the special tax district around Disney World amid the company’s feud with DeSantis over LGBTQ rights. “This governor has used all of his powers to make sure everyone around him is in lockstep,” says Jeff Brandes, a libertarian-leaning former GOP state senator who lost a seat on a prized committee after
