>>This week on NewsNight, as the Florida legislative session gets underway, a look at some of the issues up for debate, including extensive changes to education in the state.

Plus, the contentious relationship between Florida's political leaders and the news media.

NewsNight starts now.

[MUSIC] >>Hello, I'm Steve Mort, and welcome to NewsNight, where we take an in-depth look at the top stories and issues in central Florida and how they affect all of us.

While the Florida legislative session began on Tuesday in his State of the State address, the governor outlined his agenda saying, quote, You ain't seen nothing yet.

Lawmakers are debating bills on an array of issues ranging from abortion, guns and transgender care to so-called woke ideology in education.

Progressives rally with students at UCF against Governor DeSantis and Republicans Legislative plans for Florida's public university system.

>>Ron DeSantis wants to abolish diversity, equity and inclusion... >>Education a key focus of the last legislative session is once again front and center.

HB 999 bars public universities from offering majors or minors in critical race theory, gender studies and intersectionality.

And it says core classes will not be allowed to present U.S. history as, quote, contrary to the creation of a new nation based on universal principles stated in the Declaration of Independence.

It also bans state higher education institutions from spending money on diversity, equity and inclusion programs and gives power over the hiring of faculty to university presidents and boards of trustees, which include political appointees.

>>These are publicly funded institutions.

They don't just get to do whatever they want.

I think there's people that have criticized, you know, what we're doing New College or some of these others.

And their basic view is the elections don't matter, that you can win a massive landslide, and yet you still have no ability to have set the mission statement for major institutions that are publicly funded.

And that just can't be the case.

>>HB 999 follows on from last year's Stop Woke Act, the Parental Rights in Education law dubbed “Don't Say Gay ” by opponents and HB 1476, which requires all reading materials in schools be reviewed by a qualified district employee.

The DeSantis administration has already said the new A.P.

African-American Studies course runs afoul of Florida law, triggering a high profile spat with the College Board.

Other pieces of legislation would affect K through 12 education in front of lawmakers, ideas to tackle the use of pronouns in schools and require books to be immediately removed from school shelves when they're flagged as inappropriate.

Another proposal would take away the power of local school boards to approve sex education materials.

>>Here we are once again about to go into a legislative session and totally ignoring the real issues that we should be dealing with here in the state of Florida.

And I also think it's important for us to point out that none of these issues are making anyone's life better.

None of these issues are putting food on the table of families.

None of these issues are helping that mom who's working two or three jobs to provide for their family.

>>But it's not just education that's likely to be a target of the war on Woke in Tallahassee.

Lawmakers will also consider banning state and local governments from considering environmental and social governance factors in investment and financial decisions.

And the bill filed by Brevard State Representative Randy Fine would put into state law a prohibition on doctors providing puberty blockers and hormone therapy to transgender minors.

Okay, well, let's bring in our panel now to break it all down.

Joining us in the studio this week, Christopher Heath covers politics for WFTV, Channel 9.

Thanks so much for coming in, Chris.

Appreciate it.

And independent journalist Jason Garcia writes the Substack “Seeking Rents.

” Thanks for coming in today as well, Jason.

All right, Chris, let me start with you on this one.

I mean, how aggressive is the Republicans agenda for this session compared to recent years?

>>Yeah, they got the wind in their sails.

Not only does the governor have a 20 point win in November, they've got a supermajority in both the House and the Senate.

These are numbers that they haven't had since the Tea Party wave back in 2010.

So this is a Republican majority that can do whatever it wants.

Democrats have virtually no power.

They can't challenge things on rules now.

They can't really do anything procedurally.

They can raise concerns, but they can't stop amendments from being put on the ballot.

It's essentially whatever the Republicans want they can do.

And by the way, if they have to give people passes along the way on controversial bills, they can peel off several Republicans and still pass it.

They'll do whatever they want to do with no opposition.

And you know the quote from the the musical Damn Yankees, whatever Lola wants, Lola gets whatever Ron wants Ron's going to get.

>>What do you think, Jason?

>>Yeah.

If if the Florida legislature was a band.

Ron DeSantis is the lead singer, the guitar player, the bassist and the drummer right now.

And the overarching theme of this session is going to be setting Ron DeSantis up to run for president.

And that means sort of taking on like long sort of important priorities to the Republican base, but also picking sort of wedge issues that really play well in a Republican primary.

So that's where the overwhelming focus in this session is going to be.

>>Right before the governor delivered his state of the state.

A couple of bills were filed in the House and Senate on a six week abortion ban here in the state of Florida.

Was that a surprise?

Chris, or expected?

>>You know, when I sat down with Speaker of the Florida House, Paul Renner back in November, December of last year, we had brought up abortion and he brought the fact that it was still working its way through the courts.

But he did expect a bill to come forward.

And he talked about how, you know, he's very pro-life and wants to see the state be very pro-life.

And you've kind of heard that mantra that is more of a practical side.

From a political side, Florida has the most liberal abortion laws in the Southeast.

If you look at all of our neighboring states, you have Georgia at six weeks, were at 15.

Virtually everybody else has outright bans on abortion.

So it was going to be untenable at a certain point for Florida to be the most liberal abortion state in the southeast.

This was going to happen.

We'll see what kind of stomach there is for this, especially after what Republicans saw happened in November, where a lot of races they thought they were going to win.

They ended up either being very narrow or losing because voters are not necessarily with them on bans up to this point.

But we'll see if they decide to do it anyway.

>>I'm going to say I just wanted to add to that, that that is the most fascinating issue I think, of the session just from a pure political lens.

Right.

I mean, if you watched the governor's press conference that he did right before, right after state of the State, he had zero interest in saying anything definitive on abortion right now.

Other other answers, he would go on at length to talk about.

Abortion, two sentences and done.

You know, and I think that reflects the sort of tension between he's running in a Republican primary versus a, you know, Donald Trump or former governor of South Carolina, that he's going to with a bunch of activists that want him to ban abortion as much as possible.

But he's also trying to think ahead to a general election where abortion bans are not popular.

>>And what about transgender care, staying with with medical issues?

We heard Brevard state rep Randy Fine.

He's filed his bill to ban transgender treatments for minors.

Right.

The Florida Board of Medicine and the Florida Board of Osteopathic Medicine both already have this rule.

>>Right.

>>In the, you know, in the in their rules at the moment.

Why do supporters say this bill is also needed?

>>Well, in terms of why they say it's needed, I think generally what you find is they they tend to focus on some of these edge cases like, you know, a minor that went through a gender reassignment procedures and then later came to regret it.

And that's not to say these these cases don't exist, but they're very rare and obviously they're very important.

Like we should not ignore them.

But what is happening is they're sort of they're deciding on what they want to do and then going looking for the evidence to sort of justify it rather than sort of looking at this the way that sort of medical professionals come from and looking at sort of all the all the sort of health benefits that come to more people from from going through this stuff.

And what that reflects is kind of to the opposite, I think, of abortion is there's a there's a calculation that this is a winning issue both in a primary and in general, that that there is more sort of, you know, uncomfortable uncomfortability among moderate voters with with the idea of, you know, gender affirming care, particularly for minors.

>>Well, it's talking about what Republicans might think are winning issues.

Chris, let's look at higher education.

I talked about in my piece there.

How significant an overhaul is this HB 999 for the state's public schools and universities or colleges and universities?

And why does the governor think these these programs that most of them have are discriminatory?

>>Well, what you what you have to look at with what Ron DeSantis is doing, both in his first term and now continuing on to this term, is taking a look at kind of the way education has always been.

Now, the courts have long held that education in Florida, if you teach K-12, youre a state employee, the state has a vested interest in your speech, what you do, what you say.

DeSantis is very much pushing that from the K-12 up to higher education, and the courts have always kind of have had a line of demarcation and said, we want robust discussions at higher ed, we want higher ed to be a place where, you know, a thousand flowers flourish.

We don't necessarily want that same scrutiny there.

He's pushing that there.

When it comes to DEI, diversity, equity and inclusion.

This is something that you saw just a couple of years ago, schools being told they needed to include.

Now it's being pulled back.

>>Fairly recently, right?

>>Yeah.

And so this is one of those things where, again, this is an issue that they're pointing at and it's kind of it goes in almost in the same pot that you had critical race theory where it's like, okay, we don't like this.

We're not 100% sure exactly why, but we're going to find some parts about it we don't like and we're going to pull it back.

This is really the state stepping up and saying we are going to take a much more firm grasp, a much more heavy handed approach to higher education, both with what you're allowed to say, what you're allowed to teach.

We're treating you the college professor, the same we're treating any K-12 teacher the same as we're treating somebody who works at the DMV.

We get to control what you say and what you do when you're on our dime.

>>I mean, yeah, let me just add to that, too, that one thing that's really interesting about the higher ed stuff is probably nowhere else can you see just how quickly this stuff is advancing in terms of, you know, we spent most of the last year talking about the higher ed stuff was couched in the language of like critical race theory and transgender diversity and inclusion type stuff.

Right.

But now this this bill they filed would ban gender studies degrees.

Right.

Like this is going way beyond the sort of stuff that they'd been talking about before.

>>But on education and on K through 12, we're also seeing some sort of Jeb Bush era priorities, right, when it comes to school choice.

>>Yeah, I think, you know, when you talk to talk to a lot of like advocates for like public schools and stuff, there are people that will say this is the biggest issue of this session is this idea that I think is primarily a priority of the House Speaker, Paul Renner, a guy from Jacksonville that would offer just a universal voucher program, essentially an $8,000 coupon to to the parent of any child in the state, regardless of whether or not your school or your child has ever attended public school.

Right.

And you could use this to go to any sort of private academy.

You could use it for for tutoring if you homeschool, that sort of thing.

And what's really interesting about this is nobody has any idea how much this would cost.

Right.

To the state or the state House has sort of produced an internal estimate that that puts the cost at like $200 million.

But I think everybody is looking at it.

That is like laughably low.

For instance, it's assuming like 50% of parents would just choose not to take $5,000 or $8,000 for each of their kids.

Right.

That that is not going to happen.

On the other end, there's this left leaning think tank that has said this could be like a $4 billion hit, which, you know, if that's true, that just like devastates public school funding.

So someone really needs to get to the bottom of like, what would this cost?

>>Yeah.

Before we move on, I did want to ask you, Chris, about permit-less carry, supporters call it constitutional carry.

This is kind of an interesting one, right?

I mean, it seems to have annoyed both sides.

The gun rights advocates, they were saying it doesn't go far enough, but the governor seems to be indicating that he would be willing to entertain the idea of an open carry portion of this bill.

What do you see?

>>I think if the governor really wanted open carry, we'd have open carry.

This is one of those issues where he can say, I want open carry.

If only the legislature would do that for me, the legislature will do whatever he asks.

The thing is, is that you have a lot of law enforcement and we're not just talking like, you know, liberal, you know, sheriffs from blue counties, lots of law enforcement, Republicans, Democrats, independents who've all said we're not comfortable with open carry, we're okay with permit-less carry.

We're okay with the idea that, you know, if you can legally buy a gun, you can legally concealed carry.

We're fine with that.

We're not good with open carry.

He's listening to law enforcement say that's a bridge too far right now.

So that's why you've seen this originally got introduced as constitutional carry.

It's not true constitution carry its you know permit-less carry.

That's what's going to pass and mainly because again law enforcement across the state for the most part has said we're good with permit-less carry, open carry not right now.

>>It's going to be really interesting to see what happens.

A lot to watch in the in the weeks and months to come.

There are a lot of issues up for consideration in this session, so we can't get all of them today.

Well address many more of them next week, though.

In the meantime, you can find links to the bills we talked about today on our website.

wucf.org/newsnight.

All right.

Next tonight, the relationship between Florida's government and the news media.

Let's start with a report from WKMGs Mike DeForest, which found reviews by the governor's office can add months to the process of obtaining public records.

I spoke to Mike about that.

>>When a citizen requests a public record of a state agency like the Florida Department of Law Enforcement or the Florida Department of Corrections, you submit that request.

The agency itself pulls those records, redact the information that cannot legally be released, and then the agency themselves gives it back to the person who requested.

That's what happens most of the time.

But what we discovered is in several hundred cases, those state agencies are forwarding them to the governor's office for a secondary review before they are being released.

And interestingly or not, a vast majority of those records requests are being made by journalists and news organizations.

And so what we found over the course of the year was like nearly 300 records, an average of one per business day was being sent from these state agencies to the governor.

And then when it landed at the governor's office, according to this log that we were able to uncover, it's clear that they are sitting at the governor's office, in some cases for weeks, some cases for months.

I think the most one record requested was at the governor's office for nine months.

And then that is in addition to the time that it took the agency to pull them and the agency to produce it to the person who asked for.

>>And why are they doing that, Mike?

Do you get any indication from these agencies or the governor's office as to what's happening here?

>>We actually discovered this was happening about a year ago, and it was only recently that we uncovered even more information about the scope of this issue.

The governor's office would not talk to us this time around, but when I talked to them about this last year, they claim that if the governor had an interest in these records because they may perhaps involve the governor or that the governor would be asked questions about the records, then he, as the person who is most in charge of upholding the laws of Florida, has a right to review these records before they are released.

Now, under Florida's public records law, there is no set time limit on when a government agency must turn over a record no five day limit or ten day or a month.

All that the law says, and it was actually a 1984 Florida Supreme Court ruling that the only delay allowed in releasing public records is the amount of time it would take for the agency's records custodian to retrieve those records.

In other words, get them off the shelf, pull them out of a box or find them on a computer, and then go through those records and redact, blackout, delete any kind of information that is not legally releasable like Social Security numbers or juvenile information.

The question is, does the governor have the right to conduct these secondary reviews and thus delay the release of these records before giving them to the public?

>>And just to be clear, documents requested from the state have to be released.

Right.

Or does the state have a choice in the matter?

>>It is in Florida's constitution that every person, not even a citizen of Florida, has the right to review most public records.

And a public record is basically a document that's either generated by the government or received by the government in the course of that, governments duty.

So with some exceptions, there are a growing number of exemptions and confidential records that the state cannot release.

And some say that takes additional time for these record custodians to go through and make sure they're not accidentally releasing something to the public that they're not allowed to.

But for the most part, most government records, you and I have the right to look at them.

We paid for them.

>>Mike DeForest there from Channel 6.

Okay, Jason, let me start with you on this one.

You put in a lot of public records request.

Does anything that surprise you?

>>No, not at all.

Let me give you two sort of examples of one personal and one sort of out of another organization.

Both showed why people should care about this, too.

After last years session, so one year ago, I requested just emails between the governor's legislative affairs director and the Florida legislature just to get an idea of what the governor is actually working on, not just what he talks about, but what he's really working on behind the scenes.

In the past, this is shown for instance, the governor helping Disney get a carve out from legislation, that sort of thing.

They still have not produced those records.

The 2023 session has begun.

Right.

We still don't know what the governor was working on in the 2022 session.

And then you saw this with the Miami Herald, too.

And they were really trying to dig into the migrant relocation, the Martha's Vineyard stunt.

Right.

They had to go to court to get the governor's office to produce records.

This stuff is incredibly important.

And the fact that that the governor's office, particularly, but increasingly a number of other agencies, are deliberately slow playing and daring people to sue them on this is really chilling for everybody.

>>And public records request are a pretty basic function of journalism, right?

>>It is because you have to know both what they're saying behind closed doors.

And you also have to know, I think, more to Jason's point, how are they spending our money?

Because because that's at the end of the day, we're paying them to go do these jobs.

We are paying them to spend our money.

You know, the government always talks about, oh, we secured this amount of money for this project or that.

You didn't secure it.

You took money from us and you're using it to do other things, which is the absolute function.

But records help illuminate that process.

It shows.

Is that a fair playing field?

Are you helping somebody else, you know, get a special contract?

This is important to everybody.

And I and I think, again, to Jason's point, if you don't know how this is happening and they know that you're not going to necessarily take them to court or they can slow play it to the point where nobody cares by the time they release it, then there is no there, then there is no follow through.

There is no oversight.

There is no sunshine.

>>I want to talk about the governor's proposals to make it easier for people to sue the news media for defamation.

We've talked about that on the show before.

So I dont want to sort of go into too much detail about what that includes, but I'm kind of interested to know whether you think that this is set up to be another test case for the Supreme Court, much like those abortion laws in conservative states leading to the overturn of Roe v Wade, are they going after Times versus Sullivan, do you think?

>>Oh 100% they are, and one of the ways we know that is public records request, right.

Some of the emails that came out of the actually e-mails that I obtained last session out of the legislature showed the governor's office was kind of pitching this idea ahead of last year's session.

They decided not to pursue it.

But one of the documents they circulated as part of that was that we want to tee up a challenge before the United States Supreme Court.

In other words, we are passing this knowing it is unconstitutional, hoping that this leads to litigation that gets before the Supreme Court and has them overturn this like decades old standard that has protected not only journalists.

Right.

But like publishers in speech in general.

>>I mean, The New York Times editorial board wrote, quote, Florida is trying to take away the American right to speak freely.

I mean, is that really fair, you know, or is this just about, as the governor says, upholding the protections of members of the public who feel they have a reputation to-- >>Well, you can go back to 2016 and some of the rhetoric you heard on the campaign trail, especially from Donald Trump, talking about opening up the libel laws and saying that, you know, we're going to do that.

You know, he was inaccurately saying we're going to do that at the federal level.

Where this would have to start is now at the state level, which is where this bill comes into play.

And I think you're 100% correct.

This is designed to tee up a challenge to New York Times versus Sullivan.

The legislature has heard what we've all heard.

There are at least two, maybe three members of the U.S. Supreme Court who have suggested they would be open to revisiting the landmark decision.

Now, three is not a majority, but three is enough maybe to give it cert, put it before the court, get the arguments out there, and then who knows, the chips fall where they may.

Maybe you get a 5-4 decision and all of a sudden New York Times versus Sullivan's overturned the standard for defamation and actual malice is essentially obliterated.

And I think, you know, most of us would look back and say, well, the idea of stare decisis, an idea that's been decided, is been decided.

We don't-- >>That seems to be out the window, right?

>>Yeah.

I think in a world where we went back and got rid of Roe versus Wade on the Dobbs decision and so many others, you're now starting to say, I think everything is going to be a question before the court.

And where does the court decide it wants to go?

This is 100% designed to get to the Supreme Court for that challenge.

>>But at the same time, it's interesting, isn't it, because the governor has forged a pretty close relationship with conservative media outlets.

I mean, he appears on Fox a lot, some of these sort of smaller in-state conservative media outlets.

He's he's he's got a pretty close relationship.

I mean, how is his administration view being able to sort of leverage those outlets?

>>Oh, yeah.

Well, just to give you one example, when the governor suspended Hillsborough State attorney Andrew Warren, the prosecutor that had said he would not sort of criminally prosecute abortion related offenses, you know, the governor's office wanted and wanted some more intel on him.

So they drafted up a public records request.

Speaking of public records laws, looking for emails that Andrew Warren had sent while he was while he was state attorney.

But they didn't file it themselves.

So they had one of these, like conservative websites file it on their behalf and they did it in their own name.

But it was verbatim what the governor's office wrote.

It wrote down right down to like repeating the same typos the governor's press person had made in the proposal.

Right.

And, of course, that produced enough records that this outlet used in stories.

And then the governor's office would then turn around and promote those stories to other journalists as if it was like an independent sort of piece of news.

>>And by the way, on this, if if New York Times V Sullivan does go down, take a look at this Dominion versus Fox News lawsuit that's going on right now.

Everyone's talking about how Dominion has they've got pretty much the goods on Fox News, but it's not a slam dunk in a world where New York Times versus Sullivan doesn't exist, it is a slam dunk.

We're not even - this may be a summary judgment from the bench at that point.

That's the kind of change that this would be.

So Fox News and again, this is not just liberal outlets or mainstream outlets that need to be worried.

All outlets can serve.

It doesn't matter where you are on the spectrum, if New York Times versys Sullivan goes away a lot of exposure.

>>I think.

I think I read the Fox News cited New York Times versus Sullivan five times in its pleading.

>>Yeah, a lot of people have pointed that out, for sure.

Finally, I want to talk about a specific big media company in the governor's crosshairs, and that's Disney.

The governor signed a bill recently that puts the state in control of Disney's special tax district, now named the Central Florida Tourism Oversight District.

He also named his picks to sit on that board.

They include the CEO of a Christian outreach ministry, GOP political donor and a co-founder of the conservative Moms for Liberty.

Jason, you've looked a lot at this Reedy Creek issue.

What did you make of the governor's picks for the board?

>>Well, I thought it was really interesting and really strategic.

We've got kind of two activity types.

But then you've got three more to sort of traditional kind of like Republican operatives, fundraisers.

And it suggests to me that that board is very much aligned to sort of make a lot of noise.

But as long as sort of Disney doesn't antagonize the governor any going forward, it should still sort of run just as it has all along.

You know.

>>There's not much that that board can do vis-a-vis Disney content, though, right?

>>No, no.

Because here's the thing.

I mean, if Disney decided tomorrow that they were going to pack up the Magic Kingdom and disappear, Reedy Creek would still exist.

Reedy Creek and the management of those those lands would still exist.

I had a very long conversation with a Republican who is involved in more local government stuff, and his concern with the way this board is drafted gets into the whole idea of home rule and local control.

And he said this should be alarming to everyone because let's play this out 20, 30 years down the line.

Let's say Democrats in Florida get their act together for the first time and get and get a supermajority in the House and Senate, get a Democratic governor and decide they don't like coal power plants anymore.

So they create a special district around the last coal plant in Florida and put five appointed members on that.

This is the precedent now that we have set.

And it should be a little concerning to anyone who values the idea that you get to have a vote in the people that make laws and implement taxes on you, that all of a sudden, not anymore.

At least not here.

So much going on in Florida politics, I feel like half an hour is definitely not enough.

But you can join this conversation as well on social media.

We're at WUCFTV, on Facebook, Twitter, and also on Instagram.

But that is all the time we have for this week.

My thanks to Christopher Heath covers politics for WFTV Channel 9, and independent journalist Jason Garcia writes the Substack “Seeking Rent.

” Check it out.

We'll see you next Friday night at 8:30 here on WUCF.

From all of us here at NewsNight, take care and have a great week.