Florida RINOs Try to Lame-Duck DeSantis Over Amnesty
DeSantis has spent the last several years clamping down on illegal alien labor, angering those lawmakers with vested interests in amnesty. Now they want revenge.
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A cabal of pro-amnesty lawmakers are attempting to strip DeSantis of immigration enforcement power and give it to a Big AG RINO who notoriously champions amnesty and fights E-Verify. Adding insult to injury, they’re trying to trick Trump with an appeal to vanity by calling this monstrosity “The Trump Act.” Roll call for the 87-page bill that not a single one of them actually read:
In a national first, and in contravention of the state’s Constitution, the bill strips the Florida Governor’s office of all immigration enforcement authority and invests it solely in the Agriculture Commissioner, along with the newly created bureaucracy of “Chief Immigration Officer:”
The amnesty bill also hamstrings any county that would want to deport illegal aliens by leaving it to the sole discretion of the Commissioner, thereby making the state a de facto sanctuary state:
Why is this assumed such? Because Wilton Simpson, the current Agriculture Commissioner, owns a large-scale egg-laying operation and is one of the largest beneficiaries of Big Sugar donations in the state and is also a major beneficiary of Trulieve cash. He voted in favor of giving driver’s licenses to illegal aliens and in favor of in-state tuition for illegal aliens. Big Sugar is one of the powerful entities dominating Florida politics, the other being foreign company Trulieve, who tried to buy codified change in Florida’s Constitution to establish a monopoly and destroy their competition under the guise of “legalizing marijuana.”
These influences have bent the knees of numerous lawmakers including former Governor Rick Scott, who backed away from supporting E-Verify after pressure from sugar. Florida legislators Joe Gruters, Alex Andrade, Daniel Perez, Ben Albritton are all on the dole of Big Sugar and Trulieve, per publicly reported financial data:
That’s a lot of money donated to the Florida House Speaker Daniel Perez by a foreign pot company seeking control of the state market. (I haven’t even touched on Big Insurance, who recently gifted $1 million from the state’s top Democrat donor to the President of the Florida Senate, Ben Albritton.)
The Florida Legislature refused to fund E-Verify but that didn’t stop them from accepting donations from a foreign company in potential violation of noncompliance:
The RINO trick was to make it look like they were doing something but withhold funding so they could later claim the Governor wasn’t exercising the authority given him.
While Florida RINOs were pocketing amnesty cash, DeSantis was meeting with Trump and fine-tuning Florida’s aid in carrying out Trump’s mass deportation operation.
Here’s the play: The RINO faction of the Florida GOP want to protect their cheap, illegal labor. They are trying to make drama of old primary hurt feelings and pit Trump against DeSantis as a way to obfuscate their true intentions. They named their amnesty bill the “Trump Act” as an optics challenge to DeSantis. If DeSantis vetos it, they will claim that DeSantis vetoed a Trump bill — even though Trump himself already endorsed DeSantis’s bill and I’m told by an excellent source privately informed aides that he thinks the Wilton Simpson amnesty bill is “untenable.”
This hasn’t stopped the RINO faction from fighting for it anyway. There is too much sugar and pot money at stake. They publicly worried that DeSantis would be too effective at implementing Trump’s agenda. Andrade began berating and dismissing voters who criticized him by mocking their number of X followers. Meanwhile, Speaker Perez launched a paid influence campaign to turf for amnesty:
More talking points:
The amnesty cabal didn’t even bother to involve the Florida Department of Law Enforcement with any of this and FDLE repeatedly blasted the amnesty bill on X:
Even Rep. Byron Donalds, no doubt eyeing the precedent set by unconstitutionally limiting power to the executive, criticized the amnesty bill; Anna Paulina Luna also blasted it. Scores of Florida lawmakers — like Rep. Mike Caruso, Anthony Sabatini, Sen. Blaise Ingoglia, and Sen. Jay Collins — and Florida sheriffs all with consistent records against amnesty and special interests have all aligned against the Truliever amnesty cabal. As it now stands, the amnesty caucus hasn’t sent their bill to DeSantis yet as they’re waiting for public interest in the fight to die down before they try.
DeSantis declared that any Republican backing the Simpson amnesty bill would be “dead on arrival” in a primary. The Governor has reinstated the Florida Freedom Fund, a war chest that successfully defeated the abortion-on-demand and Trulieve amendments and cemented Florida as a red state. The RINO cabal doesn’t have a veto-proof majority, which is why they haven’t sent their bill to DeSantis. They also know that their challenge won’t pass legal muster as the DOJ explicitly stated “…the Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services (ACS) is not a law enforcement agency.”
Unfortunately, what we’re seeing in Florida is playing out similarly in Texas. It reminds me of the old establishment GOP playbook that we defeated in 2010 during the tea party days.
One of the more vociferous of the RINO faction, Florida Senator Randy Fine, will join me on air in my second hour today to defend this amnesty bill.
This is typical of RINO's.
Dana thank you so much for tackling this. Floridian here. I wanted to add that Florida’s previous agricultural commissioner (Nikki Fried) shut down her office during COVID and stopped processing concealed carry permits during the pandemic. So when BLM was rioting and looting, law abiding citizens couldn’t legally carry their firearms in Florida. Yesterday the state rep was saying that AC was responsible for gun policy but in reality that office has a terrible record of defending 2A rights.