Step by step, session by session, Florida looks as if it’s inching toward a full-time Legislature.
For the second straight year, the regular session ended Friday without a budget. After more than two months, their single mandatory job is not finished, and the people in control do not seem the least bit worried about it.
The budget takes work, and lawmakers also must resolve details of a ballot question on cutting property taxes in Florida, and on redrawing the lines of congressional districts to tilt the playing field even more in the Republicans’ favor.
Depending on who’s counting, two, three or four special sessions are ahead.
Last year, they needed a lot of overtime — 45 extra days — to do a budget. Not until June 30, the very last day of the fiscal year, did Gov. Ron DeSantis sign it. By then, there was serious talk of a partial state shutdown. The Legislature looked dysfunctional.
Mike Stocker/Sun Sentinel
Steve Bousquet, Sun Sentinel columnist.
The same game of legislative chicken now starts anew as the calendar creeps toward April.
The reason I see signs of a full-time Legislature — which almost no taxpayer wants — is because the stigma of not being able to finish the job in 60 days seems to have disappeared.
The mountain of unfinished work in the Capitol invites obvious comparisons to Congress, which has a 16 percent approval rating in the latest Gallup poll.
After the unfinished session adjourned Sine Die Friday, Senate President Ben Albritton, R-Wauchula, was asked by reporters if the public should be frustrated by the omission.
“Absolutely not,” he insisted, looking relaxed with his Big Gulp-size coffee cup in hand. “If this was August 1, I’d say, yeah, that’s a problem. No, sir. I do not believe voters should be upset that the timeline has been at least traditionally altered.”
Not even after two months?
“If it doesn’t happen in a 60-day window, that’s not a loss,” Albritton said. “It’s not an L. It is not. To be clear, it is not. There’s still plenty of time. We’re going to get it done.”
He reminded reporters that “I move slowly,” and he disagreed diplomatically with Sen. Don Gaetz, who called the session an embarrassment.
Gaetz’s important bill to bring fiscal discipline to what state auditors describe as a poorly managed school voucher program passed the Senate, but never got the House’s attention.
That’s a loss for Florida.
In Florida’s supposedly part-time “citizen” Legislature, members are paid $29,697 a year, a salary unchanged for decades.
They don’t get paid overtime, but they sure will work a lot of overtime this year. It makes me think that these union-busting legislators might need a union.
The session is nearly three months old, and the two biggest and most important issues of 2026 — the budget and property tax relief — are a long way from being resolved.
Republicans are supposed to be the party of smaller, leaner, more efficient government. So why does it seem that they spend so much time in Tallahassee?
Past aminosities don’t help. Albritton and House Speaker Daniel Perez of Miami have a troubled past. DeSantis and Perez don’t get along, either. Remember the governor’s refusal to shake the speaker’s hand on Opening Day in January?
DeSantis, in Jacksonville on Friday, could not resist a poke at his fellow Republicans.
“The bad news is that the Legislature Sine Die-d without doing the only one thing that they’re required to do, which is produce a budget,” he said as laughs swept through the crowd. “You know, it is what it is.”
DeSantis said lawmakers will soon prefer to be back in their districts, running for re-election and telling voters all the great things they did (which they didn’t, as our Sunday editorial discusses in detail).
“This is not something that should be drug out,” DeSantis said of the budget impasse. “But it’s not something that is going to drag out until June.”
Really? It did last year, and it could again.
Steve Bousquet is Opinion Editor of the Sun Sentinel and a columnist in Tallahassee and Fort Lauderdale. Contact him at sbousquet@sunsentinel.com of (850) 567-2240.