A fight between Florida House Republicans and Gov. Ron DeSantis escalated to a full intra-party war on Tuesday as DeSantis raged against fellow GOP members he said were “behaving like Democrats” during a press conference in Pensacola.
“We have this almost three-to-one super majority of Republicans in the Florida House of Representatives, and it is rotten,” DeSantis said, speaking to a friendly room of more than 50 supporters at Pensacola State College.
DeSantis was in Pensacola because two House Republicans who’ve emerged as the primary protagonists against DeSantis are both Pensacola representatives, Michelle Salzman and Alex Andrade.
The event at PSC was ostensibly to announce that HopeFlorida was opening offices in all state colleges, but the more than 90-minute press conference took place at the same time that the House Health Care Budget Subcommittee, led by Andrade, was holding a hearing on HopeFlorida.
HopeFlorida is a non-profit controlled by the state, spearheaded by First Lady Casey DeSantis, to connect welfare recipients with additional non-governmental services that can help them get off welfare.
Andrade has questioned HopeFlorida receiving $10 million from an unreported $67 million Medicaid settlement, and later that same amount of money being transferred to “dark money” groups that campaigned against the state constitutional amendment last year that would have legalized recreational marijuana.
“These guys in the Florida House of Representatives, you’ve got a cabal of them in the leadership,” DeSantis said. “They are colluding with liberal media and the Democratic Party in Florida to try to smear, to manufacture smears against HopeFlorida, against me, against the First Lady.”
DeSantis’ press conference was aimed at putting pressure on Andrade and Salzman.
“They’re not doing the things that voters want them to do,” DeSantis said. “Make no mistake about that. They are stabbing you in the back.”
Andrade and Salzman strongly disagree, saying they’ve received overwhelming support from their constituents.
Andrade told the News Journal that after his committee hearing today, the public knows the governor’s office took the $10 million in money meant for Medicaid and directed it to a political action committee.
“I don’t care who you are, if you launder taxpayer funds to use for a political campaign, you owe an explanation to taxpayers,” Andrade said.
DeSantis never mentioned Andrade by name, but he did go after Salzman and her bill that brings presidential searches at universities back under Florida public records law.
DeSantis said Salzman had gone “native” in Tallahassee doing the bidding of House Speaker Daniel Perez.
“She had been a very good, good ally for many years,” DeSantis said. “She had a good conservative record, and I think what happens is these people go to Tallahassee and they go native. She’s doing the bidding of the leadership and the staff. She’s not doing what you sent them there to do. You did not elect her to undo our conservative reforms in higher education, because I’m confident if she ran on that, you wouldn’t have elected her in the first place.”
Salzman, who is of Native American descent and a member of the Santa Rosa Creek Band of the Lower Muscogee, said she took the remark as a personal jab.
“He knows that I’m Native American,” Salzman said. “I’ve been to his Native American events at the governor’s mansion, and they supported my Native American bill that I did for my tribe in Santa Rosa County.”
Salzman said all of her constituents who have called her office are supporting her bill and that her bill is one of several that she’s sponsoring this year that support conservative principles like transparency.
“Whenever you send people like the Republicans that I have in my district, the list of the bills that I have, they’re like, ‘Holy cow, thank you,'” Salzman said. “So his narrative that I’m bowing down to liberals or Democrats or whatever, is debunked just by looking at what I file.”
Salzman said that she’s already getting hundreds of messages of support to her office after DeSantis’ Tuesday press conference, and while she’s getting criticized on the social media website X, she believes most of that is coming from DeSantis’ office.
“That’s not real life,” Salzman said. “It’s just not. If Twitter won elections, then the governor would be president.”
Salzman said supporters who were wearing Salzman t-shirts were turned away from the press conference, but so were other local Republicans.
Escambia County Chairman Mike Kohler, also a Republican, confirmed to the News Journal he was not allowed to enter the press conference, but was told the event had reached capacity. Kohler added however, that he knows other Escambia County Republicans who were not let into the event. The only local elected officials in the room were from Santa Rosa County.
“I think it’s kind of odd that not one local elected official or member of the Escambia County Republican group was in the meeting,” Kohler said. “We got turned away. It just seems really weird to me, and maybe that is just an odd snafu.”
Last month, the Escambia County Commission voted to write a letter opposing Boise State Professor Scott Yenor’s appointment to the University of West Florida Board of Trustees. Yenor resigned the appointment last week because of the opposition against him.
DeSantis threatened to veto Salzman’s bill and other bills that would undermine his agenda.
“(They’re) trying to jam it through this process,” DeSantis said. “Over my veto pen, though, it isn’t going to work.”
This story will be updated.
This article originally appeared on Pensacola News Journal: Gov. Ron DeSantis declares war on Pensacola Republican legislators