The Jeb Bush Legacy: Ron DeSantis’s Executive Power
When Ron DeSantis was elected governor of Florida in 2018, he asked his general counsel to help him learn the powers of the office during his transition period. He planned to use them. He reportedly “pored over a binder enumerating his varied powers: appointing Florida Supreme Court justices, removing local elected officials and wielding line-item vetoes against state lawmakers.”
In the first ten days of his term in office, he appointed two conservative Supreme Court justices, removed three elected officials, and rescinded “nearly four dozen of his predecessor’s nominations to state boards.”
“Shock and Awe,” proclaimed Florida newspapers statewide.
Where did he get these powers?
From former Florida Governor Jeb Bush, at least for many of them.
Donald Trump’s endorsement may have turned Ron DeSantis from an unknown Congressman into a juggernaut candidate for governor over his GOP primary competition. But it’s Jeb Bush and his legacy who most closely shaped Ron DeSantis’s tenure in office as governor.
As Florida State University political scientist Bob Crew makes clear in his excellent 2010 book, Jeb Bush: Aggressive Conservatism in Florida, Jeb Bush, son and brother of two US presidents, transformed the Executive Office of Governor from one of the weakest in the country to one of the strongest.
With favorable economic and political winds at his back, along with new constitutional amendments consolidating executive control over the cabinet, Jeb Bush inaugurated a new regime of Republican governance in Florida that we are still living through today.
It was also a national watershed: “For the first time in modern state history and for the first time in the twentieth century in the South, a Republican governor was elected concurrently with Republican majorities in both houses of the state legislature” (pp. 20–21).
The conservative revolution had begun.
Bush embarked upon a vast plan guided by the Hoover Institution, Manhattan Institute, American Enterprise Institute, and other conservative think tanks to transform the governor’s power and to enact sweeping policy proposals.
With a “top-down managerial style,” “no advisers in the conventional sense,” and a compliant legislature (p. 25), Bush cut taxes, reduced the size of the civil service, privatized government services, trimmed social services, and transformed education by promoting charter schools and vouchers for private schools.
Florida has served as a national laboratory for GOP governance since this time.
Energizing the Executive and Politicizing Personnel Appointments
Remember the Donald Trump administration’s twilight efforts to radically overhaul the federal civil service through a proposal called “Schedule F,” which would strip government workers of protections and turn them into at-will employees?
Jeb Bush did it first in Florida.
As part of his government modernization plan, Jeb Bush moved 16,300 employees from career civil service to at-will employment, among other changes to give more flexibility to politically appointed managers to hire and fire people (p. 112). Then, with this new personnel flexibility, he told state agency directors to reduce staff by 25 percent in preparation for his budget (p. 30).
These changes also paved the way for privatization of everything from criminal defense to child protection services to staffing of nursing homes for veterans. “Under Governor Bush, privatization of public services was thought to have been employed in Florida more broadly than in any other state in the nation” (p. 31).
Both Bush and DeSantis have said they want to see this kind of personnel overhaul at the federal level of government.
Jeb Bush also undercut the Florida legislature’s role in the budget process. He limited budget requests from agency heads and changed budget formatting in a variety of ways to set parameters and cost estimates on his own (p. 47–48).
Bush also undermined the legislature by using the line-item veto liberally, vetoing nearly $2 billion in appropriations over his eight years as governor (p. 48). DeSantis later left this record in the dust, vetoing a record $3.1 billion from the 2022 budget alone.
The pandemic gave Ron DeSantis additional emergency powers and executive control over the budget. He commandeered $5 billion in federal COVID relief money, setting state priorities and policies unilaterally. Florida legislators offered nary a peep of protest, at least at first.
Remaking the Judiciary through Appointments
Bush increased gubernatorial appointment powers particularly in two areas — higher education and the judiciary (p. 59). DeSantis has used these powers to consolidate personal control over these institutions.
In Florida, governors appoint judges for district courts of appeal and the Florida Supreme Court. “Until Governor Bush and the Republicans gained control of state government, the appointments were made by the governor from lists of candidates provided by nine-member, nonpartisan judicial nominating commissions (JNC) appointed by three separate entities” (p. 61), a measure to insulate the judiciary from politicization.
Crew explains, “In 2001, in the aftermath of the presidential election in which the Florida Supreme Court sided with Al Gore’s position regarding the recount of ballots and at the behest of the governor, the legislature revised the state statute to permit the governor to select all nine members of the nominating commission” (p. 62). This opened up over 200 new appointments for the governor for all the combined JNCs and reduced the influence of the Florida Bar Association.
Ron DeSantis has used the judicial appointment powers bequeathed by Jeb Bush and gone beyond them to consolidate conservative control over the Florida Supreme Court. DeSantis worked with Federalist Society co-chair Leonard Leo in the shadows of his gubernatorial transition to vet appointments to the court to ensure adherence to his own conservative ideological test, subverting the typical judicial nominating commission process.
DeSantis flipped the court from a “4–3 liberal majority to a 6–1 conservative advantage” and kept going: he “has currently picked five of the seven justices currently on the court, the most of any governor in a generation.”
Even now, there’s a throughline to Jeb Bush: Florida Supreme Court chief justice Carlos Muñiz served as deputy general counsel to former Gov. Jeb Bush.
The new DeSantis-imprinted Florida Supreme Court allowed his gerrymander usurping Florida legislative authority for redistricting to eliminate a Black-majority district in North Florida, expanding the Florida GOP delegation to Congress. They will also rule on the legislature’s recent abortion bans.
Remaking Higher Education Through Appointments
Jeb Bush used a new constitutional amendment to put higher education under enhanced gubernatorial control, extending political influence over the system. Bush prodded the legislature to create a new State Board of Education as well as separate Boards of Trustees for each university in the state system. Bush would appoint nearly all new trustees (p. 57).
With new appointments to university boards, Bush could influence the selection of university presidents, finding plum, highly-paid positions for political friends. He gave his imprimatur to political cronies for the presidencies of Florida Atlantic University, University of North Florida, and Florida State University (p. 60–61).
DeSantis did much the same.
On January 6, 2023, in another act of “shock and awe,” Gov. Ron DeSantis appointed a new group of trustees to New College of Florida in Sarasota, a “hostile takeover” of the small, liberal arts school of “free thinkers.” The new board of trustees promptly rewarded former Florida House Speaker Richard Corcoran with the interim presidency and a salary of $699,999, for a school with fewer than 700 students. South Florida State College got a former GOP lawmaker and DeSantis ally as president, too.
Privatizing K-12 Public Education
Bush’s signature policy innovations, though, were in K-12 education and, again, we see DeSantis following the movement conservative goals through to their logical conclusion — the total privatization of public education.
Bush inaugurated a first-in-the-nation program of state vouchers for private schools (p. 32). Bush’s A+ Plan created a system of high-stakes standardized testing for schoolkids, whereby the state would grade schools on a scale of A through F based on student performance in reading, writing, and mathematics. If a school received an “F” grade in two of four consecutive years, students could use a voucher to attend private school.
Three other voucher programs expanded access to students with disabilities and offered corporations tax credits for contributing to voucher programs (p. 32).
The voucher programs have long been plagued by a lack of accountability, absent teacher quality standards, and no demonstrated results of their effectiveness in boosting student performance.
Gov. Ron DeSantis and the Florida legislature put the finishing touches on expanding the system to universal school vouchers in the 2023 session. What began as a $3 million outlay of public money to private schools in the 2004–2005 school year (p. 32), now is projected to rise to over $4 billion annually, according to the Florida Policy Institute.
DeSantis Expanding Security Powers in the Executive
DeSantis has expanded executive authority in new ways as well, going beyond the foundations that Jeb Bush laid for him. He created his own personal Florida State Guard and an election security police to ferret out cases of alleged voter fraud.
The Florida State Guard will be a permanent force of 1,500 personnel separate from the Florida National Guard with a budget that could grow to over $100 million. The force could respond to natural disasters but other states have dispatched them to the southern border as well. The ACLU fears it could turn Florida into a “police state,” with its authority to make arrests.
The Florida election police are a 15-person state-level law enforcement squad focusing on ensuring “election integrity” by investigating allegations of voter fraud with a now-$1.4 million budget. They arrested 20 voters prior to the 2022 elections, mostly Black voters, but many of the charges were later dropped. Both Jeb Bush and Ron DeSantis vigorously tried to prevent convicted felons from returning to the voting rolls, and the intimidation of the election police are another vehicle toward that end, after Florida voters approved a 2018 referendum facilitating voting rights restoration.
But Jeb Bush had long ago politicized the machinery of election administration. Under the constitutional changes that began with his term in office, he was allowed to appoint political cronies to Secretary of State, previously an elected position. Most famously, Katherine Harris, Secretary of State who presided over the contested 2000 election, served concurrently in that position and as co-chair of the George W. Bush’s Florida campaign for president with Jeb. Jeb Bush had long dispensed with proprieties regarding perceived impartiality, for this position or for trumpeting his brother’s campaign (p. 92).
Bush also tested the limits of Florida police powers and executive authority with the Terri Schiavo case, which “reached the US Supreme Court on six separate occasions” (p. 76). Schiavo, a brain-damaged woman being kept alive by a feeding tube in a hospital for a decade, despite her husband’s wishes to stop these measures, became a rallying symbol for Jeb Bush and the pro-life movement starting in 2003. At one point Bush allegedly sought to dispatch officers from the Florida Department of Law Enforcement to resume her feeding tube, but a judge issued a restraining order to stop them and deputized “each and every singular sheriff in the state of Florida” to protect her (p. 76). Whatever the law, it seemed that Bush would never take “no” for an answer.
The Legacy of Jeb Bush: Florida Executives in the National Shadow of Donald Trump
At the time Crew finished his book in 2010, he thought that Jeb Bush’s single biggest legacy was cutting the Intangible Personal Property Tax (p. 179). While Florida had no income tax, the intangibles tax represented a tax on stocks, bonds, mutual funds, and money market funds. Bush’s elimination of the intangibles tax constituted 30% of his total $19.1 billion tax cuts in office and substantially reduced state revenue to “starve the beast” of social services (p. 102-103). Now cool billionaires could move to Florida without a drop of sweat off their greenbacks.
To ensure tax breaks for middle- and working-class Floridians, whom he awkwardly referred to as “Joe Bag of Donuts” (like Joe Sixpack), Bush pushed for annual tax holidays for disaster preparedness and school supplies (p. 103). The average Floridian saved $16 a year with these tax holidays (p. 104).
DeSantis has continued the tax holidays and added a few of his own, along with additional tax cuts worth over several billion dollars.
But it’s his executive power grabs that ultimately define him — and define Jeb Bush, given what has unfolded after he revolutionized the executive office of the governor.
Yet both men live in Trump’s shadow, now.
Crew notes that Jeb Bush presided over widespread popular dissatisfaction with his policy initiatives, falling percentages of Republican voter registrations as governor, and declining support for the Republican Party (p. 168–169). After his brother President George W. Bush prosecuted the Iraq War and presided over a financial crisis that caused turmoil in the Florida housing market, Barack Obama went on to win Florida twice.
The biggest boost to Republican voter registrations in Florida in recent years through party switches was, in fact, Trump’s GOP primary candidacy in 2016, according to the Florida Chamber Political Institute. Trump handily beat both Jeb Bush and Senator Marco Rubio in the Florida GOP primary, effectively ending Jeb’s political career. Trump romped to victory by winning over conservative evangelicals and voters who favored the Muslim ban, according to exit polls.
Can DeSantis do any better looking into 2024? DeSantis touts citizens flocking to the “Free State of Florida” amidst pandemic lockdowns. Analysts note that Republican voter registrations have surpassed Democratic voter registrations in the state, with in-migration to the state especially favoring Republican registrations.
Naturally, DeSantis claims credit. He built it, they came, right?
Yet to the extent that voters appreciated the relatively early gubernatorial release from pandemic lockdowns, they are responding to a relief from executive authority rather than the exercise of it.
DeSantis has not taken that lesson to heart. He has run roughshod over public schoolteachers, the legal system, the LGBTQ+ community, people of color, marginalized migrant communities, and Democratic elected officials statewide. He has restricted women’s rights to reproductive healthcare in draconian fashion.
The flipside of Bush’s and DeSantis’s extreme movement conservative success in Florida may be diminished prospects for personal success in their bids to become president of the United States.
Florida, the MAGA laboratory to concoct a national blueprint for Southern conservatism, may someday be regarded as more influential for its governors’ ideas and influence on the movement than as a launching pad for the presidency. Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater had a similar kind of influence in his 1960s presidential election loss, paving the way for Ronald Reagan and eventually Donald Trump, sunnier and funnier leaders who could somehow build bigger political coalitions, even if they weren’t always enough to eke out popular-vote victories.
Bush’s legacy of executive power has never done much for Joe Bag of Donuts, but it might just help Joe Biden — or Donald Trump, once again.