During a press conference to announce his Freedom First Budget proposal in Tallahassee, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis pushed back against Florida Democratic State Senators for resisting his past efforts to keep the state open during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Gov. DeSantis said that if Democrats had their way, “They would have locked down and cost hundreds of thousands of jobs.”
DeSantis then took a victory lap around Democratic lawmakers by pointing out that his administration had stood up for working-class Floridians and saved countless jobs, whereas if Democrats had their way and shut down the state, millions of Floridians would have lost their jobs.
“They criticized me for keeping the state open. They criticized me for getting our kids back into school. Just think if we had not done that, the destruction that would have happened, the unemployment rate that we would see,” Gov. DeSantis. “We’ve saved the livelihoods of so many people who are hard-working, who don’t have the luxury of working from home. We stood up for them time and time again.
DeSantis continued, adding that under his leadership, he signed a bill into law “to protect people from losing their jobs over mask mandates,” a measure that DeSantis said every single Senate Democrat “voted against.
“When we did the bill to protect people from losing their jobs over mask mandates. Every Democrat in the Senate voted against it. They were all in favor of people losing their jobs —cops, firefighters, people that work for private businesses, nurses,” added DeSantis, We’ve stood up for those folks and we’ve been able to save more jobs than anyone’s been able to do.”
Florida’s 2022-2023 legislative session begin next year on January 11 and end on March 11.
