Well, that was certainly a session.

There aren’t too many updates on the bills I was watching. None of them made it out of House messages. Only one — the most egregious one I warned about in the last article – made it into law and there’s some amazing reporting from the Tampa Bay Times about it. We’ll get into that shortly.

For now, let’s look at our stats.

2025 FL Senate Session Stats

Failed		Passed
Died in Committee/Messages	65	Passed, Enrolled	107
Died on Calendar	20	Sent to Secretary of State	1
Laid on Table	115	Signed by Governor	2
Withdrawn	11	Awaiting Signature	4
Filed, not Considered	613
Total Failed	824/942	Total Passed	112/942
Percent Failed	87%	Percent Passed	11%

Not a great year, definitely reaffirming the “lamest lameduck session” when compared to previous years. That isn’t to say there aren’t some decent bills that got passed; there were a handful that were easily drowned out by all the ceremonial bills, remembrance days, and bills aimed at making Florida a little less free or healthy. It’s more that compared to years prior, even previous election years, this year was a little worse.

Let’s take a brief look at a couple bills that did manage to pass. First, SB 688 which legitimizes and establishes a Board of Naturopathic Medicine within the Department of Health. The second is HB 1471 – the bill that seeks to allow the Governor to decide who is and isn’t a terrorist and punishes students for exercising their right to free speech on campus by either taking away their visas or charging them out of state fees.

SB 688 was a bill I had initially flagged as something to watch, but it was on my “probably not making it out of committee” list. I was so wrong.

This bill, to put it bluntly, does nothing to protect people from the actual scammers in the naturopathic and supplementation world. It would still allow for practically anyone to use the titles “certified naturopath”, “traditional naturopath”, or broadly use “naturopathy” for their practice with or without licensing. So long as someone isn’t parading around using the term “naturopathic doctor”, then the Board of Naturopathic Medicine doesn’t care.

At the same time, it keeps contradicting this by saying that “naturopathy” is defined as having a basis in what the American Association of Naturopathic Physicians teaches. The Association does not provide education on naturopathy and only lists a handful of, in my opinion, colleges with suspect accreditation – like Bastyr University and Sonoran University.

Additionally, and this is rather personal, I find it suspect that all the states where naturopaths are licensed are Republican controlled states and many of those practices in those states are unable to accept insurance or Medicaid for coverage. Nothing screams “we don’t want to have a public healthcare option” louder.

What’s even more telling is that the Association’s website has a whole section dedicated to “correcting Wikipedia”. They then got locked out from editing the Wikipedia page because of “detractors.” They then go on to provide “facts and evidence” sheets about naturopathy that “correct Wikipedia’s misinformation.”

In all, this legislation is just garbage through and through. It does nothing to protect people from harm. It legitimizes suspect medicine in an attempt to not have to do anything about healthcare, while still getting to call it a healthcare bill. And it only offers the illusion of choice when most people can’t afford to see even a primary care physician in the first place.

The second awful bill I want to highlight is HB 1471 – the bill that would seek to make college students terrorists for speaking up about political issues the state doesn’t like. It would invest the governor with the power to declare terrorist groups, foreign or domestic, and outlaw the speech of those groups. It would then seek to punish people with misdemeanors and fines, but particularly it could effectively deport foreign students by revoking their visas and charging them incredibly high out of state tuition fees.

To put it plainly, this puts a lot of power into one person’s hands and makes criminals out of people who are exercising their rights.

Hope isn’t lost though.

The Tampa Bay Times has already dug into this matter and their reporting, as ever, is excellent. They have very clearly laid out how this bill came to be in the first place: a deputy legislative affairs director emailed a draft to Senator Erin Grall. These early drafts were traced back using the document’s metadata to members of DeSantis’ Office of Policy and Budget. It then mutated from there to include the language about college students.

The thing is, the SCOTUS has repeatedly ruled in favor of students when it comes to matters of exercising free speech on campus. Additionally, this bill comes on the heels of an executive order DeSantis tried to impose: attaching a blatantly discriminatory “terrorist” designation onto CAIR – the largest Muslim civil rights group in the US.

That executive order was issued an injunction when challenged by CAIR legal, the Southern Poverty Law Center, and the Muslim Legal Fund of America. CAIR-FL has also held a press conference about this bill and seems poised to act if the Governor’s office does use this to target the Muslim population of Florida. I have no doubt several groups are waiting to see how this will be applied and are waiting for the chance to take this bill to court.

We’ll see how all this shakes out over the next few months, I’m sure. Especially with midterms right around the corner.

This is also your infrequent reminder that the Governor’s seat, one US Senators seat, all 28 of the state’s US Representative seats, 20 Florida state Senator seats, all 120 Florida state Representative seats, AND most state offices are up for election. That’s a lot! And there’s been some early, minor, indication that even in Trump’s own home county…his candidates are not all that popular.

All that said, that’s it for this update. Stay safe and sane!