Last month we asked the question: Can NASA headquarters land here in Sunshine State?
It is primarily about moving the headquarters to Cape Canaveral based on a push by Gov. Ron DeSantis. Now it appears that DeSantis has some allies in Washington on the issue.
US Senators Ashley Moody and Rick Scott in Florida are pushing for new legislation to make travel from Washington permanent. Efficient integration of the Canaveral Act Aerospace Program (CAPE) would shift operations to Brevard County as a way to save money, according to Scott.
“The move to Florida will not only save Americans taxes, but will also streamline sales and increase the efficiency of this critical industry, close to the largest workforce ready to help private partners and America achieve their space exploration goals,” Scott said.
As mentioned before, this move makes sense. Why lead the operation from Washington when the action is taking place at the Kennedy Space Center? There are already ongoing renovations independent of this push. What are some upgrades to make it a suitable location for NASA headquarters?
President Donald Trump needs to check with his adviser Elon Musk to see how good Florida is for space sex.
This is no longer a dream of a governor. It looks like there’s a lift-off.
Now it’s in our weekly game of our winners and losers.
winner
Honorable mention: Endangered Florida Panthers. Big News for Environmentalists Florida has partnered with the Environmental Protection Agency to expand Wakha Hatchee Strand Preserve State Park by adding 60 acres of acres.
Conservation Florida purchased the land from Avatar Properties. It was then moved to the state park system for state management. That means there is no additional construction on the land.
That’s good news for the Panthers, known to roam the reserve. The Panther population has suffered 36 deaths over the past year, with 29 people struggling with cars. Conservation Florida estimates that between 120 and 230 panthers remain in Florida.
This makes it even more important to move to further protect more of this important land.
“Whakahatchee Strand is a really special place,” said Traci Deen, CEO of Florida. “When we visited the parcels we acquired once, our team came across rare plants and animals that we spent our lives trying to see. We are proud to save one of the state’s most extraordinary wild places and help us add them to our award-winning state park system.”
The biggest winner is Anna Paulina Luna. Members of Congress love to promote their legislative victory. And they are important. We devote a significant portion of our delegation newsletter twice a week to covering these bills, big or small.
However, you deserve additional credit when you get your bills on the floor without going through the standard process of registering leadership.
Luna achieved such a feat using what is called a discharge petition. So you need to vote for what 218 members agree to.
You may think it happens more frequently. But much of Washington is made up of hard votes and backroom deals and insulation members. If you are given the opportunity to win a large number of votes, there are many items that will be handed over in a second. Instead, they often don’t hit the floor due to Washington’s plot.
And that’s why this kind of movement is so rare. If the majority party wants to vote for something, the speaker will almost certainly bring it to the floor.
But that wasn’t the case, but Luna pushed her brand new mom to allow her to vote on behalf of her. The joint vote was used during the community pandemic, but it was favorable to Republicans. They took the Chamber of Commerce and a proxy vote was issued.
Luna, who gave birth during the first period, says moms who have been recovering from birth for the first six weeks need to make an exception.
Again, this is likely to pass through a majority. But speaker Mike Johnson disagrees with that.
That is, Luna turns to the discharge petition process, and this week she has earned the 218 votes needed to force her vote, thanks mainly to her democratic support. US Rep. Byron Donald was the only Republican on the Florida delegation signing the petition.
Although the votes have not yet occurred, Luna already deserves great credit for jumping over the hoops and defiing party leadership to force them to vote in the first place.
And she’s right about this issue. The humble author of the column welcomed the boy in January. The idea that women are expected to rush back to Washington to join the legislative process is absolutely crazy. It’s somewhat incredible that a family value party doesn’t essentially see it.
It’s good that Luna is working on this.
The biggest winner: Donald. Donald lands here to continue his red-hot momentum with the race of the governor of Florida, rather than to land on the right side of Luna’s discharge petition.
Again, we are almost a year and a half away from the votes cast in this contest. But Donald continues to look like a clear favorite to win a Republican nomination, becoming the state’s next governor in increasingly reddish Florida.
Donald already has the rise of Donald Trump, which is definitely enough to seal this thing already in the GOP base.
But the advantage of securing the president’s support is not just his voice in favor. It’s everyone on his orbit, and it’s much of the existing Republican power structure, and it’s lined up behind Donald.
I started watching some of it this week. Donald Trump Jr., of course, supports Donald’s bid. So does Charlie Kirk, one of the nation’s largest conservative influencers, running a powerful Turning Point USA organization that has been swaying majorly among Republican voters.
However, it was the club of the Growth PAC, which announces support for Donald, that started this strong week from Donald.
It is worth noting not only for the club for growth in the conservative movement, but also for the group’s support of DeSantis during its first run in 2018. Now, DeSantis floats with his wife as his successor, so the group is out in the DeSantis dynasty and supports Donald instead.
Being able to flip such a prominent group speaks often about Donald’s ability to go forward to continuing to secure support from the various pillars of the Republican base. This is just the beginning.
loser
Disgraceful mention: Dave Weldon. Weldon joins fellow Florida men Chad Cronister and Matt Getz to win a Premier Post nomination in the second Trump administration.
Along the way, Weldon became the next director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. However, according to reports, Weldon was heading for a confirmation hearing Thursday morning, and he received a call saying the Trump administration was pulling Weldon’s name out of consideration.
it hurts.
There were no official comments from Weldon or the White House on the reasons for the move. However, Weldon’s previous vaccine skepticism reportedly led to several major senators opposed his appointment. Since Weldon had no votes, Team Trump made sure to spare himself the humiliation of candidates down.
This means that the former Florida Congressman will not return to Washington in the end. It is unclear who Trump will lead the agency.
The biggest loser: the family Democrat. Republicans hold the vast majority in both rooms in Congress, and have already embarrassed Tallahassee Democrats to some extent.
But somehow, they continue to find ways to dig up worse press.
Remember the Democrats attacked in 2024 and try to run candidates across every seat on the poll to break the GOP’s super royalty. They failed.
It then announced that two Democrats were exchanging parties after the election. They showed a variety of reasons, but the real reason was that democratic brands became so toxic that they felt better if they joined the Red Team with the odds of expanding their respective political careers.
This week, Democrats made public their private explosion. And Spatt included the top Democrats in the house.
Our own Jacob Ogles defeated the news of House Democrat leader Fentris Driskel, who stands up against Rep. Jose Alvarez of Kissimmee after Alvarez voted at a committee hearing to advance laws that would make it difficult to obtain future petitions regarding Florida’s votes.
It’s not a voting on the floor, but sometimes Democrats can get it out of the committee before they can vote to promote bills from the committee. Also, Democrat leaders consider the bill to be highly toxic and require disapproval throughout the process.
For Doriskel, the bill reportedly fell to the latter camp. And Doriskel said she was not given the lead in Alvarez’s decision to vote in favor.
“Part of the culture that is about to develop here understands that the party is a coalition in some respects and may not vote the same thing on all bills,” Driskel said. “What I ask is that people have let us know.”
The lobbyists have shown Florida politics that Alvarez also seems to have fallen into the bill before he even heard “yes” and praised it in the committee he voted for. Alvarez said on his side that Doriskel had angered him during the conflict.
“To talk to another member of the house like that was a huge disdain for her,” Alvarez said. I was in public office long enough to know that I would never tell people to vote. ”
It was just the beginning of the tea that spilled out of this meeting. And the big thing unknown to Democrat voters across the state, and to us, if Democrats can’t even work together in their own game plan, how do they see Republicans dominate the nation and dig into the hole they find themselves?
As we keep saying: Florida is now a red state. And it will stay that way with a Democrat-following clown show.
The biggest loser: Tampa Bay baseball. And that’s all. The contract to develop a historic gas factory district and build a new stadium for the rays is officially dead.
Rays owner Stuart Sternberg made the announcement in a social media post ahead of the March 31 deadline for the team to place their final signatures in the deal.
And the face that the Rays no longer have a future home makes them doubt the entire team presence in the Tampa Bay Area.
Right now there are some security here. DeSantis spoke with MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred on Friday, saying Manfred is “committed” to finding the location where Rays was placed.
And Sternberg has stepped out of his existing contract, but he has opened up some kind of path to build a new deal, but it is unclear how viable it is. Is it a viable option to look at Tampa rather than St. Pete? The investor group reportedly is interested in purchasing the rays and is committed to keeping them in the Tampa Bay Area.
So this could end well. However, there is no longer certainty and we have seen a lot of bad things happen when team owners can’t get the deal they want. Look at the sad saga of another MLB franchise, Auckland A.
To us and everyone else, this looked like a completed deal last summer when St. Pete and Pinellas County signed a deal. But somehow we ended here because of a series of extraordinary events prompted by the act of nature. Before Hurricane Milton’s hit, it seemed like there was a better chance of the Ray Mullins 2025 World Series than the deal fell apart. Still, I’m here.
This is documentary material at this point. I hope there’s a happy ending where Rays is at home. But until we’re on that set – at this time, fans need to wonder what the future holds for this team.
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