Jesse Scheckner
Senators aren’t giving into House attempts to force negotiations on tort reform by tacking unrelated language onto a separate proposal that Senate President Ben Albritton supports.
House members last week approved blending two bills, one focused on providing for two-way attorneys fees in health insurance lawsuits, the other creating safeguards against liability for owners of former phosphate mining lands.
The attorneys fees portion came from a measure (HB 947) whose Senate analog by Fort Myers Republican Sen. Jonathan Martin is on track to die without a hearing. The phosphate-related language was already part of the bill (SB 832) that Senators kicked back to the House on Wednesday.
Its sponsor, Zephyrhills Republican Sen. Danny Burgess, noted that the altered bill contains “some significant expansion dealing with issues of scopes of litigation that were not considered within the Senate bill.”
“I move the Senate refuse to concur (with the) House amendment … and request the House recede from the amendment,” he said to loud applause on the floor.
The onus is now on the House to either decouple the bills so SB 832 can advance without the language from HB 947 — opposed by several allies of Gov. Ron DeSantis, including former Office of Insurance Regulation Commissioner Michael Yaworksy, House Speaker Paul Renner and the Governor’s former Communications Director, Taryn Fenske — or see both bills die.
Davie Democratic Rep. Mike Gottlieb argued against combining HB 947 and SB 832, sponsored in the House by Republican Reps. Berny Jacques of Sarasota and Omar Blanco of Miami. He cited portions of House Rule 12.8, which provide that state amendments are not germane if they unreasonably alter a bill’s nature.
It “strains language beyond reason,” he said, that the two bills were at all related.
Rep. Sam Garrison, a Fleming Island Republican on track to become House Speaker in 2028, disagreed, contending the bills were “reasonably related” and could be combined in accordance with a different House rule.
Garrison added that the House was “decidedly more ambitious” than the Senate with the legislation.
House members voted 80-20 for SB 832, which Albritton voted for before it underwent its alteration in the lower chamber.
Even if the changed bill somehow bounces back to the Senate and is passed, its survival is unlikely. DeSantis has vowed to veto any bill that would roll back tort laws passed in 2022 and 2023 that, among other things, eliminated one-way attorneys fees.
