I had Pence and the CDC director down at Port Everglades talking about cruise ships, the second week of March, and no one was talking about shutting down the country.

Ron DeSantis

If it gets to the point where they're trying to enforce, you know, my view would be, don't comply, and we would support the legislature taking some of the stimulus money and using it to pay off the fines the businesses incur for not complying.

If you're not being treated well.

We are not in Florida going to allow any media-driven hysteria to do anything to infringe people's individual freedoms when it comes to any type of COVID variants.

Nobody should lose their job due to heavy-handed COVID mandates, and we had a responsibility to protect the livelihoods of the people of Florida.

I told Floridians that we would protect their jobs, and today we made that the law, nobody should lose their job due to heavy-handed COVID mandates, and we had a responsibility to protect the livelihoods of the people of Florida. I’m thankful to the Florida Legislature for joining me in standing up for freedom.

We need to stop bossing people around, we've got to stop the coercion. We've got to stop browbeating people.

If even a fraction of them decide that this is not something they want to do and leave, this will cause a lot of these health systems to hemorrhage.

No cop, no firefighter, no nurse, nobody should be losing their jobs because of these jobs, we have got to stand up for people and protect their jobs and protect their livelihoods.

Once these areas go deep blue they get destroyed, how many places that are deep blue are well governed in this country? Can you name me some?

When you look at the Biden — when you look at the Brandon administration.

The federal government has no right to tell parents that in order for their kids to attend school in person, they must be forced to wear a mask all day, every day, many Florida schoolchildren have suffered under forced masking policies, and it is prudent to protect the ability of parents to make decisions regarding the wearing of masks by their children.

As the rest of the nation faces rampant inflation and businesses stare down unprecedented supply chain problems, our message is this: Florida is here, we have capacity, we have incentive packages to help businesses who want to move here and we are going to make sure Americans get their Christmas gifts this season.

If somebody is symptomatic, of course they stay home. If there's a close contact, but somebody has not developed any symptoms -- you monitor them, you notify the parent, the parent always has the right to have their kids stay home, if they think that's in the best interest of the student and the family 100 percent, we would not want to intrude on that. But if a parent has a healthy child, that child has a right to be in school.

We're going to make sure we leave no stone unturned, whoever needs a treatment, we're going to work like hell to get them the treatment.

So if you look at places here in Alachua County, like the city of Gainesville, I mean that's millions and millions of dollars potentially in fines. Orange County -- many, many more than that.

I just think it's fundamentally wrong. We should not be allowing the federal government to attack people's livelihoods.

My message from Florida is this: When Joe Biden violates the Constitution, when Joe Biden attacks the jobs of Floridians and Americans, when Joe Biden targets the livelihood of Florida families and American families, I am fighting back against him.

What we have found is, you know, in the trial courts in Tallahassee, state and federal, we typically lose if there is a political component to it. But then in the appeals court, we almost always win, and so I don't think( the judge) is going to lift the stay... but if it is lifted I am confident that that will be reinstated at the 11th Circuit.

What they did in Texas was interesting, and I haven’t really been able to look enough about it, they’ve basically done this through private right of action, so it’s a little bit different than how a lot of these debates have gone, so we’ll have to look, I’m going to look more significantly at it, i do think that at the end of the day the science on this has been very powerful now for a long time, you go back 40 years ago what people thought versus what they can see now, very very powerful, so I’ve always been somebody that really does support protections for life, as best as we can do.

We think the parents are best situated to make that decision and if these entities are going to violate state law... there's consequences for that.