| | | | |  | | By Kimberly Leonard and Kierra Frazier | |  Buildings sit along the coast line as the rain and storm surge from Hurricane Debby inundate a neighborhood on August 05, 2024, in Cedar Key, Florida. | Joe Raedle/Getty Images | Good morning and welcome to Tuesday. Florida is beginning to recover from Hurricane Debby now that the storm has moved into Georgia. At least four people have been killed in Florida, including a 13-year-old boy in Levy County who died after a tree crushed his mobile home, Gov. Ron DeSantis said during a Monday afternoon press conference. Nearly 108,000 were still without power as of this morning, according to Poweroutage.us, after hundreds of thousands had their power restored throughout the course of Monday, POLITICO's Bruce Ritchie reported. DeSantis said that new flood protection devices deployed around utility substations prevented more widespread outages. The hurricane made landfall as a Category 1 storm and then downgraded to a tropical storm as it slowly made its way across land, heading east across north Florida before tracking toward Georgia and South Carolina, where heavy rainfall and flooding is still anticipated. DeSantis warned that Debby was a “very saturating, wet storm” that led to high rainfall and flooding, which could persist throughout the week. Reps. Kat Cammack (R-Fla.) and Jared Moskowitz (D-Fla.) sent a letter on behalf of the Florida delegation to President Joe Biden yesterday asking him to revise his disaster declaration to include emergency assistance for debris removal. Florida’s director of emergency management, Kevin Guthrie, said during Monday's press conference that only the emergency protective measures declaration that helps with tasks like evacuations and sheltering got approved so far — which he noted wasn’t unusual. The state could again ask for the declaration by assessing its damage starting today, he said, and then provide new documentation about it for the federal government. DeSantis said he and Guthrie would be touring and inspecting disaster areas today to survey the damage. “We will be on the road [Tuesday], and we will be going to affected areas and continuing with our relief and support efforts,” he said. The storm also disrupted elements of the 2024 election. Early voting for the primary was supposed to start yesterday for voters in many of Florida’s counties. But at least half a dozen counties — including Duval, where Jacksonville is located — postponed early voting. The policy aspect of storm handling ahead of the election is also playing out. Some Democrats, such as Rep. Kathy Castor and congressional candidate Whitney Fox, blasted a portion of “Project 2025” that calls for the next GOP administration to break up and downsize the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The project's authors accuse NOAA of being "one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry.” Among its proposals are to move the National Weather Service’s functions to the commercial market, saying private companies such as AccuWeather do a better job forecasting storms. “Project 2025” was assembled by the Heritage Foundation and former aides to former President Donald Trump, although he and his campaign officials have disavowed the 900-page document. But that hasn’t stopped Democrats from using it to warn voters about what a second Trump term would look like. WHERE’S RON? DeSantis is holding a press conference at 10:30 a.m. with Guthrie in Steinhatchee. Have a tip, story, suggestion, birthday, anniversary, new job, or any other nugget in the campaign reporting that Playbook should look at? Get in touch at: kleonard@politico.com.
| | | | During unprecedented times, POLITICO Pro Analysis gives you the insights you need to focus your policy strategy. Live briefings, policy trackers, and and people intelligence secures your seat at the table. Learn more. | | | | | |  | ... DATELINE TALLAHASSEE ... | | OPEN CARRY LEGAL FIGHT — “Gun Owners of America fights Florida's ban on carrying firearms openly: 'Blatant infringement',” by Fox News’ Chris Pandolfo. “Gun Owners of America (GOA) is filing a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida that seeks to have the 1893 gun restriction declared unconstitutional and a court order to block enforcement of the law. The challenged statute makes it "unlawful for any person to openly carry on or about his or her person any firearm or electric weapon or device." PRONOUN DEBATE — “Teachers unions urge appeals court to uphold challenge to Florida’s teacher pronoun law,” by News Service of Florida’s Jim Saunders. “Accusing Florida of ‘dangerous political theater,’ state and national teachers unions have urged an appeals court to side with a transgender Hillsborough County teacher who challenged a law requiring educators to use pronouns that align with their sex assigned at birth. The Florida Education Association, the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers last week filed a 47-page brief arguing that the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals should uphold a district judge’s decision that the law violated the First Amendment rights of teacher Katie Wood.”
| | PENINSULA AND BEYOND | | | |  Opposition leader Maria Corina Machado, left, and opposition candidate Edmundo Gonzalez hold up vote tally sheets from the top of a truck during a protest against the official presidential election results declaring President Nicolas Maduro the winner in Caracas, Venezuela, on July 30, 2024. | Cristian Hernandez/AP Photo | ESCALATING — “Venezuela’s top prosecutor announces criminal probe of opposition leaders,” reports The Associated Press. “Venezuela’s top prosecutor on Monday announced a criminal investigation against the opposition’s presidential candidate Edmundo González and its leader María Corina Machado over their call on the armed forces to abandon their support for President Nicolás Maduro and to stop repressing demonstrators. Attorney General Tarek William Saab’s statement tied the investigation directly to a written appeal the two members of the opposition sent hours earlier about Maduro and the demonstrators who have come out in force to defend their votes in the July 28 election.” ‘WATCHED ON ALL SIDES’ — “This man holds the Venezuelan regime together. Here’s why Maduro doesn’t trust him,” by Antonio Maria Delgado of the Miami Herald. “As Nicolas Maduro intensifies the crackdown against protesters and dissidents in what is seen as the biggest challenge to his rule since he came to power, the embattled Venezuelan strongman has turned to Cuban intelligence agents to keep an eye on members of the military who might privately be unsure about his claim that he won last week’s presidential election. And few are being watched as closely as Maduro’s own defense minister, Vladimir Padrino López, amid Maduro’s growing distrust in the country’s armed forces.” POWER OF ATTORNEY INVESTIGATION — “Regina Hill used elderly woman’s credit after failing to qualify for home loan: investigators,” reports the Orlando Sentinel’s Annie Martin. “After Orlando City Commissioner Regina Hill struggled to obtain a home loan, she used a document that bore signs of forgery to leverage an elderly constituent’s superior credit for a government-backed mortgage, investigative records show. That document bears the name of a politically connected notary who is a friend and former campaign field director for Hill, according to documents and interviews recently released to the Orlando Sentinel from the Florida Department of Law Enforcement investigation.”
| | CAMPAIGN MODE | | GROWING SUPPORT — “The number of political committees aimed at defeating abortion rights amendment in Florida is growing,” by Florida Phoenix’s Mitch Perry. “There is now a fourth political action committee formed to oppose the proposed abortion-rights constitutional amendment on the ballot in Florida this November, and a fifth may be about to launch.” LATEST DONATIONS — “Group backing marijuana legalization takes in $116K in last week of July,” reports Christine Jordan Sexton of Florida Politics. “Smart & Safe Florida, which has raised nearly $67 million over the past two years to try to legalize recreational marijuana, received $100,000 from Insa, which operates several medical marijuana dispensaries across the state. The campaign report also showed that Verano Holdings donated more than $9,000 worth of T-shirts to the committee.” ACCUSATIONS — “‘A nasty race.’ Bracy and Thompson square off for Senate in Orange County,” by the Orlando Sentinel’s Jeffrey Schweers. “From the start of the campaign, [Randolph] Bracy, 47, a business consultant and former state senator, has accused incumbent Geraldine Thompson of being an ineffective lawmaker, inflating her record and not living in her district, as state law requires. To defend herself Thompson crashed the June press conference Bracy held to announce his intent to sue her over the residency issue. Court records do not show he has filed a lawsuit. Thompson, 75, a former Valencia College administrator and veteran politician, in turn accused Bracy of the same residency problem, saying he lives outside the district in a lakeside compound he and his new wife bought in January.”
| | TRUMPLANDIA AND THE SWAMP | | TRUMP INSIDER — “The woman who engineered Donald Trump’s rise from the ashes of 2020,” reports POLITICO’s Meridith McGraw in an excerpt of her new book shared with Vanity Fair. “One of the main reasons they had been successful in Florida, [Susie Wiles] said, was that she was from the state and knew the laws and the people. In the 2020 campaign, she explained, there were too many staffers who were dispatched to places where they didn’t understand their own environment, let alone the electorate, and so when things inevitably went wrong, they did not have the connections or resources to fix them. And she would know. Doing just that—knowing who the players are and building relationships in the world of politics—was something Wiles had worked hard at for decades.”
| | DATELINE D.C. | | | | 
A sign is displayed on a Google building at their campus in Mountain View, California, on Sept. 24, 2019. | Jeff Chiu/AP | FLORIDA PART OF LANDMARK WIN — “DOJ, states win Google search antitrust case,” reports POLITICO’s Josh Sisco. “The Justice Department and several dozen state attorneys general won a sweeping victory against Google Monday as a federal judge ruled that the search giant illegally monopolized the online search and advertising markets over the past decade. In a 286-page ruling U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta in Washington, D.C., ruled that Google locked up some 90 percent of the internet search market through a partnership with Apple to be the default search provider in its Safari web browser, alongside similar agreements with handset makers and mobile carriers such Samsung and Verizon. Mehta also found that Google disadvantaged Microsoft in the market for ads displayed next to search results, allowing it to illegally dominate that market as well.” GIVEN THE GREEN LIGHT — “Biden parole program migrants with already-approved travel should be able to fly to U.S.,” by the Miami Herald’s Jacqueline Charles and Syra Ortiz Blanes. “Nationals of Haiti, Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela who have been authorized to come to the United States under a Biden administration humanitarian parole process should not be affected by an ongoing review of the program – unless they had their travel authorizations revoked. On Saturday, travelers in some destinations were prevented from boarding flights through the federal program, which allows people from the four countries to live and work in the United States for two years.” SENIOR HEALTH CARE EFFECTS — “The one-hour nurse visits that let insurers collect $15 billion from Medicare,” by The Wall Street Journal’s Anna Wilde Mathews, Christopher Weaver, Tom McGinty and Mark Maremont. “A Wall Street Journal investigation of insurer home visits found the companies pushed nurses to run screening tests and add unusual diagnoses, turning the roughly hourlong stops in patients’ homes into an extra $1,818 per visit, on average, from 2019 to 2021. Those payments added up to about $15 billion during that period, according to a Journal analysis of Medicare data.”
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