Florida Gave Three Elected Officials the Power to Call You a Terrorist. What Happens When Different Officials Hold It?

Would you want this exact power sitting in the hands of a governor and cabinet you didn’t vote for? That is the question every conservative who supports HB 1471 needs to answer honestly, because the power this bill creates does not come with a partisan warranty.

HB 1471, “Systems of Law and Terrorist Organizations,” was signed by Governor DeSantis in April and took effect July 1, 2026. Sponsored by Rep. Hillary Cassel and Sen. Erin Grall, the bill lets Florida’s Chief of Domestic Security, currently FDLE Commissioner Mark Glass, recommend that an organization be designated a domestic or foreign terrorist group. The Governor and the three-member Cabinet, all Republicans, approve or reject that recommendation. Once approved, the designation is published, and the group or any member has 30 days to challenge it in circuit court in Leon County.

This is not a symbolic label. A designated organization can be administratively dissolved as a corporation. It loses eligibility for state funds and contracts. Schools with an affiliation to a designated group can lose state funding. Providing material support to a designated group becomes a crime, and students who “promote” one can face expulsion. The bill also bars Florida courts from enforcing any part of Sharia law, the provision its sponsors led with in public messaging, even though it takes up one sentence in a 28-page bill.

Real threats deserve this kind of tool. Groups that coordinate material support for terrorism, that recruit, that train, that fund violence, should lose access to public money and public institutions. That is not the part of this law in question.

On July 1, the day this law went live, DeSantis announced he had received recommendations to designate the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the Muslim Brotherhood, and Antifa as domestic terrorist organizations, alongside more than 90 foreign cartels and terror groups. This was DeSantis’s second attempt at the CAIR designation. He tried it by executive order in December 2025, CAIR sued, and a federal judge blocked it in March, ruling he lacked the legal authority to do it unilaterally. HB 1471 was the fix. As DeSantis put it at the press conference: “We did need to have more of a legal structure to be able to add teeth to these designations.”

That sentence is the whole story in miniature. The law exists because the executive wanted a designation power the courts said he didn’t have, and the Legislature built it for him.

This bill did not pass with unified conservative support. In the Senate, Republican Alexis Calatayud voted against it alongside every Democrat. And a former Republican state representative, Joel Rudman, made the argument conservatives should sit with directly: “My colleagues on the Republican side of the aisle, I’m sure they’re looking at this bill, saying, these statutes, they can’t be warped, they can’t be abused, we have no intention of abusing them. But you have to understand that every bill you pass into law, there’s going to have some unintended consequences, and you have to be prepared for how those statutes are going to be interpreted when you’re not the majority party.”

DeSantis was asked directly whether that concern had merit. He rejected it, pointing to how the Biden administration treated some of these same groups. That answer assumes Florida’s political majority holds indefinitely. It won’t. Democratic state Rep. Robin Bartleman asked the sharper version of the same question during floor debate: could a future governor and cabinet designate the National Organization for Women or Planned Parenthood as domestic terrorist organizations under this same statute, using the same “affect the conduct of government” language this bill relies on? Nothing in the bill’s text says no.

The case for this bill is not paranoid or dishonest. Genuine domestic terrorism exists. Antifa-linked violence and organizations providing material support to designated foreign terrorist groups are real problems that state government has a legitimate interest in cutting off from public money and public institutions. A state that waits for federal action before acting against a genuine threat operating inside its own borders is not being cautious, it’s being negligent.

But the design of this power does not track that legitimate interest. Three elected officials, all from the same party, decide who gets the label, with no legislative vote, no independent judicial finding before the designation takes effect, and a 30-day court challenge window that runs after the reputational and funding damage is already done. Florida Statute 775.30’s definition of terrorist activity, intimidating a civilian population, influencing government policy through intimidation, affecting government conduct through violence, sounds narrow until you remember that political advocacy organizations get accused of exactly that kind of framing by their opponents all the time. CAIR has never been criminally charged with anything. It was named, unindicted, in a 2007 terrorism-financing trial. That is the evidentiary bar this law’s first real-world use rested on.

Picture this same statute five or ten years from now, under a governor and cabinet who don’t share your values, applied to a crisis pregnancy center network, a homeschool advocacy group, or a church coalition organizing against a policy the state considers destabilizing. The statutory language, “affect the conduct of government,” “intimidate a civilian population,” is elastic enough to reach in that direction if the people holding the pen want it to. That’s not a hypothetical dreamed up by the bill’s opponents. It’s the exact question a sitting Republican legislator raised about his own party’s bill before it passed.

A principle only holds if you’re willing to apply it when the people in charge of it aren’t yours. Support cutting off material support for actual terrorism. Don’t support handing three officials, of any party, the power to decide who wears that label with no vote and no independent check before the damage is done.

This is our read of the bill. We encourage you to read it yourself and reach your own conclusions.