(02/26/2026) The Florida Senate’s Appropriations Committee on Criminal and Civil Justice voted 5-3 on Wednesday to advance SB 1632, the bill that would allow state officials to designate organizations as domestic terrorists. It was the bill’s second committee stop. It will not see a third.

The hearing began at 1:30 in the afternoon, broke around 5 PM, and reconvened at 6:20 PM for another hour — a marathon session that stretched well past its scheduled window. Over an hour of that was public testimony — and approximately 95% of the speakers opposed the bill. The opposition was broad and deep: civil liberties organizations, faith leaders, educators, students, and community advocates all warned that the legislation’s vague language could be weaponized against constitutionally protected speech and advocacy.

The three Democrats on the committee — Senators Rosalind Osgood, Tina Scott Polsky, and Carlos Guillermo Smith — pressed the bill’s sponsor, Sen. Erin Grall, R-Fort Pierce, with detailed questions about the bill’s vagueness, its potential to silence free speech, and its implementation. Grall’s answers were telling. When asked how the bill would prevent the kind of abuse critics feared — political targeting, suppression of religious practice, chilling of campus speech — Grall repeatedly fell back on assurances. She didn’t think the bill would be weaponized. She didn’t believe it would be used to silence free speech or religious practice.

What she could not do was point to specific language in the bill that would prevent those outcomes. “I don’t think it will happen” is not a safeguard. It’s a hope.

The SPLC’s Florida policy director, Jonathan Webber, put the constitutional stakes plainly: the legislation would allow an organization to be branded a domestic terrorist organization “without any prior criminal conviction of the group, its leaders or its members. That is punishment before due process.”

Even the bill’s supporters showed cracks. Committee Chair Ileana Garcia voted yes — but expressed serious concerns about the bill and could not guarantee she would support it in a future vote. It was an extraordinary moment: the person presiding over the hearing advanced the bill while signaling she might not back it again.

Grall, for her part, acknowledged the concerns. She told senators she was committed to continuing to work on the bill before it reached the full Senate floor. “I give you my commitment that I will work on this to try and make it something that you can be comfortable with, because it is about our domestic security,” she said.

The bill had been temporarily postponed from a scheduled February 18 hearing before being taken up on February 25. When it finally passed 5-3 with a committee substitute, it had cleared two of its three assigned committees: Judiciary (8-3 on February 3) and now Appropriations on Criminal and Civil Justice. Its third and final stop was the Senate Fiscal Policy Committee.

It never got there. The next day — February 26 — Senate leadership withdrew SB 1632 from the Fiscal Policy Committee, making it available for a full Senate floor vote without further committee review. Less than 24 hours after the bill nearly died in a marathon hearing where the committee chair herself couldn’t commit to supporting it again, leadership chose to remove the next opportunity for scrutiny rather than risk the bill stalling.

The bill that Grall couldn’t fully defend, that the committee chair wouldn’t fully endorse, and that the public overwhelmingly opposed is now headed to the Senate floor — without one more committee hearing standing in its way.

The House version, HB 1471, is expected before the House Judiciary Committee this week — its final committee stop before the full House floor. The session ends March 13.