TAMPA — For a man who’s been in his job for 14 months, Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier has had the uncanny ability to generate an inordinate amount of headlines, sometimes for some quite controversial decisions.
While that could help his name recognition as he goes before the voters for the first time in his life in November, it also creates potential pitfalls.
Take the issue of guns.
A year ago, Uthmeier announced that he and Gov. Ron DeSantis believed that Florida’s 2018 law banning individuals under 21 years of age from purchasing long guns was unconstitutional, so therefore he was directing his office not to defend it.
Then, in September, after the First District Court of Appeals ruled that the 1987 law banning open carry in Florida was unconstitutional, the AG declared that in light of that ruling he was declaring that open carry is now the law of the state.
Most recently, he has contended that the Florida law banning convicted felons from possessing firearms is unconstitutional when it relates to people who have not committed a violent crime and are considered “nondangerous.” That’s despite strong pushback from all 20 of Florida’s state attorneys, Republicans and Democrats alike.
“Where I make these decisions not to enforce certain Florida laws, that is based on the oath I take,” Uthmeier told a crowd of more that 100 people who gathered Friday at the Cuban Club in Tampa’s Ybor City for the Tampa Tiger Bay Club’s monthly meeting. “My first oath to the people of Florida when I put up my hand is to uphold and defend our Constitution.”
Uthmeier, 38, joined the governor’s office as deputy general counsel in 2019 and later became general counsel. He graduated from the University of Florida and earned his law degree from Georgetown University.
Hope Florida controversy
He was serving as DeSantis’ chief of staff in 2024 when he chaired a political action committee (called Keep Florida Clean) working to defeat Amendment 3, which would have legalized recreational cannabis if approved. That political committee’s work was boosted by $10 million recovered from a Medicaid overbilling settlement and routed through the Hope Florida Foundation.
Hope Florida is a community-based, state-wide welfare assistance initiative launched in 2021 by First Lady Casey DeSantis.
A grand jury was empaneled in Leon County last year to investigate possible criminal wrongdoing from that settlement. In February, the Florida Trident reported that the grand jury investigating the case had produced a report — called a presentment — which remains confidential while a legal challenge by the Florida Center for Government Accountability plays out.
The Miami Herald recently reported that Uthmeier declined to say whether he has asked a judge to keep the grand jury report secret.
During a Q&A with Tampa Tiger Bay Club members on Friday, radio talk-show host Shelley Reback asked Uthmeier whether he had objected to releasing the report and, if he hadn’t, why won’t he call for its release?
Uthmeier responded that by law he’s not allowed to confirm or deny that there is grand jury report, adding that “nobody did anything wrong.”
“This has been a politically motivated and media-driven farce,” he said, noting that his work with Keep Florida Clean was voluntary and that he was fighting against a proposal that would have allowed “somebody to have a constitutional right to possess 150 joints and smoke it right here.”
Civil rights laws no longer valid?
On the Martin Luther King Jr. federal holiday in January, Uthmeier provocatively declared in an advisory legal opinion that more than 80 state laws aimed at protecting minority employees and businesses were no longer valid, arguing they violated the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause.
“Florida laws requiring race-based state action are presumptively unconstitutional under the Fourteenth Amendment,” he said in a social media post announcing the opinion.
A group of Black Democratic lawmakers blasted the move days later in the Capitol. Some insisted Uthmeier should be suspended for his actions, since DeSantis did the same to Democratic state attorneys Andrew Warren in 2022 and Monique Worrell in 2023.
The attorney general disagreed. “They were picking and choosing what laws to enforce based on their own policy preferences, not based on any question of constitutionality or legality,” he said of the local prosecutors.
Over the past year, Uthmeier has been aggressive in threatening to remove locally elected officials in Florida over policies on working with the federal government on immigration enforcement. Most recently, they included Tampa Mayor Jane Castor.
“If somebody’s indicating that they’re no longer going to engage in the 287(g) process, you’re no longer going to provide support when asked, without a good justification, you’re breaking the law,” he asserted, referring to the formal, voluntary partnerships between U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and local law enforcement agencies.
He added that once he provided that information to Castor, she realized, “I better be square with the law, so she decided to pull back and changed her position.”
The attorney general didn’t back down when he was accused by another audience member of being part of an administration that has shown “hostility” towards the LGBTQ youth community. Uthmeier replied that, while he respected the LGBTQ community, “this effort to trans and mutate children has got to stop,” generating a mixture of boos and cheers.
He went on to boast that his office has brought legal actions against several healthcare associations that have encouraged parents to engage in what some call gender reassignment surgery and others as gender-affirming care. And then he got personal, referring to his six-year-old daughter as a “tomboy.”
“She wants to dress like her brother,” he said. “She wants to run out and kick the soccer ball. She’s not in public school but I’d be worried if she was because somebody might say, ‘You can be a man if you want to be a man,’” a comment that mostly elicited boos.
UF law side gig
One question that seemed to catch the attorney general off-balance involved the revelation first reported by the Miami Herald that he is making $100,000 a year as an adjunct professor at the University of Florida’s Levin College of Law for two hours of instruction per week, a salary that makes him the highest-paid adjunct law professor at UF in at least a quarter century.
“I think the students get a lot out of it,” he said, a sentence he repeated two more times in his response. He added the the media haven’t reported that Florida State University “for years has had an even higher-paid position for our Solicitor General Office,” a position now held by Jeffrey DeSousa.
According to the office of attorney general’s website, Florida’s solicitor general serves as the Richard Ervin Visiting Professor at the Florida State University College of Law. The Phoenix reached out to the FSU College of Law to confirm Uthmeier’s statement. A spokesperson said that the school was “processing the request.”
A member of the Tampa Tiger Bay Club was happy to have Uthmeier appear in person, as the club’s previous entreaties to top GOP elected officials over the years have always been declined.
Uthmeier is expected to face former Democratic state Sen. José Javier Rodríguez in the general election for attorney general in November.
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