Brandon Larrabee - News Service of Florida

As he eyes a run for the U.S. Senate, Gov. Rick Scott on Wednesday unveiled the first piece of his pending election-year budget proposal: a $30 million pay raise for state law-enforcement officers.

Calling Gov. Rick Scott's likely bid for the U.S. Senate an "open secret" would be a misnomer — there's no secret there, open or otherwise.

Two University of Florida alumni have filed a class-action lawsuit against the state, saying lawmakers and Gov. Rick Scott funneled money that should have gone to higher education into tax cuts and savings.

Despite a bipartisan backlash against a White House commission's request for information about states' voter rolls, Gov. Rick Scott's administration is still not saying whether Florida will provide the potentially sensitive information.

Rep. Paul Renner (R-Palm Coast) emerged Friday as the Republican choice for House speaker following the 2022 elections, giving Northeast Florida a much-desired spot for the first time in two decades.

Renner was supported by fellow members of his "class”— lawmakers elected to their first full term this past November — with 16 votes, two more than he needed for the win, according to the Florida Times-Union.

It took an extension to the regular session and a special session on top of that to finally get a state spending plan for the new fiscal year, but the budget that tied up lawmakers for months finally takes effect Saturday.

TALLAHASSEE — To the extent that any legislative session is remembered, the 2017 edition might be remembered as much for what lawmakers didn't do as for what they did.

TALLAHASSEE — In a sharply worded opinion, an appeals court Tuesday overturned a Leon County judge's 2016 decision that seemed to support the "opt-out" movement that encourages parents to defy standardized testing requirements.

A Florida House panel's decision to hear Thursday from a speaker with a history of inflammatory statements about minorities and immigrants roiled the normally peaceful legislative committee week in Tallahassee and prompted Democrats to walk out of the hearing.

TALLAHASSEE — Florida residents will have until Tuesday to register to vote, after a federal judge ordered an extension of the registration deadline because of Hurricane Matthew.

PANAMA CITY BEACH — With less than a month to go before Florida could decide the fate of his campaign, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump began a swing through the state Tuesday with a nearly apocalyptic warning of the stakes of the November election.

A federal judge ordered a one-day extension in Florida's voter registration deadline and seemed ready to consider a longer delay against the backdrops of the recovery from Hurricane Matthew and one of the most heated presidential races in decades.

Updated 9/30: Little more than a month before he was set to vie for re-election, state Rep. Reggie Fullwood pleaded guilty Thursday to two counts in a federal indictment.

TALLAHASSEE — U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio, the Republican incumbent, will face Democratic Congressman Patrick Murphy in November in a high-profile race that could decide control of the Senate.As votes continued to roll in Tuesday night, Rubio and Murphy were both cruising against their primary opponents.

TALLAHASSEE — A Miami-Dade County judge ruled Monday that a state law allowing the death penalty to be imposed without a unanimous jury decision is unconstitutional, adding to the challenges facing Florida's capital punishment structure.

TALLAHASSEE — A federal court turned aside Democratic Congresswoman Corrine Brown's legal fight to keep her current district intact, setting the stage for a campaign that will range from Tallahassee to Jacksonville.

A three-judge panel based in Tallahassee unanimously ruled against Brown on Monday, saying she could not prove that a new east-west configuration of her district would dilute the ability of African-American voters to elect a candidate of their choice in 2016 or beyond. Brown's current district, which was found by the Florida Supreme Court to violate the state Constitution, ambles from Jacksonville in the north to Orlando in the south.

County supervisors of elections will see their salaries rise, under a bill signed into law Wednesday by Gov. Rick Scott.

TALLAHASSEE -- A federal judge has struck down county commission districts in a rural North Florida county -- a potentially precedent-setting decision that could play into a challenge of the state's congressional lines.

Updated Wednesday, March 16, 10:30 a.m.:

Money for the St. Johns River Ferry and developing downtown Jacksonville are among the items Gov. Rick Scott has decided to veto.

Overall, Scott is trimming more than $256 million worth of projects out of the state budget Florida lawmakers passed last week. He made the announcement Tuesday.

Presidential candidates and their supporters tried to rally voters across Florida on Monday, the last day before primary elections that could decide the future of U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio and boost the momentum of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

 Florida House and Senate leaders announced a deal on the state budget during a late-night meeting Monday, pumping more than $120 million in last-minute projects into the spending plan and setting the Legislature on course to end its annual session Friday, as scheduled.

A deal on the state's public-safety budget that lawmakers reached late Friday would not give the Department of Corrections the 734 additional positions the agency says are necessary to make Florida's prisons more secure.

The new jobs were part of an effort by the department to have corrections officers work eight-hour shifts instead of 12-hour shifts. The department has been reeling from a series of reports about issues such as contraband smuggling and abuse of inmates.

Florida State University announced Monday that it has agreed to pay almost $1 million to settle a lawsuit by a woman who accused the school's Heisman Trophy-winning quarterback of sexual assault in a case that sparked a national conversation on athletics and rape.

An election-year budget that includes huge tax cuts, record funding for public schools and a new initiative to bring jobs to Florida might be good politics for lawmakers. The question is whether they can afford it.

A state Senate redistricting plan favored by voting-rights organizations was approved Wednesday by a Leon County judge in a move that could shake the Republican Party's grip on power in the Capitol.

In choosing the new map, Circuit Judge George Reynolds also rejected a plan put forward by Senate Republican leaders as the best configuration of the chamber's 40 seats. The proposal chosen by Reynolds would lead to a roughly even number of districts favoring each party.

Arguing that an east-west configuration for her district "combines far-flung communities worlds apart culturally and geographically," lawyers for U.S. Rep. Corrine Brown (D-FL5) asked a federal judge Tuesday to void Florida's latest congressional redistricting plan.

The state's largest teachers union filed a complaint Monday over a program that rewards teachers for high scores on college admissions tests, saying the "Best and Brightest" bonuses discriminate on the basis of age and race.

The charges, filed by the Florida Education Association with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the Florida Commission on Human Relations, come weeks before lawmakers are set to consider extending the bonus program, which was added to the state budget during a June special session.

The final state redistricting trial in a nearly four-year legal battle over Florida's political boundaries ended with both sides trading charges of partisan gerrymandering, some of them the same accusations that have been hurled in court since the beginning.

In closing arguments Thursday before Leon County Circuit Judge George Reynolds, lawyers for the state Senate and a coalition of voting-rights groups made final pitches for their versions of a map for the Senate's 40 districts.

The decisions prompting state Senate leaders to choose a redistricting plan they recommended to a Leon County judge took center stage Monday, the first day of a trial to determine whether that map should go to the Florida Supreme Court.