Rep. Christine Hunschofsky, D-Parkland, will take over as House minority leader after the November elections.
Hunschofsky was elected to the House in 2020, after serving as mayor of Parkland. During her four-year tenure as mayor, she led the Broward County city through a major flood, a hurricane and a mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, where 14 students and three staff members were killed.
The News Service of Florida has five questions for Christine Hunschofsky.
Q: What bill have you filed this year that you’re the most passionate about?
HUNSCHOFSKY: I’m quite passionate about all my bills. I think all my bills are really good.
I do a lot of work on all my bills, and I don't file anything I don't believe in, but I have a mental health AI bill that is dealing with how AI can assist a psychologist or social worker or a mental-health counselor, but it can't replace them in the practice that they do.
They can use it as a tool, as assistance for research or whatever they're doing, but the actual work of the practice or the therapy is through the professional. … It's to make sure that when people are seeking therapy, they're going to a licensed human being versus technology somewhere. It's to protect the patient, and it's also to protect the integrity of the professional, and just to put some clarifying guidelines.
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And this is a bill that I've enjoyed working on where we went out to all the stakeholders and said, this is what we want to do. This is our beginning language.
I love this process. I love the process of seeing an issue that we want to address, putting some preliminary language together, and then going out to the stakeholders and saying, OK, let's talk about what makes sense, what doesn't make sense, where there might be an unintended consequence, and kind of that sausage-making process is one of the things I absolutely love about the policy side of the work we do, because you learn so much in that process.
Q: You were the mayor of Parkland at the time of the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in 2018, which I believe was the worst school shooting in our state's history at the time. The House seems intent on repealing a part of a school-safety package that raised the age to purchase long guns from 18 to 21. You’ve also sponsored a bill that would clarify a court ruling that struck down the state’s prohibition against openly carrying guns. Do you think the gun issue is going to be addressed at all this year by the Legislature?
HUNSCHOFSKY: I filed a bill this year to close the open-carry loophole. Through the courts, the open-carry ban in Florida was lifted. It was deemed unconstitutional. All of a sudden, open carry was allowed in the state of Florida.
However, when you look at our Florida statutes that deal with places that you are not allowed to bring a handgun, like a government meeting and places like that, the sensitive places or protected places, those places now in statute say you can't bring a handgun, you can't bring a concealed weapon, but they are silent on any firearm, so they don't address an AR-15.
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All I've done with the legislation that I filed is, instead of it being you can't bring a handgun or a concealed weapon, you can't bring any firearm or weapon.
I've changed none of the places. I've made it as clean as possible, just to bring us back to the status quo that everybody agreed there are certain places where you should not be able to bring a firearm. And I've had great conversations with people who are not on the same political side of the aisle that I am, but who care about safety, and I talked to people in law enforcement.
I've talked to people who are state attorneys. And everybody agrees that this is something that should be done. Yet I have not gotten any inclination that it's going to move at this point in the session, and that is something I find very sad, because the topic of firearms has become so politicized that we can't even seem to have a normal conversation anymore.
Privately, everybody off the record and behind the scenes is willing to have a conversation, but there's this fear of having a conversation in public about it, or even opening it up for a conversation. And, like, I don't just talk to people who agree with me on every issue. I actually often enjoy my conversations more with people who don't agree with me, because they're always informative.
My job is to learn about where people are on things. … I've talked to gun owners, people who own AR-15s, and they and I are much more aligned on these issues than you would ever know on X or on any headline anywhere. I just wish we could get back to having these normal conversations that we have in private. I wish we could have them in public. … People say, well, it's so political. Things are only political if we choose to make them political. That is a choice we make.
Additionally, I go back to everybody who voted for the Marjory Stoneman Douglas Public Safety Act in 2018, then chose to run for reelection. They all got reelected. Leadership isn't being afraid of a perceived bogeyman.
Leadership is going out in the community, doing the work, listening to people, and then making the case for why this is the correct or incorrect policy. I wish we could get back to that point again when we're dealing with firearms, because I think if people understood the devastation and trauma that people are left with, they would be much more inclined to have that conversation.
Q: As the incoming leader of the House Democratic caucus, you're recruiting candidates and raising money for the November elections. Can you give us an update on those endeavors?
HUNSCHOFSKY: I continue to recruit candidates and raise money for our November 2026 elections. That's my update. My goal is to work hard to get the resources we need to be competitive in the seats we need to be competitive in. And, obviously, my goal is to return in November 2026 with more Democrats in the House than we currently have, because I think more balance in government is a good thing.
Q: You were elected to the House in 2020, in the middle of the COVID pandemic and a pretty intense presidential election. What surprised you the most when you came to Tallahassee?
HUNSCHOFSKY: Oh yeah, I was mayor for four years. We had massive flooding. I got elected in November 2016. We had massive flooding in June of 2017. Hurricane Irma, September of 2017. A mass shooting, February of 2018 and then COVID, March 2020. I was quite battle tested and crisis tested prior to ever setting foot on the floor of the Florida House. I don't know that much surprised me, because I don't know that I had any strong ideas or expectations. I'm somebody who's super-curious all the time, so I always go into a new project or a new situation as, OK, as soon as I get in, I’ve got to start learning. I’ve got to start figuring out how things work and what my role in that can be.
I think what was hard about getting elected during COVID is we were so isolated from everyone, and so I think I lost time during COVID. In the one sense, I had a lot of time to talk to committee staff and learn from other members, and that was really helpful.
I had more senior members who gave me tips and guidance, which was very helpful, but we were so isolated that I think that made it harder to build certain relationships that make it more helpful in the process, like to even understand who are the different stakeholders. … I think one of the hardest things to figure out early on is who are all the stakeholders that you have to invite to the table in order to hear their feedback or present them with your argument of why you want to do this. … Bringing everybody to the table and figuring things out is one of my favorite parts of this process. It's how I like to do things.
I always am looking for, how do we get to a point where we can get everybody on board? There's some issues where there are just non-negotiables where that’s not possible but there's so many places where this good work can be done. So I don't think that I had expectations. I will say it's very amazing. Every time I walk on to the House floor, I still feel this way. … Every new session, I take a picture or video walking onto the floor for the first time. It's incredibly humbling.
Q: You’re having a dinner party. What three people would you invite, living or dead?
HUNSCHOFSKY: I'm trying to think of the people whose insights I would like the most in the times we're in, when I think about what's going on in Europe right now with Russia and all of that — a Churchill or a Bobby Kennedy or Eleanor Roosevelt.
People who could give me context of how they approached things in their time. I don’t know who the right people are, necessarily, for that, but with all the social media going on, all the noise, always, I'm always trying to find people that help me develop a framework of how to approach information and that kind of thing.
I would love to know, with the challenges they faced, what their thought process was like, what their framework was of how they decided to take a position or come to a conclusion. I may not agree with it, but I want to just ask, how did you approach this?
