Florida legislature
In 2016, Gruters won election to the Florida House of Representatives from the 73rd District, which then included Eastern Manatee County and Northeastern Sarasota County. In 2018, he won election to the Florida Senate representing the 23rd District, then consisting of Sarasota County and part of Charlotte County. Gruters was endorsed in 2018 by the Florida Chamber of Commerce. In 2022, he won re-election to the Florida Senate.
Gruters introduced three environmental bills in December 2018, ahead of the legislative session to address red tide and other issues: one bill would restore septic inspection regulations that had been lifted during the Great Recession and another would fine polluters for sewage spills.
In the wake of a fatal shooting at a San Diego, California, synagogue in 2019, the Florida Senate passed a bill by Gruters to combat anti-Semitism, including by requiring schools to deal with anti-Semitic behavior the same way they do racial discrimination.
Gruters was a driving force behind Florida's 2019 law (S.B. 198) that forces local and state law enforcement to honor U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detainers and prohibits local government from implementing "sanctuary" policies (which no Florida government had adopted). The controversial bill passed the Florida Senate 22-18, and was signed into law by Florida's Republican governor, Ron DeSantis.
Gruters sponsored Senate Bill 796, requiring electric utilities to adopt long-term plans for burying electric lines as a protective measure against hurricanes; the Senate voted 39-1 in favor of the bill.
Gruters filed a bill to ban abortions 20 weeks after fertilization.
Gruters sponsored Senate Bill 230, a piece of legislation that would reinstate Florida's controversial quest to identify purported noncitizen voters. The legislation would require the supervisor of elections in each Florida county to enter into a local agreement with court officials to obtain a list of jurors who had self-identified as non-citizens. That list would then be compared to the registered voter rolls and any names of non-citizen found would be purged from voter rolls. Prior efforts to purge the voter lists in Florida have been a failure, with lists of purported "non-citizens" found to contain some U.S. citizens. The president of the League of Women Voters of Florida called the legislation Gruters proposed as "most likely a politically motivated proposal".
Gruters also proposed legislation that would ban smoking at public beaches statewide. Convicted violators would be fined up to $25 or sentenced to ten hours of public service.
In 2019, he introduced the Florida Inclusive Workforce Act to ban employment discrimination against LGBT people. This was a scaled-back version of the legislation; unlike the anti-discrimination bill Gruters had previously supported. His new bill would not extend the anti-discrimination provisions in housing and public accommodations. These omissions were opposed by the LGBT rights group Equality Florida; Gruters defended the incrementalist approach of the bill, saying that would maximize the chances of passage.
After Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election and Donald Trump refused to concede having lost the election and making false claims of fraud, Gruters pushed for legislation in the Florida legislature that would restrict voting rights in the state. In 2021, Gruters called for cancelling all existing mail-in ballot requests, saying they would be "devastating" for Republicans up for re-election in 2022.
He sponsored Bill HJR 31 and guided it through the Florida legislature so that it would be a constitutional amendment proposal presented to the voters on the 2024 ballot as Amendment 1. The proposal intended to do away with an existing state constitutional requirement that school board candidates run in non-partisan races, without party labels. During the discussion on the Senate floor, Gruters tried to assure opponents of his proposed politicalization of school board races that the proposed amendment was a move toward "transparency". The proposed amendment was defeated on November 8, 2024.
