The House, the Senate and their 3-ring circus

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© St. Petersburg Times
published February 15, 2002

Bring in the Russian skating judge! Call back the team that caught Big Daddy the bison! Hijack the jury from the prison guard trial in Starke! Maybe they can fix things in the Legislature.

Let's see. There's a new outfit called Citizens for a Tax Rollback, now buying ads on a TV station near you. This is more or less a front for John McKay, president of the Florida Senate, who continues to try to reform Florida's tax structure. He has lined up lobbyists loyal to his cause to pay for this.

However, McKay and the Citizens are getting their ears pinned back by the Coalition to Protect Florida's Economy, which is more or less a front group for an array of interests who do not want to get taxed under McKay's plan. (These are the guys that have been running antitax ads for some weeks now.)

Do not confuse either the Citizens or the Coalition with Citzens for a Sound Economy, which also opposes McKay's plan. I do not know for whom they are more or less a front, and am willing to posit that they might be, in fact, citizens, who favor a sound economy.

Anyway, the whole thing is a farce, an opera buffa. The state House is just sitting around waiting for McKay's plan so it can kill it. The House members have been grinning as they decide exactly how to stick in the knife.

Should they kill McKay's plan in a little-bitty committee? No. They want to haul the thing out onto the House floor, so that all 120 of them can take credit for killing it.

They ought to wear togas and do it on the Ides of March.

As a sideshow, this week the Senate boss McKay snarled of the House speaker, Tom Feeney, that Feeney was protecting special interests who were his campaign contributors. It was a rare shot -- of course everybody in Tallahassee takes money; the news is for one person to blame another for doing it. (Headline: POT, KETTLE TRADE BARBS.)

The anti-McKay guys responded by publishing their list of contributors, which, amazingly enough, contained special interest groups. McKay's group balked at doing the same ("But we're the good guys.") This led to the farcical sight of Cory Tilley, spokesman for the anti-reform bad guys, piously saying that such secrecy "raises questions from an ethical perspective." Harrumph!

Just in the nick of time, the House voted to make the high school students of Florida sit through some good old-fashioned prayin' to Jesus if they want to attend their own graduation. Technically the House voted for a bill to allow a student-chosen neutral "message" at graduations and other events. The debate made it clear what they really meant.

It will be up to the Senate to kill this and other House radicalism, including an idea to make every public school student in the state eligible for a voucher to attend private school at taxpayer expense. The catchy name of that bill is "No Strings Attached/Freedom Scholarships." But why go halfway? Why not just declare Ben Franklin wrong and abolish public education altogether? Clearly the House has sold out to the teacher unions.

The Senate, which, remember, is led by rich white Republicans, looks like a bunch of goatee-wearing Trotskyites by comparison. A Senate committee this week rejected the Senate's own version of the education budget because it wasn't big enough. Maybe we should raise taxes, the Senate said. Feeney just laughed when he heard it.

Increasingly grumpy, the Senate took out its frustrations by holding up the nomination of Phil "Instant Expert, Just Add Water" Handy, the governor's pick for chairman of the new state education board. The Senate also grumped about the governor's "terrorism" budget (if you can get the word "terrorism" into your budget request, do so).

The Senate seemed especially hung up on a satellite system to track all the livestock in the state. (Sure, now Jeb wants it -- but where was he when they were chasing that bison?) What could be more important than livestock-tracking? Certainly not the future of public education, the separation of church and state, or a wickedly unfair tax structure. Cue the toothless boy sitting on the swing with the banjo.

-- You can reach Howard Troxler at (727) 893-8505 or at troxler@sptimes.com.

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