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A Times Editorial
Without notice, Gov. Jeb Bush proposed to match the Senate's budget without any new taxes, but it falls short in education and social service goals.
© St. Petersburg Times, published March 6, 2002
More than the next state budget is now at stake in the Florida Senate. More even than whether the schools will continue to stagnate and poor people who are sick will be abandoned to their fate. The greater issue is whether the fundamental principle of separation of powers still motivates the Senate, or whether it will reduce itself, like the House, to little more than a Greek chorus for the most imperial governor since Claude Kirk.
Senators are preparing to vote on an appropriations bill that most, in their hearts and minds, know to be just barely sufficient even with the $880-million in new revenue from suspended tax exemptions on which it is based. But some -- most disappointingly the president pro tem, Ginny Brown-Waite, R-Brooksville -- are preparing to vote no. A few of these had weak knees from the start. The rest felt Jeb Bush's heavy hand on their shoulders Monday.
Past governors did not shy from lobbying the Legislature for more money for programs, such as Bob Graham on education or Lawton Chiles on social services, that most concerned them. It is unprecedented, however, for a governor to lobby individual legislators to spend less overall than recommended by their own appropriations committee. To do it behind the Senate president's back, as Bush did, without so much as the courtesy of personal notice, adds a calculated insult to the already poisoned Capitol atmosphere.
With a flourish, the governor proposed Tuesday -- again with no notice to John McKay, Don Sullivan or the other senators most concerned -- to match the Senate's education budget without any new taxes, using a $400-million windfall expected to result from Friday's revenue estimating conference. This was supposed to be the velvet glove surrounding the iron fist of a veto threat. The velvet glove turns out, however, to be tissue paper. It falls some $93-million short of the Senate's education goals and $185-million short of the Senate's humanitarian aims for the medically needy and other social services. It would compel the Senate, like the House, to improperly divert $100-million from environmentally endangered land purchases to the Everglades restoration program, for which everyone had promised a separate and secure funding source.
Bush's offer to repeal some tax exemptions targeted by the Senate, but only if the revenue is used to cut other taxes, is no substitute for a decent budget. Rather, it is part of a strategy intended to prevent that budget from ever reaching a House-Senate conference table, thereby eliminating any risk of his having to veto a pro-eduction budget, for the sake of his antitax ideology, in the inconvenient climate of an election year.
Brown-Waite, like some others of faint heart, pleads that the Senate budget is merely a "short-term fix." But so is the governor's alternative, and it is even less of a fix. So long as the House and the administration remain hostile to any long-term revenue reform, short-term solutions will be better than none.
It is a defining moment for the senators -- all of them, including any Democrats who might be tempted to leverage their votes for better districts. Now is not the time for that. It's about Florida's future, not theirs.