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A Times Editorial
© St. Petersburg Times, published April 6, 2002
Contrary to first impressions, the special session that failed (yet again) to enact a new school code wasn't a total waste of time and money. Many legislators took advantage of Tallahassee's splendid spring weather to improve their golf games. Their clerks strove for, and possibly set, new speed records in printing, amending and reprinting 1,800-page bills. And maybe even Gov. Jeb Bush learned something useful, too.
If he did, one lesson would be to respect the unwritten rule that one never, ever calls a special session unless the outcome is sealed in advance. That should have sunk home after the failure of the first emergency budget session last October, but it obviously didn't.
Another would be to take care that legislators not have a lot of idle time, which they tend to pass by complaining to the press about how idle they are, and in making other mischief. This is an inherent danger in any special session limited to a single issue. If Bush is wise enough to learn this lesson, he'll take the advice of Senate President John McKay and others and postpone the school code until the Legislature returns to take up the budget.
The most important lesson, if perhaps the most difficult for the governor to grasp, is that there are limits to the effective use of power even when your party holds a commanding majority. Having steamrollered the Democratic minority on at least six controversial issues, the House Republican leadership took for granted that the Senate would follow suit. But some of those issues turned out to be just as important to Republicans as to Democrats in the Senate.
Chief among these was the House language purporting to guarantee religious freedom in schools. It does not need to be in the school code. The courts speak periodically to what the Constitution does and doesn't allow. To write this evolving case law into a state statute would at best precipitate more litigation; at worst, it would be taken as a signal to students and outside agitators to use school facilities to proselytize each other. Senate leaders warned both the House and the governor, to deaf ears, that this would kill the bill. And so it did. McKay said there would not have been 10 votes, out of 40, to pass it. Take it or leave it, said the House. The Senate called the bluff.
Much else was wrong, too, especially a provision that would have allowed school boards to let students keep loaded firearms in locked cars on campus. This was insane. Yet the same legislation entrusting school boards with that decision would have taken away their power to deny charter school applications.
It was just as well that the session ended in a meltdown. If the governor doesn't want another, he'll let legislators stay home for a while.