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TALLAHASSEE - Sen. Dennis Jones, R-Treasure Island, spoke bluntly about the $53.2-billion appropriations bill awaiting his vote two days later.
"There's nothing in this bill I like. Nothing," said Jones, the Senate majority leader, in a brief interview. But when the time came, Jones voted for it. So did all the Senate Republicans in the chamber that day even though most of them acknowledged it to be about $1-billion short of even a barely adequate budget for the fiscal year beginning July 1.
So it is with the final version. But most if not all of them will vote yes again today, rationalizing that at least they held their own with the House in the quarrel over how to spend it the money.
However Jones and the others explain to their constituents why they voted for a budget that so many of them denounced, the simple answer will be this: They had to. It was the delayed price of their party coming to power.
The Democrats could vote against the budget, as the Republicans often did when they were the minority, because it was not their responsibility to pass it. That burden belonged to the majority party, whose leaders were feeling the heat of the public opinion polls that followed the regular session's failure. The prospect of a government shutdown on July 1 was too grim to bear. However they would do it, it would have to be done.
Though it has been nine years since the Republicans took over the Senate, seven since they won the House and five since Jeb Bush's election, not until now has it been this difficult for the two chambers to agree on a budget. There was money to spare, at least for tax cuts, in Bush's first three years. A recession, aggravated by the Sept. 11 attacks, left little room to argue about cutting the budget for fiscal 2002.
But they scraped by last year by the legislative equivalent of cashing in the piggy bank to pay the rent. That caught up to them this spring in the form of the $1-billion that the Senate tried to add to the proposed budget before the regular session adjourned. Next year, warns Appropriations Chairman Ken Pruitt, R-Port St. Lucie, the deficit - owing mainly to increased demands in education and Medicaid and to depleted reserves - could be as deep as $2.8-billion, with no remedy in sight.
The Senate would have raised taxes, if it could. It would have postponed $220-million in scheduled tax cuts on business income and stocks and bonds, if it could. But the Democrats and Republicans never were as far apart over taxes as the Republicans in the Senate and the Republicans in the House find themselves today.
House Speaker Johnnie Byrd is to taxes as Captain Ahab was to Moby Dick - a man obsessed. Where the senators see a disaster for the schools, colleges and universities, Byrd sees an opportunity to shrink government. The rest of the House Republicans, most of them too new to know better, are as much in thrall as Ahab's fictional crew of the ill-fated Pequod.
Byrd prevailed on that issue because Senate President Jim King wasn't willing to expose Florida (and his party) to a shutdown. No one knows whether Byrd would have gone to the brink because King flinched first.
The Senate debate was painful to all sides. When Democrats tried to postpone yet again the tax cuts on stocks and bonds, Republicans retorted that a promise made should be a promise kept. Then they voted in unison for a budget that effectively breaks the oldest of Florida's promises - that of a place in community college for every student who qualifies.
"Those were tough votes," Pruitt said later. "A lot of members had to reach real deep. We understand the bigger picture here."
"Sooner or later," said Jones, "we have to start dealing with real numbers to meet the needs of Floridians." That should be next year, he said, if the economy improves and there's no war in Iraq to distract Floridians from the crisis in Tallahassee.
"I would be surprised," he added, "if that didn't mean significant (new) revenue."
A much bigger surprise would be for Johnnie Byrd to accept it.