Gov. Bush would have done well not to follow this bad example
By MARTIN DYCKMAN
Published July 13, 2003
The appointment of Toni Jennings as his lieutenant governor was expected to restore to Jeb Bush's administration the adult supervision that was lacking throughout most of his first term. But it became obvious last week that she is either keeping her wisdom to herself or, more likely, the young'uns simply aren't listening.
Seasoned, sensible politicians do not publicly bash their own party's legislative leaders as Bush has been doing. Nor do they indulge in plots to recruit primary election opponents for those lawmakers, as one of his deputy chiefs of staff did.
The reason that they don't is not so much ethical as practical. It never works, and it is prone to backfire.
But of course those who ignore history are usually fated to repeat it, which brings us to the subject of Claude R. Kirk Jr., Florida's first post-Reconstruction Republican governor. He might also have been the first to be re-elected but for his having grossly antagonized his own Republican legislators. Not many cared to help him in his 1970 re-election campaign against Democrat Reubin Askew, some were not-so-secretly encouraging Askew, and few shed any tears when Askew won.
Kirk loved to veto the Democratic majority's bills. The Republicans had loyally upheld all of his vetoes even when they had to hold their noses. Two years into his reign, however, they parted company over a legislative pay raise.
The 1885 Constitution, replaced in 1968, had limited legislative pay to $1,200 a year. The 1969 session set about to raise it to $12,000, which was reasonable in the face of a greater workload including annual sessions.
The raise was important as an institutional reform not just to the Democrats who controlled the Legislature, but to the Republicans who had finally attained a significant minority thanks to the court-ordered reapportionment that coincided with Kirk's election. It would not have been brought to the floor, however, without House Minority Leader Don Reed's assurance that Kirk had signed off on it.
Kirk later told his biographer, Edmund F. Kallina Jr., author of Claude Kirk and the Politics of Confrontation (University Press of Florida, 1993), that there was "never any agreement to allow an exorbitant pay raise." Reed insisted to the end of his life not only that the administration had consented to $12,000, but that the lieutenant governor had said "We don't think it's enough."
Regardless, Kirk did not object prior to its passage and did not even hint at a veto before some newspapers went into editorial tizzies over the raise.
Kirk didn't just simply veto it. He called a joint session to tell legislators to their faces, in not so few words, that the public thought they were a bunch of crooks. (A few were, but overall it was, thanks to reapportionment, the most idealistic Florida Legislature ever.) Kirk compounded the damage with a subsequent personal attack on Reed. Needless to say, the veto was overridden.
I saw these events unfold. Kirk didn't care about the raise. He simply wanted to provoke a fight. He despised the Legislature much as Bush loathes trial lawyers, or anything else, such as a public employee union, that gets in his way.
Bush's position is in some ways different. He has already been re-elected, he has Republican votes to spare and he has alienated only the leadership of one house, not both. But there are also important similarities. Like Kirk, Bush had no previous elected experience, he hungers to be a powerful governor, he demands total loyalty, and he has little if any respect for the constitutional prerogatives of an independent legislature.
To Kirk, wrote Kallina, "the duty of subordinates, whether in the governor's office or the Republican party, was to accommodate themselves to the wishes of the chief executive. On the other hand, he viewed the Legislature with disdain and, at times, even contempt. . . . He had no genuine respect for the Legislature as an institution. . . . Only the governor, as far as Kirk was concerned, knew what was good for the state and had the best interests of Florida in mind."
Bush could have profited by avoiding Kirk's bad examples, but there was nobody in his office to recall them after chief lobbyist Ken Plante, who had been a freshman senator in the Kirk reign, left (as planned) late in Bush's first year. Plante said Friday he is "delighted that I can be watching from the sidelines."
Former Pinellas Rep. William H. Fleece, whose freshman term coincided with Kirk's, recalled Friday that Kirk once called him into his office to ask whether Fleece would vote to sustain his veto of a junior college bill. When Fleece said he didn't know, "he said I could stay there until I made up my mind . . . He said I could either do what he wanted me to do or I could re-register. It was unreal." Fleece finessed his dilemma by pairing his vote.
As for Bush, he'll probably come out of the medical malpractice debate with a more severe cap on damages than most senators ever expected to give him. But this will be his high-water mark. Senators who never told him no before will be ready to let him know what it means to be a lame duck.
