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I would stand up and cheer for Johnnie Byrd, the speaker of the Florida House, maybe even quit my job and go to work for him in his U.S. Senate campaign (hey, maybe, I said), if tomorrow he held a news conference and declared:
"You know, I have come to realize that there is just too much of a conflict between my personal desire to run for the U.S. Senate and my taxpayer-paid job as speaker of the state House of Representatives.
"It's wrong for me to use my position as speaker to acquire a list of state specialty license-tag holders, and then to send out a mailing pandering to them at taxpayer expense - right after I declared for the Senate.
"It's wrong for me to use my position as speaker to amass any sort of potential political data, such as sending out "questionnaires' to voters and requiring them to give me their e-mail addresses.
"It's wrong for me to be putting members of the Florida House, who ought to be using their independent judgment for the public good, in the awkward position of declaring whether they support my U.S. Senate race.
"And most of all, I now understand how terrible a conflict it is for me to be raising campaign money from the same Florida industries and special interests who are affected by the work of the Legislature.
"Oh, by the way, even though it's not directly related to the campaign, it also was wrong for me to pump that $3-million in computer money to my political buddies and their clients. In fact, I ought to be investigated for it.
"Anyway, I'm resigning from the House immediately so I can remove these conflicts. I hope you will consider this a sign of my good faith in the coming Senate election."
Yeah, yeah, I know.
No chance.
Byrd just doesn't see things that way. To Byrd, the idea of using the state's "Choose Life" license tag list for an exclusive, $14,000 mailing to abortion opponents only is simply "communicating with the public." He's just trying to get "feedback."
As for taking big campaign money from interest groups with a stake in the Legislature's work, even as the Legislature meets in Tallahassee in special session, there's nothing wrong with that.
"To suggest that government should limit people's right to contribute so we can have free speech," Byrd explained, "is not our form of government."
So we can have free speech.
That's funny. One of the principal missions of the government, under Johnnie Byrd, is to trump the private sector when it comes to speech, and most especially the "filter" of that awful, awful bad guy, the media.
He, Johnnie Byrd, must use the power of the government to tell the truth. Hence the swollen "communications" staff that he has assembled to spin the public.
And so if I, a wicked media-type, tell you that Johnnie Byrd's House voted to protect polluting dry cleaners from getting sued by their neighbors, or voted to gut the pollution rules for the Everglades, well, that's just me being "negative."
And if I, the terrible "filter" of the private sector, mention that Johnnie Byrd is reaching into the pockets of every family in this state and robbing them of their grocery money by jacking up their telephone rates because the telephone companies gave him big money, well, that's just liberal bias.
For the next year, Johnnie Byrd continues to have a large degree of control over who pays taxes in Florida and who doesn't. Whose ideas will become state laws and whose won't. Which business interests will get favors from the Legislature and which won't. How the state will spend its $52-billion budget.
If he had kept a scrupulous separation between his Senate campaign and his House work so far, it might be possible to say, hey, let's see how things go. But he hasn't. And it's just going to get worse.
Some belated credit:
I wrote Monday that state Rep. Kim Berfield, R-Clearwater, did not vote on the bill to raise phone rates. Not right. She missed the roll-call vote on the floor, true. But right after the House passed the bill, she added her "nay" vote to the official record. Happy to set that straight.