To get along in the House of Byrd, go along

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TALLAHASSEE - The people of Florida should not be angry at Speaker Johnnie Byrd for saying that members of the House are "like sheep in a way." Don't we want our politicians to tell the truth?

You'll know it's true if he is still speaker by nightfall Tuesday, the first day of the session.

If the members had any real respect for their institution, or for themselves, they would either dethrone him or extract an apology on terms tantamount to his abdication. But of course they won't do either. The majority traded their self-respect long ago for the chimerical glory of being spear-carriers in Byrd's mighty army of God.

The blame isn't all theirs, either. Some of it belongs to all those good citizens who voted for term limits. Imagine that you are a new legislator who has only six years in which to earn two years at the top. What's that they're saying in your ear?

"To get along, go along."

That's the single biggest reason why the Florida House of Representatives has become the functional equivalent of a dictatorship.

Let's be fair, though. It didn't start with Byrd. The cult of leadership arose so long ago, under Democratic speakers, that it is difficult to pinpoint a beginning. It is the natural fault in a system that lets a new presiding officer, every two years, stack committees to advance his personal agenda and reward the people who helped him get to be speaker.

Few speakers, however, have appeared so conspicuously in control as the incumbent. A noteworthy exception was Daniel Webster, the first Republican speaker (1996-98), whose regime was the last in which members of both parties felt free to breathe. The only dictates he enforced were that the day's work would end at 6 p.m. and that bills would have to pass or fail on their own rather than be coupled into those infamous last-minute "trains."

The worst thing about the House of Byrd is not that he pushes a particular hard-right agenda, or even that he is shaking down everything that breathes to finance his U.S. Senate campaign. Those foibles are not without precedent. What's worse is the transparent reluctance among his own committee chairs - people he appointed - to schedule bills for hearings and votes without explicit directions from the leadership suite.

Rep. Don Sullivan, the iconoclastic former senator from Seminole, diagnosed that correctly. He pointed out last week that he's been a House member for five months and has yet to vote on anything important in any committee.

Byrd keeps insisting that none of this is his fault; that he wants "a member-driven process." Trouble is, that syntax allows conflicting interpretations. Does the process drive the members or do the members drive the process? Ask Sandra Murman, R-Tampa. She was sole chair of the Rules Committee before she "embarrassed some Republican members," as Byrd put it in his infamous interview with the Tampa Tribune editorial board, by thinking for herself on the question of federal money for women's health education. All of a sudden, she wasn't chair any more. She was co-chair. In other words, she had been assigned a minder.

I have seen some sad spectacles since I first covered the Legislature 37 years ago, but none sadder than Murman coming to Byrd's defense last week after he likened House members to sheep and singled her out by name as an example.

Everyone used to understand that it was wrong to take money for one thing and spend it on something else. The old-fashioned word was embezzlement.

What Gov. Bush proposes to do with the affordable housing trust fund is old-fashioned embezzlement. It's financed by a tax on real estate transactions that he wants to divert into the general fund, where housing wouldn't stand a chance against prisons, education and health.

The governor has a point about so much of Florida's revenue being tied up in trust funds. But he misses a more important one. Though it's virtually impossible to get a tax passed in Florida, that one was enacted on the strength of support from people, including the homebuilders and mortgage bankers, who would have been inherent opponents to any new tax on real estate transfers. But in that case, it was pledged to a cause they supported. Self-interest? Yes. But it was an enlightened self-interest, which is not such a bad thing.

So the enactment of that tax and the creation of the trust fund represented a moral contract, if not necessarily a legally binding one, to spend the money only for the promised purpose. Whatever happened to morals?

The governor could make a more honest case by asking the Legislature to sunset the tax and re-enact it as just another component of general revenue. But of course that would put Bush in the unfamiliar position of asking for a new tax, which would boggle everyone's mind. The result, however, would not be different from what he is asking the Legislature to do.

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