TALLAHASSEE - Well, I'll be foozleblogged. I spent Monday afternoon watching a committee of our Legislature in action, and the group could not have produced a more fatuous, wrong-headed collection of bad ideas if somebody had set down to script the whole thing. Which, come to think of it, somebody probably did.
Let's get right to the main points passed by the House Select Committee on Constitutional Amendments:
There should be a double standard in favor of the Legislature. When the citizens put a constitutional amendment on the ballot, it should take 60 percent of the vote to pass. But ideas put on the ballot by the Legislature should require only a simple majority.
Citizens should not be able to propose amendments on subjects that the Legislature could otherwise address by passing a law (no matter if the Legislature has refused to pass such a law).
Citizens (but not the Legislature) should be required to name a money source, such as a new tax, when they petition for an amendment that costs something. Citizens (but not the Legislature) should have an earlier deadline for getting on the ballot.
These changes should be put on the ballot of the Aug. 31 party primary. This is sneaky. Yoter turnout will be lower, and more than 1.8-million Floridians who do not belong to a major party are not likely to vote.
The committee rammed through all this on hasty voice votes, without a written record, so the members cannot be tracked individually. Two of our local members, Frank Farkas, R-St. Petersburg, and Sandy Murman, R-Tampa, sat up there at the table and baaaahed with the ovine majority. Farkas said he might disagree with some of the items but was willing to let the whole House consider these ideas.
I must be out of practice at watching the Legislature, because it seemed to me to be as ludicrous a session of banjo-picking thuggery directed against the citizens as I have witnessed.
My favorite was Rep. Don Brown, R-De Funiak Springs, who said that rampant citizen petitions somehow contradict a "200-year tradition of representative government."
Brown and all the rest denied believing that the Legislature was smarter than the people, and hence deserving of a lower percentage of the vote for its ideas to pass.
Yet Brown said, "Not every citizen has the time, or cares to take the time, to be exposed to the input their elected representatives are exposed to."
Special credit should be given to two dissidents, Reps. Stacy Ritter, D-Coral Springs, and Christopher L. Smith, D-Fort Lauderdale, who tried to slow down their colleagues, and who voted against most ideas.
"You've got to give the citizens some other escape valve for their frustrations," said Ritter, arguing at least for the right to petition for laws, if amendments are to be restricted.
Smith said it was unfair to require citizens to come up with their own revenue source. "Half the time," he said of the Legislature's own ballot ideas, "we don't know where the money's coming from."
Rep. Dwight Stansel, D-Wellborn, said the main question should be: "What can we sell?" The voters are not likely to approve a double standard for the Legislature, he warned.
Stansel is right. The voters are likely to reject all of this nonsense, and to resent the Legislature for trying it. The backlash could well affect other items on the ballot. Gov. Jeb Bush and state CFO Tom Gallagher just announced a campaign to repeal the bullet train amendment; how will that play now?
Maybe this is just some kind of joke. Maybe the Legislature is not actually interested in a fair reform but is just voting for heavy-handed stuff to please the business lobby, which fears citizen petitions.
"See?" lawmakers could tell their business friends at election time. "We tried to help you folks, but the mean old voters wouldn't let us."
At least, I hope that's what's going on. Otherwise it means the people running the Legislature have a dripping contempt for the citizens that goes beyond scary.
Even if the polls say that the citizens support a reasonable reform of the petition process, that doesn't mean the citizens are begging to be bound, gagged and stuffed into a closet.
