TALLAHASSEE - It takes a keen sense of humor, or of irony, to make sense out of what transpires in the Theater of the Absurd that calls itself the Florida Legislature.
There are, for example, several bills to require the community colleges to teach civics to everyone. The sponsors include Sen. Nancy Argenziano, R-Crystal River, and Rep. Mike Bilirakis, R-Palm Harbor. They mean well, I am sure.
Who could object to teaching civics to our young citizens?
Yet the bills don't seem to be going anywhere except, perhaps, backward. Argenziano's was taken off the Senate calendar and sent to an appropriations committee. It may have occurred to someone that it would cost money. Bills that cost money are supposed to go through an appropriations committee before they go to the floor. Hers hadn't.
Or maybe somebody actually read the staff report, which pointed out that the required high school curriculum already contains a civics component.
But the real reason, I suspect, is that someone figured out how ludicrous it would be for this Legislature to preach civics to anyone.
This is essentially the same Legislature that undertook to "comply" with the class size initiative by allowing students to skip some courses and graduate early. Among the courses they could skip: American history and American government, which is where they teach civics.
This Legislature, moreover, is a worst-case example of just about everything the civics textbooks say that legislatures shouldn't do. The list is too long for this page.
One theoretical no-no is to pass revolutionary bills with little study, often by tying them late in the session to the must-pass budget bill. That's how the House is trying to create another district court of appeal, and a Senate chairman was trying to grease a plan to make all elderly Medicaid recipients the subjects of a huge experiment in managed care.
Fortunately for due process, Senate President Jim King killed the Medicaid plan last week. Florida's elderly, who might benefit from a well-thought-out plan, have my Times colleagues Alisa Ulferts and Steve Nohlgren to thank for breaking the story that helped halt the rush job.
Legislators are also not supposed to write themselves special favors. A bad example is in CS for SB 3004 (and House PCB PR 04-06), enormous bills that are mostly about voting, paper trails, recounts and other hot-button election issues. They also contain a get-out-of-jail-free card for politicians who break the election law.
It says that the Florida Elections Commission cannot take up an alleged violation, other than by referral from the Division of Elections, without a sworn complaint from a citizen that is - this is new - "based on personal knowledge of the complainant." That's to stop citizens from asking the commission to investigate the outrageous things newspapers routinely report and politicians routinely ignore.
But that's not the worst of it. The bills also add this restriction: "The commission shall investigate only those alleged violations specifically contained within the sworn complaint or specifically reported to the commission by the division. . . ."
In other words, if the commission looked into a rathole and found a den of snakes, it couldn't do anything about the snakes.
This would make the Elections Commission almost as impotent as the Ethics Commission, which has been trying since its creation more than 30 years ago to be rid of similar handcuffs and leg irons.
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Of local controversy in Tallahassee: a proposal to rename the demonstration school at Florida State University, popularly known as Florida High and officially as Florida State University School, after J. Stanley Marshall, a retired president of FSU.
Maybe he deserves it. Though controversial in some other regards, Marshall endeared himself to many students by putting an end to women's curfews. There never had been one for the men.
But it's an idea in which John Thrasher, who's pushing it as chairman of the FSU Board of Trustees, ought to have no part. Thrasher was House speaker-designate in 1998, when Marshall, as a member of the Constitution Revision Commission, voted to create an independent redistricting commission. A week later, under fierce pressure from Thrasher and other Republican politicians, Marshall switched his vote, which killed the plan. Thrasher and another future speaker, Tom Feeney, were watching from the gallery.
"There were very compelling arguments on both sides. I was troubled as I looked at the issue more carefully," Marshall said. Among the things that had to be troubling him was what Thrasher and Feeney could do to dry up contributions to Marshall's conservative think tank.
Marshall did good things on that commission. Among them: nonpartisan school boards. But the defeat of fair redistricting was not his finest hour. It surely wasn't Florida's.
