Senate President Jim King reminded his colleagues Monday that this is the week when time is not their friend. That warning goes double for the entire state of Florida. With only four days left in the Legislature's regular session, the temptation to settle for bad deals and enact bad bills can seem irresistible. King should also have cautioned them that, when in doubt, the responsible decision is "Just say no."
There are worse outcomes than an extended session. One of them would be to settle on a budget with blanks where each school district's allocation should be, as the House leadership seemed to be demanding Monday.
The fact that so much still remains undone is not coincidence. It was planned that way. On April 2, for example, the Senate sent to the House SJR 2506, a constitutional amendment by Sen. Tom Lee, R-Brandon, to improve the state budget process. It would cap what each session could spend on permanent programs out of temporary funds and require the executive branch and the Legislature to engage in responsible long-term fiscal planning. If Lee accomplished nothing else with his public service, that alone would be a monumental legacy. That no one in the Legislature had raised any serious objection to SJR 2506 reflects the fact that, until Friday, there was none to be made.
This is what happened Friday: After wasting three weeks, the House finally got around to receiving the Senate "message" entailing SJR 2506. The House then added an amendment that would require a two-thirds vote in both houses to enact any new tax, expand a tax base, raise any tax rate, or repeal a tax exemption. It was in that form, mangled almost beyond recognition, that the House sent the legislation back to Lee and the Senate with the implied message, "Take or leave it."
If that's the deal, Florida's future depends upon there being no deal. Lee will be Senate president the next two sessions. He'll have other chances to do it right. To accept what the House did would be to dispose forever of any possibility of tax reform for this chronically misgoverned state. The House amendment was good news, no doubt, for the handful of people who don't want to have to pay sales taxes on stadium skyboxes. For everyone else, it was another of the obscene gestures that Florida has learned to expect from Johnnie Byrd's House of Misrepresentatives.
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Gov. Jeb Bush appointed four new members of the Florida Elections Commission the other day. He will have wasted their time, and his, if the Legislature gets away with crippling the commission as proposed in HB 1971 and SB 3004. These bills, important in many other respects to the election process, would forbid citizens from filing election law complaints without "personal knowledge" of the offense and, worse, bar the commission from investigating anything it uncovers during another pursuit.
That would be like telling the police who respond to a burglary that they couldn't interfere with another that they see being committed.
Burglars may have little influence in the Legislature, but corrupt politicians obviously have too much. Shame on Sen. Anna Cowin, R-Leesburg, for fronting for them.
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Not one senator - shame on them all - found the voice Monday to object to one of the worst public records exemptions ever proposed to them. An amendment to CS for SB 702, which comes to a final Senate vote today, would make secret the identities of hospitals, doctors and other health care providers named in reports of medical errors filed with the state under the new patient safety legislation. No committee heard testimony on this before Sen. Burt Saunders, R-Naples, got it approved on the Senate floor. A vote for any bill with such a provision in it is a vote against the public interest. The House version is HB 1887. Sponsor Frank Farkas, R-St. Petersburg, postponed a floor vote Monday.
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Against all good sense, not to mention the emphatic advice of most of the law enforcement community, the Senate passed SB 1830, which would eliminate state law enforcement on Miccosukee reservations. That might be tolerable if it weren't for their gambling business, whose nontribal patrons could be out of luck in more ways than one. Gov. Bush has threatened to veto the bill, which makes it a free vote, in effect, for legislators who would try to pretend a "yes" vote doesn't matter. But not free for the Miccosukees, who have given more than $500,000 to state campaigns and will now be expected to come up with even more.
