TALLAHASSEE - They really showed him, didn't they? After two years of putting up with the escalating tyranny of Speaker Johnnie Byrd, this is what some of the 81 House Republicans finally did about him last week: They gave no money to his parting gift.
And having polished the skill of keeping their mouths shut, they put it to good use when the time came to sing his ceremonial praises. For once, silence did speak volumes.
Only once, if then, has a House speaker been so poorly regarded. Never has one been so despised. The lobbyists, the only people here with sufficient memory, view Byrd as almost without peer at the bottom of the barrel. A few mentioned Tom Gustafson (1988-90), whose nickname was "Whirlybird," but Gustafson was simply manic. He wasn't mean. He also had a leadership cadre that was willing and able to reason with him.
Byrd wasn't the first speaker whose power went to his head. But none has been as overt and brutal as Byrd, who stripped out of the final budget projects both houses had approved for communities represented by Republicans who bucked him on the Byrd-for-Senate bill to freeze the telephone rate increase he had supported the year before.
"I am so frustrated that it has come to this, that our citizens are made to suffer this vindictiveness, and I sincerely apologize to my constituents in Mulberry," Rep. Dennis Ross, R-Lakeland, told the Lakeland Ledger.
Mulberry lost a $617,000 grant to improve its sewer system. Now it will have to borrow the money, and fast, to avoid a fine for violating federal regulations.
"Mulberry is a very poor little community," said Sen. Paula Dockery, R-Lakeland, who also lost projects in two other communities whose House members had bucked Byrd. "There should be a revolt, and I don't know why there wasn't."
That was the right question. Why did they put up with it? Every voter should ask it of Republican House members who want to be re-elected.
"Why did you put up with it? Why did you surrender what so many Americans have died for - the right to representative government - and we entrusted to you? Why did you let Byrd use you like Huey Long used Louisiana's weaklings? When he called you sheep, why did you line up for the shearing?"
They probably will tell you that it was because everyone figures Allen Bense, the incoming speaker from Panama City, to be a nice guy who wouldn't do as Byrd did.
"They all believe that if you wait, somehow it will be better next year," says Rep. Don Sullivan, R-Treasure Island.
But there's the problem: If Bense weren't a nice guy, there would be nothing to stop him from doing exactly as Byrd did. The House itself is the problem. One reason is term limits. Out of 120 House members, only two former senators have been around long enough to know, as one lobbyist put it, "that it doesn't have to be that way."
Of the 120 members, only 31 go back as far as Daniel Webster, the first Republican speaker in 1996-98, who is so fondly remembered that, as one Democrat put it, "We would elect him speaker for life." Eighty-two, more than two-thirds of them, learned to be legislators under the stronger hand of Tom Feeney or the mailed fist of Byrd.
"It's all due to term limits. All they know is the top-down form," says Sullivan, who is one of the two ex-senators. ". . . They just don't have the experience to know who they are, what they're capable of. That prevents them from swarming up together."
Another consequence of term limits: New House members who aspire to committee chairs or other leadership positions think they have to cater to those already on the ladder who might help them up.
"If you have any ambition as a leader, you've got to start on Day One," says Tom Slade, an ex-legislator and former Republican state chairman.
"The second thing is," says Sullivan, "there's too many Republicans. You can't get 22 people. They will crack . . . There's no sense of group."
Twenty-two Republicans and the 39 Democrats would have made a majority to stop a proposed constitutional amendment to seriously limit state spending and require a two-thirds vote to raise any tax or repeal any tax exemption. Sullivan, Heather Fiorentino of New Port Richey, Nancy Detert of Sarasota and Thad Altman of Melbourne were the only Republicans to vote against it. Whenever Sullivan thought he had found others, Byrd's lieutenants moved in. "All of a sudden they ganged up on them, two or three at a time."
Speakers' powers usually have faded once their successors were named. Not Byrd's. Bense, reluctant to inherit the throne by way of the guillotine, was loyal to the bitter end. Privately, he has passed the word that he'll run the House by older models. The first step should be exhaustive training for all members in the history of the House and in its rules.
Term limits may be immutable, but so is the fact that knowledge is power.
