Shortly before Thanksgiving, Rep. Marco Rubio of Miami will become speaker of the Florida House of Representatives. He will have a solid Republican majority and focus on the results of his idealistic project to fill a book with "100 innovative ideas for Florida's future."
The pages are blank now, but Rubio's book needs an asterisk: "Caution: None of these ideas can be tied to a tax increase or the expansion of government. They can't rewrite, overturn or otherwise depart from the Book of Jeb."
Gov. Jeb Bush is heading toward his last legislative session, but his influence will be felt long after he moves out of the Governor's Mansion in January. He has steered the Florida Republican Party sharply to the right, and Republican lawmakers rising through the ranks are more fiscally and socially conservative than they were a decade ago. His bold initiatives chart a course that will be difficult to adjust - even if the GOP-led Legislature is inclined to change.
"His shadow is going to be pretty long," said Senate President Tom Lee, R-Valrico.
The next governor will want to set his own agenda, and the Legislature will be eager to flex its muscles after eight years of deference to Bush. But neither will be able to stray far from the parameters Bush has set. He has molded public policy and the Republican Party in his image. Most legislators haven't worked with any other governor. And Bush has re-established his Foundation for Florida's Future to remind them he will be watching.
Among the areas where the son and brother of presidents is leaving a legacy that will not be easily altered:
* Taxes. Before Bush was elected in 1998, discussions about taxes in Tallahassee revolved around how to raise them. Now just maintaining the current level of taxation has become unacceptable, even in a state that ranks 35th in per capita taxes and sees plenty of unmet needs in education, social services and infrastructure.
"People can spend their money wiser than government can spend money," said House Speaker Allan Bense, R-Panama City, a fiscal conservative in the Bush mold. "There will always be needs."
Under Bush, there have been tax cuts for the more affluent, such as the gradual reduction of the intangibles tax on stocks and bonds that will result in the elimination of that revenue source by the end of this year. There have been targeted tax cuts for business, and there have been broad tax cuts such as sales tax holidays for school and hurricane supplies. Even Democrats who normally oppose Bush have caught tax-cut fever, concluding it is more pragmatic to try to influence the types of cuts than to fight what they can't stop.
"It's trying to make lemonade out of lemons," said House Minority Leader Chris Smith, D-Fort Lauderdale.
By the end of this year, Bush likely will take credit for more than $20-billion in cumulative tax cuts over eight years. But he also has significantly cut the revenue stream that his successor will has available to pay for his own initiatives.
* Education. Bush's elaborate student-testing and school-grading systems touch more families directly than anything else he has done. FCAT has become a household word and the focus of public education.
The Florida Supreme Court struck down the use of public money to pay for private tuition vouchers for students in failing schools, but those vouchers have been used by a tiny fraction of the state's students. The real change has been the heavy reliance on standardized testing and the use of the results to reward or punish schools.
"The FCAT has become the end-all and be-all of our school system," said Sen. Rod Smith, a Democratic candidate for governor.
But Bush's system is so ingrained that it would be impossible, politically and practically, to dismantle it. "If you don't measure it," the governor said, "you don't care. Think about it."
The education debate is over how much the FCAT has improved student performance and whether the test should determine whether teachers get bonuses. The political debate is not whether Bush's education policies have a future but whether they can even be tweaked.
* Privatization. He never called state workers "lard bricks" like the last Republican governor, Bob Martinez. But Bush has made an unprecedented move to hire private businesses to perform what traditionally have been state responsibilities.
Just last spring, Bush signed a state budget with another 1,000 privatized prison beds. Florida became the first state in the nation to fully privatize its child welfare programs. The state's personnel system has been handed to a private company in a $350-million, multiyear contract. Medicaid is being farmed out to private medical interests in Duval and Broward counties, and that privatization experiment likely will be expanded.
There have been problems that have left even some Republicans grumbling. Private prison companies were paid millions they did not deserve. The private personnel system had trouble getting the right paychecks to the right workers, and the security of private data on Bush and others was compromised. But Bush has again shifted the debate. It's not whether to privatize in Tallahassee; it's how to do it.
At the same time, consider this remarkable comparison: There are fewer state workers now than when Bush became governor in 1999, and the difference would be even greater if not for an increase in the universities and the courts.
Rubio, the next House speaker, adds this caveat to his quest for 100 good ideas. They can't "needlessly expand" government. In this climate, any government expansion would be difficult no matter how serious the need.
* Crime. While Bush keeps education and privatization at the forefront, he effectively has taken one topic off the radar screen as a hot political issue. The state's crime rate is lower than it's been in more than 30 years.
The governor attributes a sharp drop in crimes involving guns to his 10-20-Life initiative that he signed into law in 1999, his first year in office. There is a minimum 10-year prison sentence for crimes committed with a gun, a minimum 20-year sentence for crimes in which a gun is fired, and 25 years to life sentences if the gun causes death or injury.
Another initiative from Bush's 1998 campaign, three strikes, requires judges to hand out the maximum sentence for a third felony.
Other factors in reducing crime also are at work, including a healthy economy and low unemployment. The state went on a prison-building binge in the late '80s and '90s. And a law passed three years before Bush was elected requires inmates who committed crimes after October 1995 to serve at least 85 percent of their sentences. As a result, the average percentage of sentence served has risen in the Bush era from 74 percent in 1998 to 85 percent.
Bush has finished the heavy lifting, at least until the crime rate rises. Instead of touting sweeping crime initiatives such as 10-20-Life, legislators will focus on more specific areas.
* Social issues. This is the governor who ended affirmative action in university admissions and state contracting. He signed further abortion restrictions into law and intervened in the Terri Schiavo feeding-tube controversy. He blurred the lines between church and state with voucher programs that use public money to send thousands of children to religious-affiliated schools.
Those are fundamental changes in public policy that legislators aren't likely to reverse, and only the courts have acted as a significant check. Politically, Bush has shifted the Republican Party so far to the right that many Republicans recoil at any suggestion they could be labeled moderate.
How far will Bush's conservative crusade extend into the future?
The Republican lawmaker expected to become Senate president for the 2007 and 2008 sessions, Sen. Ken Pruitt of Port St. Lucie, recently sent a fundraising letter asking for money to protect the Boy Scouts and the Pledge of Allegiance. "Even though Republicans have a majority in the Florida House and Senate," he wrote, "unfortunately some are afraid of standing up to the ACLU and the anti-God, left-wing liberals."
The Republican lawmaker who had been expected to become Senate president for the 2009 and 2010 sessions, Sen. Alex Villalobos of Miami, suddenly found himself losing support in February.
