Politics

Inside the sausage factory

By STEVE BOUSQUET, Tallahassee bureau chief
Published October 20, 2007

The collapse of this week's special session on property taxes provides insights about why things happen in Tallahassee.

To recap, Senate President Ken Pruitt and House Speaker Marco Rubio signed a joint proclamation Oct. 11 agreeing to study specific tax proposals.

Chief among them: a higher homestead exemption, portability under the Save Our Homes 3 percent assessment cap and tax breaks for first-time home buyers and low-income seniors.

The House then tossed in plans to extend the Save Our Homes cap to second homes and businesses, and briefly wanted to swap a higher sales tax for a big drop in school taxes.

No way, cried Pruitt & Co. Ever loyal to the machinery of lawmaking, they said the House violated the proclamation.

But this centrist Senate, populated by political veterans wary of creating future budget problems, lacks the House's voracious appetite for cutting taxes. It's also tougher to quickly cobble together enough votes for a constitutional amendment in the Senate than in the House.

The 120-member House is typically hyper-partisan, all knees and elbows, a big noisy place where top-down leadership is prized.

That's the antithesis of the smaller Senate, with its bigger egos in even bigger leather chairs, where rank-and-file members look for ways to declare their independence by poking a stick in leadership's eye.

If Pruitt demands tax cuts that are too deep, he risks losing fellow Republicans who draw the line at hurting public schools.

A shift of a few Republican votes in the Senate prompts talk of a mutiny against leadership. A shift of a few votes in the House means nothing.

Gov. Charlie Crist, a former senator, knows this and has aligned himself with the Senate's tax position.

Rubio has pushed the envelope on tax cuts all year. But this week he realized the limits of his zeal when the Senate's most respected member, Dan Webster, said the House broke its half of the agreement.

Webster said it politely, as always, but he in effect said the House hadn't bargained in good faith.

But rather than capitulate, House Republicans dug in deeper. They went to work on a downsized 5 percent across-the-board assessment cap that includes ideas Democrats first proposed. Getting Democrats on board, is a way to increase pressure on the Senate to go along.

"It's way too early in the game for anyone to reach any conclusions about what is or isn't do-able," said Rep. Dean Cannon, R-Winter Park, the House's lead negotiator.

Webster, with 27 years in office, embodies the wide gap in experience and wisdom between the two chambers.

Term limits have exaggerated those differences. The House is a stepping-stone to the Senate. 34 of 40 senators served in the House. Many House members are new to public office.

Some senators carry themselves with an air of superiority bordering on arrogance that House members resent.

So the House is always battling for respect, as when Rubio and his team try to push the Senate into accepting one more tax cut.

Now the Senate has two options: pass a tax plan according to the House's script, or embrace the plan it passed this week that many Republicans say doesn't go far enough.

The House and Senate are very different bodies, as the Founding Fathers intended. That old axiom, "the House proposes and the Senate disposes," is no joke.

Steve Bousquet can be reached at bousquet@sptimes.com or (850) 224-7263.

[Last modified October 19, 2007, 22:56:36]