Republicans look pretty bad right now

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© St. Petersburg Times,
published October 28, 2001

TALLAHASSEE -- The Democrats controlled the Legislature for more than a century, sometimes well, as when they made education a state responsibility and wrote a new Constitution, and sometimes poorly, as in 1987 when they fumbled the last clear chance for tax reform. (A Republican, it should be noted, was governor then.) But they never looked as bad as the Republicans do now. If you owned a junkyard, you wouldn't trust them to run it.

(Was the U.S. Olympic Committee watching Florida self-destruct? How else to explain getting edged out by Houston?)

It's not that the Republicans lack for smart leadership. Senate President John McKay, for example, knows as much about government as anyone around, and though he is a conservative he also tries to be sensible. But he let himself get sucker-punched by Tom Feeney, the House speaker, whose singular priority is to keep cutting the intangibles tax. After the Senate passed a budget-deficit plan calculated to make the House delay the next impending tax cut, Feeney declared that the House would pass the Senate bill unchanged without putting off the tax cut. Without a conference committee on appropriations, McKay would have no leverage to postpone the tax cut.

Feeney's scheme means spending so much of the cash reserve that you probably shouldn't let a state check get cold before cashing it. It also means letting the Senate take the blame for the cruelty in the budget, though the House's cuts would have been larger in sum and in many specific ways worse. It leaves a lot to be fixed during the regular session beginning in January, but by then the intangibles tax cut would be in effect and impossible to undo.

McKay knew who had been had by whom. He laid uncommonly harsh words on Feeney in public and private Thursday night -- "irresponsible," "unprecedented" and "demeaning" were among those the press heard.

Feeney was a happy man at his Friday press conference.

"There was nothing left on the table to discuss that we thought was good public policy," he said.

By definition, then, it is good public policy to cut taxes that are paid primarily by wealthy people even if it means no more prenatal care for poor working women and no more dentists, eye doctors or hearing aids for adult Medicaid clients. Feeney once again conjured the image of a poor widow being taxed on her $20,001 savings account, but the truth is that she wouldn't actually owe tax on anything worth less than $60,000 and she could keep $20-million (or even more) out of reach of the intangibles tax so long as it's in bank deposits or retirement accounts rather than conventional stocks and bonds. For every such fanciful widow, some real woman is going to lose her baby. (She's most likely a former state employee whose minimum-wage job was outsourced to a private company that cut off her health benefits in order to make campaign kickbacks to the Florida GOP.)

Feeney's endgame isn't deceptive and he doesn't even try to hide it. It's to never pass up an excuse to diminish the government and reduce taxes. He even joked about it Friday, saying in response to a reporter's question, "We're entirely consistent. In good times you cut taxes. In bad times you cut taxes."

Consistent yes, constructive no.

It has become enormously embarrassing to the moderate Republicans in the House, but so far they are still unwilling to buck the leadership. Among other reasons, they fear getting crosswise with Feeney's like-minded speaker-designate, Johnnie B. Byrd Jr., of Plant City. Yet one of the more prominent moderates, Nancy C. Detert of Sarasota, undertook last week to sign up other Republicans as co-sponsors for a bill to delay the intangibles tax cut for one year. It's the bill that Gov. Jeb Bush wants.

Detert wouldn't say Friday how many signers she had but referred to them as a "goodly number . . . most of them from the Gulf Coast area." However many there are, though, Detert doesn't intend to force them on Feeney. She is hoping, rather, for an eleventh-hour compromise on Feeney's part.

"I'm not conducting a coup here," she said. "I'm trying to mediate. In other words, I'm not Nancy Argenziano, I'm Nancy Detert. I don't have the Joan of Arc syndrome . . .

"Optimist that I am," she said, "when we get done with the Mexican standoff they'll accept my bill as the compromise bill."

She may be no Joan of Arc, but she was the only Republican brave enough to vote against the school prayer bill.

In that debate, were there a jackass of the week award, there would have been many contenders. The clear winner would have been Rep. Jeff Kottkamp, R-Fort Myers, for declaring with a straight face that the bill was "not an effort to divide, but to unite. . . . to bring us together." Nothing is more divisive than that bill, which is precisely why Feeney let it come to a vote; it's the only issue that Republicans can count on to split the Democratic minority. Thirteen Democrats, including Sara Romeo of Tampa and Frank Peterman Jr., of St. Petersburg, (who happens to be a Democratic whip) voted for it.

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