Five Takeaways from Tallahassee for December’s Legislative Committee Week

Tying to drive from Tally to the ‘burg in under four hours, I thought up the idea for a new series of posts called “Takeaways from Tallahassee” in which I will do my best to offer some analysis, in bursts of insightful nuggets, on what is really going on in the state capital.  Here are my five takeaways from December’s second legislative committee week.

No one — and I mean no one — in the legislative branch has a clue about what to expect from Rick Scott’s administration.  Members and staffers, new and veteran alike, simply don’t know what to make of Scott…they don’t know, beyond what they read in the media, who he’ll rely on in the Legislature, in the bureaucracy or the lobby corps.  People who think they are going to work in the administration are literally talking to other people who were promised the same job.  It’s all very Kaiser Soze: lots of incomplete information, none of which adds up to a full portrait.

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Many of the freshman State Representatives, especially those tucked away on the 11th floor, were not too keen on participating in a Committee Week with seemed so slapdash.  Essentially it was a Committee Week without committee meetings two weeks before Christmas.  One frosh,who felt like he was stuck in neutral after running so hard during their campaign, quipped, “Next time they want me to watch a movie, they can send me the DVD.”

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Among the freshman legislators in the Florida House, the emerging divide is between those Republican representatives who backed by the Tallahassee establishment and those elected with the help of the Tea Party.  The Tea Partiers seem less enamored with the state capital, have hired less experienced staff and have fewer friends in the professional lobby corp.  I didn’t see many Tea Partiers along Adams Street or out to dinner with any of the big name power brokers.  In fact, many of those legislators who are associated with the Tea Party couldn’t wait to get out of town, while the establishment Republicans were disappointed there was so little to do.

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If you are a straight, Christian, white male Democrat, you are an endangered species in Tallahassee.  Two decades of Republican control of the Legislature has all but broken the professional Democratic establishment, if for no other reason than there are so few government jobs for Dem staffers to work in outside of campaign season.

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The worst thing to happen to Tallahassee…worse than term limits…worse than one-party rule…is the gift-ban which, among other things, prohibits legislators and staff from having their meal paid for by someone else.  I haven’t worked in Tallahassee in five years and the change in the atmosphere because of the gift ban is apparent everywhere.  Closed restaurants, shuttered bars, empty streets.  All the while, more money than ever finds its way into Florida politics.  If you were one of the holier-than-thous (I’m looking at you, Tom Lee) who thought the gift ban would change the culture of Tallahassee, you were absolutely right: it has caused tremendous damage to a great city while doing nothing to foster better government.

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