About 30 years ago, former House Speaker Terrell Sessums had a polite little way of suggesting that members get things moving, whenever debate got repetitious and unproductive.
"Everybody has spoken, and everything has been said," he would say, "but not everybody has said every thing."
His message: If y'all want to stay around here until all 120 members have said everything possible about this bill, we can do that. But it's not going to change the outcome, but it is going to delay a lot of other bills that maybe most of the members would rather be considering.
In this final week of the legislative session, the leadership is getting a little antsy. The Senate, in particular, wants to keep things moving.
Everybody knows there will be a chaotic rush of bills and amendments at the end of the week, as final adjournment looms on Friday evening. All they constitutionally have to do is pass a state budget, which can be done on Thursday.
But at this time of year, members like to take the big must-pass bills and add on little amendments that can contain the substance of an unrelated bill. Then the House sends it over to the Senate, or the Senate sends it over to the House, hoping that the other chamber will want the big issue so badly, it will take the little changes and send the whole package to the governor.
But sometimes, the other chamber balks and strips off the amendments -- sending it back to the first chamber and betting that members will back off. By that time, there's a backlog of bills and members are getting desperate to get the big stuff on the calendar.
This, of course, magnifies the already-large power of the presiding officers and rules chairs, who set the agenda.
Senate President Ken Pruitt, R-Port St. Lucie, warned members today not to play chicken with the House by adding amendments onto big bills. If it gets stripped down and comes back in its original form, Pruitt said, that does not make it an emergency in his mind.
Sen. Jim King, R-Jacksonville, who's been in the Legislature for 20 years, politely asked senators to stifle themselves. King, the rules chairman, noted that the Senate had spent an hour talking about a bill that passed 39-0.
If you're already going to vote for the bill, and you know it's obviously going to pass, and you know there are a lot of other big bills waiting, and you know the session ends on Friday, why talk about something everyone agrees on? That's what King was saying.
"It eats up time," he said. "No one in this Senate will ever stop you from talking... but it's time for self-policing."