The 2008 legislative session starts today.
Oh, they won't fill the House chamber with flowers and invite thegovernor to make his "State of the State" speech at a joint session. Thecommencement of House and Senate committee work today marks the de-facto,not the de-jure, beginning of election-year hostilities at the Capitol. The Joint Legislative Auditing Committee will wade right into one of thebig issues of the session, getting a report on what went wrong with thelocal government investment pool. The head of the State Board ofAdministration, which invests tax money for state and participating localgovernments, recently resigned when the fund was frozen to prevent a run onit by worried local governments that were worried about their investments.
Legislators have already introduced more than 700 bills for the session.Most of them will never survive committee action -- the bills, that is, notthe legislators -- and most legislation doesn't even get a hearing incommittee.
So far, many bills are just "shells," or place-holders that are filed to nab a spot on the agenda. A bill on casino gambling, for instance, mightjust say "It is the intention of the Legislature to revise laws regardingcasino gambling in Florida." Or health care, or education, or freshwaterfishing licenses. Details -- a couple of sentences or 500 pages of legalese -- will comelater.
And then there are some items that just get waved through the process,commending a youth baseball team here or mourning the passing of a belovededucator there. And very often, you've got to suspect that legislators drawup bills as a favor to a constituent, with no intention of pursuing them. Last year, for instance, one senator had the staff draft aconstitutional amendment expanding the Florida Supreme Court from seven to15 members. He did it to help a law student in his district, who wanted toknow how such an idea would work.
But, ooops -- the bill wound up in a stack of serious legislation andactually got filed. The Supreme Court staff spent a little time researchingand analyzing it -- costing-out such things as building more office spaceand buying more black robes -- before the embarassed senator withdrew thebill. (We won't mention his name; no harm was done.)
A lot of the real work is accomplished in pre-session hearings. Thecommittee staffs, which were given issues to analyze and problems to solvelast year, will be making their reports to various panels in the House andSenate. And, most important of all, the revenue-estimating conference willlater give legislators a forecast of how much money they'll have to workwith when the session starts.
That's going to be grim.
They won't rap the gavels and formally convene the 60-day lawmakingsession until March 4. But after the holidays every year, you can feelTallahassee come to life as the pace of staff work and pre-session committeehearings picks up around the Capitol.