There's an old Latin legal dictum that goes, "de minimis non curat lex" -- small things do not concern the law, or the law should not involve itself in trifles.
But if you stand in the Capitol's fourth-floor rotunda and look around full-circle, you'll see the overhead walls of the atrium are decorated with a huge list of all sorts of "official" state things. There's an official state sand, state bird, state animal, etc.
And every year, it seems that some legislators file bills to make something else "official," like a state pie.
In the 2008 legislative session, there will be a serious discussion about a new state song. The Florida Music Educators Association just announced that "Florida, Where the Sawgrass Meets the Sky" is the winner of a three-way online competition, drawing more than half of the 8,020 votes cast by people who clicked on justsingflorida.org in the past month.
For many years, many legislators have wanted to get rid of Stephen Foster's "Old Folks At Home," with its references to a pre-Civil War Florida that probably only existed in the imaginations of some homely old folks. The state quietly cleaned up the minstrel show dialect several years ago but, even without the racial insensitivity, a lot of people thought its references to plantations and banjo-strummin' were a couple centuries out of date.
Still, many people resented the fact that in the voting for a new state song, there was no "none of the above" or any chance to vote for keeping the current "Swannee River" tune. So there will be some debate about it in the session, including an alternative for a "state anthem" that Rep. Dave Murzin, R-Pensacola, wants to coexist with the "Sawgrass" song, if it's adopted by state lawmakers.
There's a danger of giving the impression that our legislators are wasting time in their 60-day session on a lot of "di minimus" stuff like an official state this or that. But the fact is, most of those bills are either buried in committee without a hearing or waived through without debate. Legislators don't really spend much time talking about the official state tree.
But this one, the state song, might actually take up a little time next spring.

It would be nice to think that there's been a change of attitude in pro sports and politics. But no such luck.
The news this week that the Tampa Bay Rays won't ask the Florida Legislature for $60 million is probably just an admission of political and fiscal reality. The big league ball club still plans a $450 million waterfront stadium, largely financed by revenue from redeveloping the site of Tropicana Field, where the Rays now play ball.
But team management is a pragmatic, practical bunch. State revenues are slumping badly because of the economic slowdown and the 2008 Legislature will start its session next March in something like a $2 billion hole.
And it's an election year. The idea of giving millions to millionaires, while cutting back state services, is -- well, you do the math. It's not exactly the fast track to re-election.
The St. Petersburg Times surveyed the Pinellas County delegation last week and found no support for giving the Rays a sales-tax rebate on all the pennants, T-shirts, caps and popcorn -- among other goodies -- that they sell. If your hometown delegation doesn't support it, you have a hard time getting even a million or two for something in your district -- so a high-visibility, big-ticket item in an incredibly tight-money year would have no chance at all.
One thing that's very much alive, however, is the idea the pro sports is good for the local economy. Team owners all over the nation shake down city, county and state governments for tax breaks and outright gifts of money -- threatening to move their franchises to a more receptive city, unless they get what they want.
It's kind of amusing that, before Major League Baseball put the Rays franchise at Tampa Bay, the field they're now planning to tear down was the hole card for teams threatening to leave other cities. The White Sox were saying they'd move to Tropicana Field back when Bob Martinez was governor, but the Illinois Legislature and city of Chicago met their demands.
At least the Rays aren't threatening to take their ball and go play somewhere else. Maybe those pragmatic and practical managers in the front office suspect that the state and city wouldn't try too hard to stop them.

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.

I was invited over to Marianna last month to speak at a Chamber of Commerce breakfast honoring state and local elected officials.
I'd never been asked to write or say nice things about public officers, so the idea intrigued me. As I told the officeholders and business types at the breakfast, it was a short speech -- but the topic has stuck with me.
Just what is the proper level of respect we owe our politicians, administrators and public employees? We'll pause here while you insert your own derisive comment.
They're doing the jobs we, ourselves, asked them to do -- necessary things that we couldn't do ourselves. Some do better than others, some are doing more or less than we want done, but we have only ourselves to blame if we tolerate incompetency or chincanery in office.
Take our Legislature, which is coming into special session tomorrow to fix -- yet again -- the state budget. They'll also work on automobile insurance and probably at least talk a lot about property taxes.
It can't be easy to be pulled away from your job and family on short notice. Coming to Tallahassee and working on public business two months a year in regular session, then one week a month for committee work, gets old in a hurry. And then there are those pesky special sessions and the rigors of campaigning every two or four years.
They don't need the money, about $36,000 a year. Although they try hard to act like just regular folks, almost every one of these legislators is pretty wealthy (by middle-class standards) and, in their private-sector jobs, they're either the bosses or high enough on the corporate ladder that they can take time off for politics.
Regular folks? How many of us could take four months off from our jobs to campaign? If you needed to raise a half-million dollars to seek or keep your job, could YOU do it?
And, of course, nobody asked them to serve. Nobody is making them run, or to seek re-election. We have an eight-year term limit in the House and Senate, but it really hasn't changed much. About the same percentage of legislators are leaving after four or six years (not counting those who get defeated), and relatively few try to move from the House to the Senate (and even fewer run back the other way) so they can stay more than eight.
Power is a drug for many. Ambition burns so hot in some, you can almost smell the sulphur of sold souls. It's flattering to have lobbyists, department heads, corporate bigshots and university presidents seeking your favor, even though you know that in a few years they'll be fawning just as fondly over the next member in your seat.
And yet, many of them do work hard and try to make Florida a better place. They're not the dewey-eyed idealists Gov. Charlie Crist likes to describe (a company in which he includes himself), but there are members who really do think beyond the next election or the one after that.
Since I started in this business 41 years ago, some of the finest, smartest, most honest people I've known have been political leaders. And so have some who made me wonder why they are allowed out alone, some who would steal a carbuncle.
As I told the Chamber of Commerce folks over in Marianna, maybe part of the problem is that their mail comes addressed to "The Honorable ...."
Washington author Allen Drury is best known for "Advise and Consent," but he also wrote a novel called "Capable of Honor." His thesis was that Congress is not made up of honorable men and women, so much as it's populated by people who are capable of rising to the occasion -- often when they have no other choice.
That's pretty much true in real-life politics.


Bill Cotterell
Political editor
Tallahassee Democrat
(850) 671-6545

There's an old joke about a guy on a bus who starts throwing strips of newspaper out the window.

"What are you doing that for?" asks the driver.

"It keeps the elephants away," says the man.

"What?" the driver says, "There's not an elephant in 2,000 miles around."

"Works pretty good, huh?" says the passenger.

Which brings us to Banned Books Week. Every year, librarians, scholars and other professional worriers get together and organize public events to warn us about the impending threat of censorship. On campuses, solemn-faced students and faculty members bravely gather on steps of libraries and dare to read from forbidden tomes.

And we in the news media, being reflexively sympathetic, dutifully do tongue-clucking stories about it all.

Hog wash. If we got out a big legal pad and started listing all the real threats to our civil liberties, foreign and domestic, a loss of free speech would not make the first page or two.

The worriers can always find some little town where "The Catcher in the Rye" has been removed from library shelves or some rapper's art is being censored. And then they present this as typical of what's going on all over the country.

But in a nation where HBO's "Tell Me That You Love Me" and Showtime's "Californication" are popular new TV shows, it's difficult to make a straight-faced argument that the intellectual heirs of Josef Goebbels are burning books in the town square. Spend two minutes on the Internet, stop by your local video store, click on the "adult" category of your cable company's on-demand offerings, and you can fairly gauge the level of censorship in America today.

That's a GOOD thing. We don't need prior restraint. And it's good that the librarians and others are vigilant about it, because the mind of the censor never rests. Unfortunately, they really will go after everything from the Cantebury Tales to Harry Potter. And the courts will continue slapping them down, every time.

Works pretty good, huh?

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."