Ryan Ray
House Speaker Steve Crisafulli set a brisk, all-business tone as the “people’s chamber” started the first Special Session since 2011. That was when a challenge to the body’s redistricting efforts brought the House back to Tallahassee in the summer for a quick cosmetic fix to a small number of seats.
This Special Session is something else altogether, though.
With billions of dollars separating the chambers and major legislative priorities on all sides left very much unresolved, Crisafulli is preparing for by far the greatest test of his political career, which may double as a stress test on the status of cohesion within the Legislature, between the branches of government, and among members of Crisafulli’s own caucus.
There’s the sense that the House has an appetite for another get-in-and-get-out affair like this past August, with a carefully choreographed series of hearings this week — and nothing at all scheduled after. And Crisafulli pledged after Monday afternoon’s largely procedural House Session to adopt a lighter touch than he used in May.
For instance, although members will hear from virulently anti-ObamaCare chair of Health and Human Services Committee Rep. Jason Brodeur Monday afternoon in what will likely be a one-sided seminar, there won’t be a mandatory caucus position for the majority when it comes to Senate-favored health care legislation that held up the process this year.
“Members will have an opportunity to go to the workshop this afternoon and hear all the information we put out there for them, for them to digest and make their own determination based off that,” said an outwardly conciliatory Crisafulli in remarks to press assembled on the floor early Monday afternoon.
Still, before perfunctorily referring a slew of bills to committee and calendar, Crisafulli rallied his troops and bluntly stated what, despite some dissenting murmurs from the rank-and-file, is clearly the logic that animates House leadership.
Leaving little room for interpretation, Crisafulli told the full House, or at least what passes for it over the summer with 108 of 120 members present, two overriding bits of “advice.”
Among talk of a “trade” between tax cut dollars and health care dollars among Crisafulli and Senate President Andy Gardiner, first came an ideological stick: “Medicaid expansion under ObamaCare is not the right choice.”
And then, the friendly carrot of esprit de corps: “We’re now in overtime: Let’s finish big.”
