House leaders don’t want to win, they just want to fight

Florida’s Legislature blew itself to smithereens a week ago in acrimony so fierce that a gaggle of elected Republicans left Tallahassee without even being able to agree on tax cuts. That’s like normal folks being unable to agree to breathe. Everybody is blaming the House, but there is an aspect for which the Senate is completely to blame. The Senate’s big mistake was not its insistence on Medicaid expansion. The upper chamber’s mistake was in pre-compromising with a House that clearly was spoiling for a fight.

Senate President Andy Gardiner should have started with a plan to radically expand Obamacare. He and allies should have taunted the House: “We’re expanding Obamacare, Nya, Nya, Nya!”

Then, after tense and difficult negotiations, the Senate should gradually have yielded to House insistence that Obamacare must be trampled into the dust.

The Senate should grudgingly have required recipients to make co-payments. The Senate should grudgingly have required unemployed recipients capable of working to seek employment. They should have allowed conservative business leaders to cudgel them into adopting a privately focused delivery system called Florida Health Insurance Affordability Exchange.

The Senate should have reached this position only after screaming bloody murder and depicting House Speaker Steve Crisafulli, twittering Rep. Matt Gaetz and flip-flopping Gov. Rick Scott as hard-hearted, hard-negotiating conservatives.

The House and its leaders then could have declared victory and gone home, bloody and preening, to accept the accolades of their constituents.

Instead the Senate, being mature and capable, calmly created a package that already contained all the reasonable compromise that anyone could ask for.

The House won without fighting. But the House didn’t want to win so much as the House wanted to fight. These are guys who see life — and legislating — as a battle.

The Senate did not fall in battle. The Senate fell on its sword. The House, unable to declare victory, declared an impasse instead.

This way, the battle lies ahead. The House still has a reason to exist. There will be a new session — a June 1 special session — and a special fight in the offing.

It is, unfortunately, too late for the Senate to reset the battle and take a more extreme position from which the House can force it to capitulate.

This is a curious evolution. Republicans used to relish fighting with Democrats. Battling them to compromise was sufficient.

Then Democrats in Florida became so thoroughly defeated that the GOP-controlled Legislature held complete sway. There was no one left to fight with.

Charlie Crist, as governor, briefly put up a fight, for example by vetoing legislation that Rick Scott later would sign as the Student Success Act.

Republicans had no one left to fight with. Except themselves.

Scott now has caught the House’s mustfight disease. But rather than fight directly with the Senate, he is fighting with Washington and with the hospitals who lobbied for Medicaid expansion.

This is semi-amusing. First, Scott sued Washington to force the feds to continue subsidizing Florida hospitals for care given to low-income people.

He’s doing that so the state won’t be forced to take money from Washington to continue subsidizing Florida hospitals for care given to low-income people.

If that elicits a double-take — he’s suing for federal money so he won’t have to take federal money? — just remember that he is demanding that Washington continue giving money under the Low Income Pool, the main advantage of which is that it isn’t called “Obamacare.”

The fact that Scott is fighting with hospitals providing the care is just as odd. Scott is setting up a special commission to examine hospital finances with the obvious intention of proving that hospitals don’t need the money that he is fighting with Washington to get for them. In this way, he is protecting taxpayers.

For an extra fillip of amusement, recall that this is the man who got into all kinds of hot water when the feds looked into the finances of the hospitals Scott ran as head of Columbia/HCA.

The upshot of all this need for confrontation? Good government doesn’t have a fighting chance. Jac Wilder VerSteeg has covered regional, state and national issues for three decades. Contact him at jwvcolumn@gmail.com.