An American Son: A Memoir (26 page)

I knew the bill wasn’t good enough. I knew it would be hard to bring the issue back up if we passed it. But I also knew we had gone as far as we could. We had done our best, and fallen short. I accepted the hard reality of our situation, and let the bill pass.

The press hailed it as a big win for Charlie Crist, and a big loss for me and the house. I suppose it was, but it was a bigger loss for the people of Florida. A speaker’s legacy is achieved in his first year, and his influence
wanes in the second year. For better or worse, property tax reform would be my legacy, and it was incomplete, to put it charitably.

Our fourth child, Dominick, was born in late August 2007. As the year came to an end, I looked forward to my final year as speaker with a feeling that we had some unfinished business to address. We took another shot at meaningful property tax reform in the next session. We devised a new proposal. We held rallies to promote it. We collected signatures to get it on the ballot. We passed it in the house. But the senate, once again, disregarded it. The senate president wanted to concentrate his efforts on reforming the state’s university system, and he refused to be drawn back into the property tax debate. Governor Crist didn’t have much of a policy agenda in 2008.

I spent most of my final year in the Florida legislature managing the house rather than undertaking bold new initiatives. We did pass into law a number of policies from our 100 Ideas project that had been held up in the senate the previous year. We also confronted a few difficult issues we had not anticipated addressing. And I took a few more hits in the press that year as well.

I was accused by the
Miami Herald
of trying to rig the state bidding process for concessions on Florida’s turnpike on behalf of a close, personal friend, Max Alvarez. Max had escaped Cuba as a young boy. He’s a self-made man who owns dozens of gas stations in Miami. He talked to me several times about his concern that the Florida Department of Transportation had made it impossible for all but the biggest companies to bid successfully on contracts to own and operate gas stations on the turnpike by insisting that companies bid for both gas and food concessions together. The limited competition not only hurt smaller companies like Max’s, but cost the state revenue. I’d seen this kind of fix before on the local level, when a bid’s specifications are written in such a way that only one or two companies have a shot at a contract. I agreed to support legislation that required the concessions for food and gas to be bid separately.

Some folks at the Department of Transportation were displeased by my position, as were the handful of companies that could have bid on both concessions. They told the
Miami Herald
that I had intervened in the bidding process to give an advantage to a friend. Of course, the legislature couldn’t award or deny a contract. Nor did any provision in the legislation
give Max an advantage over his competitors. But the
Herald
apparently believed the story and insinuated that I had attempted to grease the skids for a friend and supporter.

I felt I was vindicated a few months later when a new contract was awarded to a large Spanish conglomerate, but not before a series of bid disputes were filed by the losing bidders, alleging that the bid had been rigged to give it to the largest company.

A few weeks later, the subject of my home equity loan became a matter of press scrutiny. I hadn’t included it in my financial disclosure. That was my oversight, and I deserved to be taken to task for it. But the press also insinuated the loan itself was improper. Of course, it wasn’t. And once we showed we paid a standard interest rate and that the home had been properly appraised, the issue went away. I was offended by the insinuation, and thrown off stride for a while. But I’ve come to accept that a thick hide is a prerequisite for the job.

I recovered my balance after the controversies subsided in time to finish our work on a few important issues before my career in the Florida legislature reached its end. The previous summer the governor had issued a series of executive orders instituting global warming cap-and-trade regulations, which would become law unless the legislature overrode them. We had the difficult task of coming up with a bill the governor would sign that would override his executive orders. We found a solution. We passed a bill that instructed Florida’s Department of Environmental Protection to create an outline of a cap-and-trade plan for the state. However, the plan couldn’t take effect unless the legislature approved it. The governor signed it because he could claim he got a signature initiative passed by the legislature. The legislature passed it because we knew we could stop it later, no matter what the governor did.

When we ran against each other a couple of years later, in an effort to convince Republican voters he was the more conservative candidate, Crist falsely claimed I had supported cap and trade. He cited an interview I gave in which I made the assumption that some form of cap and trade would eventually become national law. Both the Republican front-runner for president, John McCain, and the Democratic candidates, Senators Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, supported a cap-and-trade system. I suggested that Florida should prepare for the inevitable by adopting a
policy of its own. But I didn’t support cap and trade. I wrote an opinion piece in the
Miami Herald
denouncing the governor’s executive orders shortly after he announced them.

Several state immigration enforcement measures were proposed that year as well. I didn’t want the state to assume a responsibility that properly belonged to the federal government, and I didn’t want the house to waste time on legislation I knew the senate wouldn’t pass. And many of our members didn’t want to debate an issue that would divide the Republican conference along ethnic lines. I made my position clear in numerous public comments. But I did not instruct committee chairmen with jurisdiction over the issue to refuse to consider the legislation. They made the decision not to take it up. Nevertheless, some anti-illegal immigration groups charged I was responsible for preventing the house from addressing the issue, a charge they and Crist would repeat when I ran for the Senate in 2010.

For me personally, the most difficult issue we addressed that year concerned the treatment of children with autism. The advocacy group Autism Speaks had targeted Florida as part of a national campaign to mandate insurance coverage for autism. I knew very little about the disorder before 2008, but that changed when Jeanette and I began to meet families of autistic children. We met with parents who couldn’t afford the expensive early intervention their kids needed—desperate, devoted moms and dads who loved their children dearly and wanted nothing more than to give their kids a chance to live productive lives. We were stunned by the number of our friends who had autistic children. I wanted to find a way to help families with autistic children or children with other disabilities, who deserved the assistance of a good and generous society.

I impaneled a special committee charged with improving the services the state provided to children with disabilities. I made sure to appoint both Democrats and Republicans who had expressed an interest in the issue. They produced sweeping legislation that could have helped thousands of families. It was late in the session, but I thought an issue that affected so many people, and moved so many others, would encourage the senate to act swiftly. But the old, tired politics of Tallahassee can thwart even the best of intentions.

A state senator who was in his last term had sponsored an autism bill
year after year and had never succeeded in getting it passed. It addressed only services for autism, and not for children with other disabilities. It wasn’t as expansive as our legislation. As a tribute to him, the senate took up and passed his bill, not ours, and sent it back to us, daring the house to vote against it.

Once again, in my last days as speaker, I was trapped by the senate. I had learned during the property insurance and property tax debates that once the legislature addressed an issue, however ineffectually, it was extremely difficult to get it to revisit the subject the following year. If I agreed to pass the senate’s autism-only bill, I would disappoint thousands of families, including members of the house who had children with disabilities and had worked so hard to put together and pass our bill. We had raised their hopes, and settling for an autism-only bill would be a tremendous blow to them. But if we didn’t pass the senate bill, families with autistic children would suffer, and we would be blamed. I had very little time to make a decision, and I prayed for guidance.

Many of my colleagues were seething with anger. The senate always does this to us, they complained. They do what they want, refuse to negotiate and dare us to do nothing. We should teach them a lesson. Let the bill die, and send our bill back to them in the next session. But I couldn’t do it. Helping some kids was better than not helping any. And after my colleagues got past their initial bitterness, they agreed to pass the senate measure.

The autism-only bill was the last legislation we passed that session. It had not been my purpose to outwit the senate. I had wanted to make a difference in people’s lives, people who had no one else to turn to. We had had to settle for helping only some of them. It wasn’t good enough, but it was something.

My speakership was one of the most challenging and fulfilling experiences of my life. There were disappointments, of course. But I was proud of the things we had accomplished. We balanced the budget both years, as required by Florida’s constitution, without raising taxes. We cut spending and produced lower budgets than the governor requested and the senate wanted, and forced government to make difficult, responsible choices Florida families have to make every day. And our 100 Ideas project was the catalyst for a series of policy advances as well. I’m very proud that we
continued the accountability-based education reforms begun by Jeb Bush. We modernized Florida’s education curriculum and raised the standards for math, science and language arts to better prepare students for college, for technical schools and for success in the global marketplace. We hadn’t achieved the revolutionary property tax reform I believed would have revitalized Florida’s economy, but we had made a difference in the lives of our constituents, and I was grateful for the privilege. It is customary on the last day of the session for the outgoing speaker to give a farewell address to the house, and I had given considerable thought to what I would say as I ended my nine-year career in the Florida legislature. My colleagues unveiled my official portrait and gave me a wonderful and much appreciated farewell gift: two years of season tickets to Miami Dolphins games.

I stood at the front of the chamber where I had given so many speeches before. I wanted to reflect on my entire life and not just my years in the house, so that I could pay tribute to my parents, who had sacrificed for my dreams, and to the country that had let me live them.

I had rarely discussed my faith in public. I hadn’t hidden it, but I hadn’t emphasized it, either. But time and again, throughout my thirty-six years, God had made His hand visible in my life. I had had opportunities to do things that the people who loved me had never had—not because I was better than they were but because I had been more blessed than them. I had been blessed with a strong and stable family. I had been blessed with good health and a good education. I had been blessed with parents who encouraged me to dream and a wife who helped me achieve my dreams. I had been blessed to be born an American.

“God is real,” I told my colleagues. “He loves everyone who has ever lived.”

I should have given the speech long before, but I had been conditioned by political correctness, by the prevailing notion that a discussion of one’s faith didn’t belong in the public realm. No matter how hard we try, though, we cannot keep God out of our lives, out of every moment, every aspiration, every failure and every success. Whether we acknowledge it or not, He inhabits our lives completely. It had taken me too long, but I was determined not to leave the house without paying public tribute to God, for the blessings He had bestowed on me and on our country. No one seemed
offended. A few members appeared to have been genuinely moved by my remarks.

Then it was over. I left Tallahassee the first week of May with no plans other than to return full-time to my law practice. For twenty years I had set goals and achieved them. Now, for the first time in my adult life, I really had no idea what would come next.

I
TOLD ANYONE WHO WOULD LISTEN, INCLUDING MYSELF, that I couldn’t wait to be liberated from public office—from its crowded, rigid schedule; from the news clips, phone calls and e mails; from the too many nights spent away from my wife and kids. I was still technically speaker of the house until the November 2008 elections, but my legislative career was effectively finished when we adjourned in May. I went home to Miami.

I was hired by Florida International University that summer to work part-time at the school’s urban policy think tank, the Metropolitan Center, and I discovered even a retiring politician can find himself unwittingly embroiled in controversy. FIU is the only public university in Miami-Dade. I would be involved with the public policy research and polling the center undertook for its clients. I would also teach a political science class each semester. I was qualified for the work—a nine-year veteran of the Florida legislature, where I had held three leadership offices. I was the first Hispanic speaker of the house, who would be teaching politics to mostly Hispanic students. There was no public money involved, either. I would be paid from private donations and client fees that I was expected to help generate.