Carl Hiaasen - Kick Ass - Selected Columns of Carl Hiaasen

• Wooed by lobbyists, the Legislature gave the Greater Miami Opera almost $1 million. Later, some of the lawmakers who voted for the money asked the opera for free tickets.

One of those, Rep. Susan Guber, says—and this is priceless—it's important for her to attend the shows to make sure taxpayer dollars are being put to good use. Bravo!

To her credit, Guber is one of the few legislators who wants to change things so that "turkey" items aren't so easily sneaked into the appropriations bill. There's not a moment to waste, either—Florida is in worse fiscal shape than most had predicted.The crisis is forcing $270 million in emergency cuts next month. Education, social services and law enforcement will suffer.

If the new governor is searching for a popular agenda, he doesn't need to go far. All he's got to do is put his nose in the air and take a whiff of this year's budget.

Whoever said politics is a thankless job ought to read the latest report from the Leon County grand jury.

It describes how some state legislators have accepted free vacations provided by lobbyists from major utilities, auto dealers, the hotel industry, Big Agriculture and insurance firms. In many cases, the trips were not reported as gifts, although the law requires it.

Not surprisingly, the globe-trotting tourists have been reticent to share the highlights of their travels—not even a postcard for the voters back home. In fact, it's almost as if lawmakers wanted to keep it a secret. It's almost as if they were ashamed.

The juiciest details came from the lobbyists themselves, summoned before the grand jury. Much of the testimony focused on hunting trips, a popular escape from Tallahassee's pressures.

Judging from what the lobbyists said, lawmakers find hunting much more enjoyable when they don't have to pay for it themselves. Shooting a high-flying mallard requires total concentration, and who can concentrate when you're worrying about some danged hotel bill?

Friendly special interests arranged for legislators to go on free hunting expeditions to El Campo and Corpus Christi, Texas; Monterrey and Ciudad Victoria, Mexico; Norwood, Colo.; Casper and Thermopolis, Wyo.; the Blue Ridge Hunting Lodge in LaPine, Ala.; the Riverview Plantation, Foxfire Hunting Preserve and Quail Ridge, all in Georgia.

For lawmakers who preferred fish over fowl, lobbyists lined up angling excursions to the wilds of Colorado, Alaska and Nice, France. Not to be outdone, a few nonsporting types in the Legislature took pleasure jaunts to Paris—and Zurich, Monte Carlo, Vail, LakeTahoe, New Orleans, Breckenridge, Treasure Cay and St. Tropez.

When the scandal first broke, some lawmakers insisted they did nothing wrong because a free trip isn't really a "gift." The grand jury found this argument just as ludicrous as everyone else did. The law, it said, is "plain and unambiguous." A free plane ticket must be reported as a contribution.

The tone of the grand jury's findings was one of barely concealed disgust. And it wasn't only the trips, but the other shameless mooching:

"Several legislators routinely solicited free plane charters/rentals from certain lobbyists solely for personal use."

The report went on: "During a legislative session it is possible for legislators to be furnished breakfast, lunch and dinner by lobbyists while still drawing per diem." No! Who would do such a thing? The grand jurors called for a tougher law that would make it a crime to take anything worth more than $50. Predictably, that's way too radical for this Legislature. A bill imposing a $50 limit on gifts will probably pass this session, but violators won't face criminal charges.

The strongest deterrent to a freeloading politician is the threat of public exposure, and here the grand jury missed the boat. In what seems an act of misguided mercy, the names of the peripatetic lawmakers were deliberately withheld from the report.

Voters then were left to guess, for instance, which sneaky weasel took a free trip and then tried to conceal the fact by paying with his own credit card. Later the legislator approached the lobbyist and demanded full reimbursement for the junket—in cash.

Leon County State Attorney Willie Meggs knows the identities of the alleged perpetrators, and is considering prosecution. Most of the crimes would be misdemeanors, and the penalties would be laughably light.

Nonetheless, a trial would be useful to document the snug relationships between powerful lobbyists and elected officials. Next time the insurance industry flies your local senator to a Paris vacation, you shouldn't have to read about it in a grand jury report.

You deserve a slide show.

One way to save Florida tons of money, and loads of embarrassment, would be to abolish the Senate.

No one would miss these bunglers, who are stinking up Tallahassee with their rotten, self-serving politics. While the state rapidly goes broke, senators remain pathologically obsessed with redistricting. Translation: saving their own sorry butts.

Republicans want more Republican districts, Democrats want to cling to what they've got. The logjam has paralyzed government. On Tuesday, the Senate froze 20-20 on a vote to adjourn. That's how bad things are.

Voters aren't the only ones to be nauseated. Last week, a panel of federal judges intervened to snatch redistricting powers from the Legislature. Barring a last-minute miracle at the Capitol, boundaries for new legislative and congressional districts will be drawn by a nonpartisan expert, and ratified by the judges in late May.

That's the best news Floridians could get. It's painfully clear that politicians can't be trusted with such important matters.

To appreciate the Senate's miserably irresponsible performance, look no farther than its president, Gwen Margolis, a Democrat from North Dade.

Margolis is full of ambition. She wants to run for Congress in one of two new districts that will be mostly Hispanic. At the same time, she doesn't want to give up her power base in North Dade and Miami Beach. So what does she do? She tailors a new congressional district to fit her desired demographics.

To an untrained eye, the proposed boundaries look like the etchings of a mapmaker on heavy pharmaceuticals. In reality, it's a masterpiece of diabolical gerrymandering.

The Margolis Magical Mystery Tour starts in South Beach and steam-rolls up the coast to Hallandale. There it shrinks weirdly to a one-block-wide corridor, sneaks up to Dania, darts back down to Pembroke Park, hopscotches west to Miramar, slithers south to Hialeah, then angles sharply toward Sweetwater. From there the boundary meanders east, grazing Little Havana and parts of Over town on its journey back to the Miami River.

Nobody said the road to Congress was easy, but this is ridiculous. Some of Margolis' colleagues don't like the map, and now it's a bargaining point: Republicans won't approve the new congressional boundaries unless she approves more GOP seats in the Legislature. The Senate has fought to an impasse.

Seeking compromise, seven Democrats recently endorsed a congressional map drawn by Common Cause, a citizens' lobby. Margolis rejected the plan because it put her in the same district with Dante Fascell, who's not about to surrender his seat.

Margolis isn't the only one playing games. Members of both parties are consumed by fear that redistricting will put them out of office, or stack them against a formidable opponent. They all want a clear, breezy path to re-election.

If only they'd spend half as much time, energy and imagination trying to fix the budget. Instead it's the raw, greedy politics of self-preservation.