With Gov. Rick Scott officially entering his second and final term last week, he now assumes the informal title of “lame duck,” a label bestowed on any governor with no prospect of running for re-election.
It’s a crass nod to the fact their time in office is coming to an end, a situation that can sap influence over the legislative process.
Winning re-election with less than 50 percent of the vote also doesn’t help, as Scott enters his final four years in office with only a thin mandate from voters.
With plenty of tools at a governor’s disposal, a second term does not leave the state’s chief executive without power.
But the challenges are different. Scott’s ability to work with GOP lawmakers no longer motivated by keeping him in the governor’s mansion will be key to moving his second-term agenda.
During the 2014 legislative session, Scott got a pass from lawmakers eager to help him snag high-profile victories.
“Having been involved with (Senate) President Don Gaetz’s administration, I know there was additional sensitivity to the governor’s priorities in an election year,” said state Sen. Tom Lee, R-Brandon.
He said lawmakers will always work to help a governor from their own party in an election year. It allows them to “lay the platform for the campaign, or kind of set the narrative,” Lee said.
That shared political interest is now gone. Complicating matters is the fact that Scott faced an often fractious relationship with the Legislature throughout his first term. It’s a tension that boiled over into public view with just seven days left in the 2013 legislative session.
At that point, Scott made a simple statement to reporters as his office was waging a behind-the-scenes fight with legislative staff.
“There are a lot of projects in there (the budget),” Scott said then in a statement that doesn’t sound like an overt threat, but had a very clear meaning in the context of legislative negotiations: Pass my priorities or lose politically popular hometown budget cash for such things as your water projects, libraries and road repairs.
Not to be bullied, the Legislature returned fire by blocking bills crafted by Scott-controlled agencies, including a high-profile Everglades protection deal agreed to by long-feuding environmentalists and sugar farmers.
The end of a legislative session always involves standoffs, but 2013 was different.
Scott took the unprecedented step of telling his budget staff to stop talking to the Legislature.
When legislative staff called the governor’s office, Scott’s staff was directed to ignore specific questions and only restate his top priorities.
The former health care executive’s negotiating style was sharpened in private sector board rooms, not a political environment that requires horse trading. That clash of styles made hammering out deals difficult.
One year later, that changed.
A day before the end of the 2014 session, Scott stood surrounded by legislative leaders on the Capitol’s prominent fourth floor to herald passage of his top priority: in-state tuition for undocumented college students.
A handful of lawmakers tried to block the plan, but throughout the session it had the overwhelming support of the House and a Senate majority.
The politics of an approaching midterm election was the catalyst that prompted Scott and the GOP-led Legislature to cooperate, but that motivation is now gone.
“We are obviously not in campaign season anymore. We are back to governing,” Lee said. “I think this process works best when the House, Senate and governor all respect each other’s priorities.”
An effective second term will hinge, in part, on Scott’s ability to focus on his priorities and overcome a sometimes rough relationship with lawmakers, according to former chiefs of staff and governors who waged the battle of a lame duck term.
“You have to have a clear idea of what your priorities are,” former Gov. Bob Graham, a Democrat who served two-terms in office in the 1980s, said of governing in a second term.
He said an experienced second term governor must “control your agencies … to stay focused on those priorities.”
Linda Shelley, who served as chief of staff to former two-term Democratic Gov. Lawton Chiles, said the ability to work with lawmakers is a key to second-term success.
She learned that from watching her boss, who served as a state lawmaker and U.S. senator before becoming governor.
“Remember, Chiles was a legislative being,” said Shelley, who is now with the law firm Buchanan Ingersoll & Rooney. “He used that to get really good agreements.”
Graham put it in a political context, offering a glimpse of how a governor can harness a lawmaker’s political ambition.
“I know John, that you are thinking of running for Congress,” Graham said, using a hypothetical example. “Your support for this proposal would be well received by the voters in the 14th Congressional District.”
Governors also have more blunt instruments they can use to get what they want.
“They have line-item veto, the ability to appoint the leaders throughout government, and (they are) the person in the state who Floridians look to to set the agenda,” said Mark Kaplan, who served as chief of staff to former Republican Gov. Jeb Bush during the final three years of his second term.
Now a senior vice president with fertilizer giant Mosaic, Kaplan says he thinks Scott’s agenda will help keep him relevant through his second term.
“It’s way too early to consider him a lame duck,” he said. “He still has a big agenda and a lot he is going to try to accomplish.”
Senate President Andy Gardiner, R-Orlando, said Scott’s ability to remove specific items from the state budget still looms large.
“Anytime you have a veto pen you don’t have lame-duck status,” Gardiner told reporters last month.