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Republican Speaker Sansom indicted, other Republicans set career path
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As a Gator fan growing up, I heard a joke about how to get to Tallahassee that went something like: “Go north until you smell it. Then west until you step in it.”
These days there’s a real stench coming out of Tallahassee but it has nothing to do with our rivals on the football field. Instead, that unmistakable odor is the stink of corruption coming from the Republican controlled Legislature.
Today, Republican Representative Ray Sansom, the former Speaker of the Florida House was indicted on corruption charges. Sansom isn’t a former Speaker in the sense of “once upon a time he was speaker.” Sansom was the Republican-elected Speaker of the House this year. If he had not reversed his own defiant declarations and stepped aside under pressure, he’d be running the Florida House of Representatives today.
The charges handed down by grand jury also included his buddy Bob Richburg, the President of a local community college where Sansom took a lucrative, unadvertised job after sending $6 million in unrequested taxpayer money to Richburg’s college.
The college, in turn, used some of those funds to build a private airplane hanger for another buddy, Ray Odom who, in turn, has given more than $1 million in political donations to Sansom, the Republican Party of Florida and other affiliated political groups.
That’s a cozy deal unless you’re a taxpayer.
This week, a newspaper busted Republican Representative Jane Adkins of Nassau County for voting on and even writing legislation which would allow a business owned by her husband to keep receiving the more than $300,000 they collect in state contracts.
Republican Jeanette Nunez of Miami, herself a lobbyist, has collected most of her $46,000 in campaign contributions from fellow lobbyists and health-care industry businesses while she is employed by taxpayer funded Jackson Memorial Hospital. Even worse, Nunez’s job at the hospital is hiring lobbyists to represent the facility – the very same lobbyists who are bankrolling her campaign.
The sad part about Sansom’s departure is that it isn’t likely to change much. Adkins (of the $300,000 in contracts for her husband’s business) is a freshman. She was just elected in 2008. And Nunez (hiring the lobbyists who then give to her campaign) isn’t even elected yet. She’s running in her first Legislative campaign.
You have to give them credit, though. By picking leaders like Sansom, Republicans start the training early.
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