A proposed statewide referendum that wouldn’t really do anything to balance any budget but would send a statement to Congress generated a lot of heat in the House Rules committee this morning.

“Basically House memorials are meaningless. They’re like toilet paper,” House Democratic leader Ron Saunders said of the proposal.

The “nonbinding statewide advisory referendum,” pushed by GOP leaders including Senate President Jeff Atwater and already passed by the Senate, would ask voters the following question:

In order to stop the uncontrolled growth of our national debt and prevent excessive borrowing by the Federal Government, which threatens jobs, robs America and our children of their opportunity for success, and threatens our national security, should the United States Constitution be amended to require a balanced federal budget without raising taxes?

“This sends a message today that federal spending is out of control and we need to have a balance,” House budget chief David Rivera, R-Miami, told the Rules Committee this morning.

But Saunders and other Dems objected to the strongly-worded proposal as election-year “propaganda,” “incendiary” and “hypocritical” because lawmakers raised millions of dollars in drivers “fees” and cigarette taxes to balance the budget last year.

“The language here is unnecessary and just an opportunity to demagogue,” said Saunders, D-Key West, who offered an amendment changing the language to “Should the U.S. Constitution be amended to require a balanced federal budget?”

His amendment failed, and the referendum passed along partisan lines.

It’s the most anticipated decision from Gov. Charlie Crist since he kept the state’s political community on edge last year about his run for U.S. Senate.

It appears to have galvanized more Floridians than the 2007 property tax revolt or the debate over Terri Schiavo’s feeding tube in 2003.

It’s clearly the most volatile Florida education issue since 1999, when then-Gov. Jeb Bush decided the state would give schools grades and money for FCAT scores.

Crist insisted late Wednesday that he still hadn’t made up his mind, which he has until 11:59 p.m. on Friday to do.

But signs point to a veto. Today.

Analysis here.

Democrat Ted Deutch, who is to be sworn into Congress today by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, says his home and family will remain in West Boca while he’s representing District 19 in Washington.

Former U.S. Rep. Robert Wexler’s decision to move his wife and kids to Maryland and to declare Florida residency at his in-laws’ house in West Delray caused a flap in 2008 — although Wexler still cruised to reelection that year with 66.2 percent.

The House Rules Committee gave Attorney General Bill McCollum’ “boost” this morning by allowing him to add individuals in the state’s lawsuit against President Barack Obama’s administration over federal health care reforms.

McCollum, a Republican who is running for governor, doesn’t necessarily need a new law to give him that power, Chairman Bill Galvano said, but would let the courts know that the state supports McCollum’s efforts.

“However, at best it can bolster it. At worst, it’s window dressing,” Galvano, R-Bradenton, said.

More than a dozen Republican attorneys general in other states have joined McCollum’s lawsuit, which in Florida has fueled a partisan fight echoed in the committee this morning.

” I don’t think we should be in the business of passing laws that aren’t necessary,” argued Rep. Jim Waldman, a Coconut Creek Democrat who is a lawyer.

“The law that’s not necessary is the unconstitutional mandate requiring Floridians to buy health care coverage and if not fining them,” retorted House Majority Leader Adam Hasner, R-Delray Beach.

The bill passed along partisan lines, with Ron Saunders of Key West the only Democrat voting with Republicans. Democrats had stopped McCollum’s measure from being tacked onto a different bill last week but GOP House leaders revived the bill at McCollum’s request.

Deputy Attorney General Joe Jacquot said McCollum’s office does not believe they need the statutory authorization but that it would bolster the lawsuit’s standing in the courts. McCollum’s office is seeking a Senate vehicle for the proposal.

The newest Quinnipiac University poll shows Republican Marco Rubio with a 56-to-33 percent lead over Gov. Charlie Crist in the Republican U.S. Senate primary.

If Crist were to leave the GOP and run as a no-party candidate, the poll found him with a lead within the poll’s margin of error: 32 percent for Crist, 30 percent for Rubio and 24 percent for Kendrick Meek. That poll of 1,250 Florida voters had a 2.8 percent margin of error. The GOP poll of 497 voters had a 4.4 percent margin of error.

Read Quinnipiac’s release after the jump…..

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Attorney General Bill McCollum‘s attempt at turning a (non-controversial) life insurance bill into a vehicle to boost his (controversial) lawsuit against the federal government over health care reforms backfired last week.

But Republican House leaders are breathing new life into a measure giving the GOP candidate for governor the power to represent Floridians, individually or en masse.

Democrats protested that McCollum’s amendment – tacked onto the life insurance bill in a series of surprise amendments that confused even Republican House General Government Policy Council Chairman Baxter Troutman – wasn’t germane to the original bill.

House Speaker Larry Cretul’s staff and the Democrats agreed to strip the original bill of the McCollum language and instead are introducing it at a stand-alone bill at today’s Rules Committee meeting.

House rules require that amendments be germane to the bills on which they are attached. Often subjective, rulings on germanity frequently threaten credulity.

But a legislative lawyer’s diagram of the germanity rule and its relationship to the bill in question (HB 885) as an explanation to a lawmaker who questioned the process seemingly made the germanity issue clear. As mud.

Republican Gov. Charlie Crist said he doesn’t know Terry Golden, who signed up to testify about the controversial teacher tenure/merit pay bill on behalf of his office. Golden is listed as the education policy chief on Crist’s Web site. The Sun-Sentinel reported that Golden supported the bill during the committee meeting.

That detail gives some credence to Sen. John Thrasher’s argument — and Senate President Jeff Atwater’s — that he thought he had Crist’s support for the bill (background here and here). Crist is now considering a veto.

But perhaps the clue might have been that she, not her boss — Scott Kittel, the office’s education policy coordinator, was at that meeting.

Republican Ed Lynch, who got 35.2 percent in Tuesday’s special congressional election after polling 27.2 percent in a 2008 congressional race, says he’ll decide in the next few days whether to make a third try this fall for the heavily Democratic District 19 seat won by Democrat Ted Deutch.

Lynch said he’s received “hundreds of e-mails” urging him to run again and “I’ll mull that over.”

He’d better mull quickly. The deadline for federal candidates to qualify for the ballot is April 30.

No-party candidate Jim McCormick, who got 2.7 percent Tuesday, says he’s also weighing a fall run either for the congressional seat or Deutch’s old state Senate seat. If he runs, McCormick says he might go back to the GOP because “it’s clear to me that America’s just not as ready for independent candidates as it should be.”

The Senate Communications, Energy and Public Utilities Committee gave a preliminary nod to Gov. Charlie Crist’s two latest picks for the Public Service Commission, David Klement and Benjamin “Steve” Stevens.

But, judging from the questions and comments at this morning’s hearings, the new utility regulators who helped kill two proposed rate hikes – including Florida Power & Light Co.’s requested $1.2 billion increase – have a ways to go.

“This is the first step in a very long process,” said chairman Alex Diaz de la Portilla, R-Miami.

The committee gave the pair a preliminary nod with an 8-1 vote. Sen. Chris Smith, a black Democrat from Ft. Lauderdale, voted against the appointees because, he said, there are no minorities on the panel.

Sens. Mike Haridopolos and Joe Negron peppered the pair with questions that mirrored the investor-owned utilities dissatisfaction with the regulators that turned down nearly $2 billion in proposed rate increases since they joined the panel this year.

Negron asked Stevens, a Pensacola bar owner and accountant, about the regulator’s statements during a January hearing in which Stevens said he would oppose a rate increase in the future.

Negron, a Republican lawyer from Stuart, wanted to know if Stevens has already made up his mind about future votes.

“I’m not predisposed. I’m open-minded but I do recognize that I’ve got technical guys here, technical guys there and they’re very smart and we have to make a decision,” Stevens said.

Haridopolos was even more pointed. He said that the PSC’s refusal to grant the rate hikes has made it harder and more expensive for the utilities to borrow money.

Haridopolos also grilled both regulators on whether they feel pressure from Crist to vote a certain way after Crist threatened to fire any commissioners who supported the rate hikes.

“We expect you to call balls and strikes. And we expect not to hear about the legislature should do this or that. We expect you to do your job. We move away from the obvious politics that are being played,” Haridopolos, R-Indialantic, said. Lawmakers want commissioners “who don’t care what the governor thinks, don’t care what the legislature thinks, and look at the long term view,” he went on.

“I will take the long-term view,” Stevens assured him.

The Senate Ethics and Elections Committee must vote on the appointees before a full Senate vote.

Gov. Charlie Crist said he didn’t know much about a proposal to do away with the separation of church and state in the Florida constitution passed by committees in the House and Senate yesterday.

But, he said, “On the face of it, it doesn’t sound like a good idea.”

The proposed “Religious Freedom” constitutional amendment could appear on the ballot in November and would set the stage for the resurrection of Gov. Jeb Bush’s school voucher program, struck down by courts two years ago.

The measure is one of several proposals backed by social conservatives that may have more traction this year because of a more right-leaning Senate that in the past was a hurdle for the conservative agenda.

Read more here.

More Post On Politics videos from the past couple weeks here.

Republican congressional hopeful Allen West, whose viral YouTube video helped him raise $677,586 in the last quarter of 2009 and gain national attention, raised $838,449 during the first quarter of 2010, his consultant said.

West has raised more than $2 million overall for his challenge of U.S. Rep. Ron Klein, D-Boca Raton. West’s campaign, which has spent heavily on a direct-mail effort, has more than $1.1 million cash on hand, consultant Ed Brookover said this morning.

Klein had nearly $2.4 million cash on hand as of Dec. 31. He hasn’t released a first-quarter report. Reports are due Thursday.

Gov. Charlie Crist cooled his heels for more than an hour as the Senate Communications, Energy and Public Utilities Committee grilled his two Public Service Commission appointees, Steve Stevens and David Klement, but left before the committee took a final vote.

Crist left shortly before 11 a.m. (Lt. Gov. Jeff Kottkamp took his place) to attend a bill signing after being kept on ice by committee chairman Alex Diaz de la Portilla who took up two other bills before getting to the appointment confirmations.

The full Senate must approve the appointments once the committee signs off on them, if they do.

“Both of these men are men of great integrity,” Crist told the committee before the interrogations began. “That’s why I chose to appoint them from the pool that was given to me from you. I believe the Public Service Commission is a great panel. It can do very good work., and I know that these two men are dedicated to doing this. That’s all I wanted to say.”

But that wasn’t enough for Sen. Chris Smith, a black Democrat from Ft. Lauderdale who has raised concern in the past about the lack of diversity on the panel.

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Hannah Giles, the former Florida International University student and conservative activist who posed as a prostitute in the undercover videos that brought down left-leaning ACORN, is scheduled to give a “special speech” at Thursday night’s tax day tea party rally at 5:30 p.m. at the county governmental center in West Palm Beach.

The videos made by Giles and accomplice James O’Keefe were back in the news recently when California Attorney General and former Democratic presidential hopeful Jerry Brown called the tapes “severely edited” and concluded the ACORN employees captured on the California videos engaged in “highly inappropriate behavior,” but didn’t break the law.

GOP congressional candidate Allen West, who’s challenging U.S. Rep. Ron Klein, D-Boca Raton, had a sit-down with Fox’s Sean Hannity in The Villages Tuesday night and weighed in on President Obama’s nuclear weapons policy, Iran, Israel, American exceptionalism and other topics.

West didn’t mention Klein, but dropped in references to Sun Tzu, Margaret Thatcher and Plato.

Hannity’s takeaway: “I don’t think I’ve had a single interview where somebody has quoted Plato, Sun Tzu and Margaret Thatcher in one interview.”

Sen. Alex Villalobos, the Republican Rules Committee chairman, joined a slew of Democratic lawmakers urging Gov. Charlie Crist to veto the contentious teacher pay bill.

But Villalobos used a different tack to persuade the governor, who has until midnight Friday to act on the measure (SB 6): it’s a “constitutional mess.”

Villalobos argued in a letter to Crist sent Tuesday that the bill that virtually eliminates job security for teachers and bases their salary increases on how well their students perform on standardized tests poses a host of potential constitutional problems.

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With all 93 precincts reporting in Broward County, which makes up about 30 percent of congressional District 19, Democrat Ted Deutch got 53.8 percent to 42.8 percent for Republican Ed Lynch and 3.4 percent for no-party candidate Jim McCormick.

About one-third of Palm Beach County precincts have reported and Deutch has about 65 percent of the vote there.

The Associated Press has declared Deutch the winner and Deutch just gave a victory speech to hundreds of cheering supporters in Boca Raton.

The Associated Press, after looking at partial results that show a big lead for Democrat Ted Deutch, is calling Deutch the winner of the special congressional election to replace Robert Wexler.

Perhaps more authoritatively, Palm Beach County Commissioner Burt Aaronson just declared Deutch “our new congressman….Let me be the first to congratulate you on a wonderful victory.”

Aaronson is at a Deutch election night party at Mizner Park.

Palm Beach County Democratic Chairman Mark Alan Siegel, who early on the night of the Feb. 2 Democratic primary forecast “upwards of 80 percent” for Ted Deutch (he got 85.2 percent), is predicting Deutch will get more than 60 percent of the vote in Palm Beach County in today’s special general election.

“The forecast is mid-60s….63, 64 something like that,” said Siegel, who based his forecast on Democratic turnout at key precincts in Palm Beach County. He predicted a slightly lower percentage for Deutch in Broward County, which is about 30 percent of congressional District 19.

Former U.S. Rep. Robert Wexler never got below 65.6 percent in a general election in the district. Wexler stepped down in January to head a Middle East think tank.

Ted Deutch got 69.5 percent of the early vote in Palm Beach County to 29.6 percent for Republican Ed Lynch in the special election to replace Robert Wexler.

Absentee and precinct numbers for Palm Beach County haven’t been posted. Palm Beach County is about 70 percent of congressional District 19.

Combined with partial results from Broward County, Deutch has about 63 percent of the vote to 35 percent for Lynch and the remainder for no-party candidate Jim McCormick.

Results are starting to trickle in, so keep visiting the PostOnPolitics blog and PalmBeachPost.com