The Florida Legislature needs to take a good look in the mirror.
The problem is, this is an election year, when most people in Tallahassee don't like to make tough decisions.
Two bills filed for the upcoming session are sure to be very unpopular with the public but deserve to be fully debated. Both involve the clock: term limits and the compressed 60-day annual session.
The question is, should both be longer?
Sen. Mike Bennett, R-Bradenton, calls term limits a failure and has filed a bill (S598) to extend terms from eight to 12 years.
"I was for term limits until I actually saw how bad it was," said Bennett, who was elected to the House in 2000 and to the Senate in 2002.
What floored him, he said, was that only a handful of lawmakers had any experience in dealing with budget cuts when the real cutting began three years ago.
Bennett's bill also seeks to ease Tallahassee's obsession with campaign fundraising by changing senators' terms from four to six years and House members' from two to four.
That would enable House members to be less preoccupied with the next election. It seems that from the day they're elected, representatives are constantly campaigning.
Bennett is a veteran lawmaker who knows that longer terms have little chance of getting a three-fifths vote of both chambers to make the ballot, not to mention the 60 percent vote at the polls needed to change the Constitution.
"I think it should be debated," Bennett said.
The second proposal, by freshman Rep. Dwayne Taylor, a Daytona Beach Democrat, asks the Legislature's research arm to study the "effectiveness and cost efficiency" of making the Legislature full time.
Lawmakers now meet for 60 days, but special sessions have become increasingly frequent, and among the most populous states, only Texas holds shorter sessions than Florida's.
Young lawmakers feel as if they are on a treadmill, moving much too fast, with no time to study issues in depth. Then after eight grueling years, they're termed out. Floridians deserve better than newbie politicians making rookie mistakes under constant deadline pressure.