Let me get this straight.

The Florida Legislature, reeling from two separate influence-peddling scandals, has an opening on an ethics and elections committee. That's the panel that's supposed to help keep elected officials and candidates in line. And the guy picked to be the chairman is a lobbyist-turned-legislator-turned- lobbyist-turned-legislator who has gotten in trouble twice for violating -- wait for it -- Florida's ethics and elections laws?

Welcome to Tallahassee, where term limits amount to a quick spin through the revolving door between public office and special interests.

John Thrasher represented the Jacksonville area in the Florida House from 1992 to 2000, when term limits forced him to leave office at the top of his game. So, like many other politicians, he cashed in. Southern Strategy Group, one of the leading lobbying firms in Tallahassee, eagerly brought him in as a partner.

State law bars ex-lawmakers from lobbying their former colleagues for two years, so Thrasher registered to lobby the governor's office and state agencies. But just two months after leaving office, he invited legislators to a luncheon with officials from the University of Miami, one of his firm's clients. Whoops.

Thrasher's earlier run-in with the law was in 1993, his first year in Tallahassee, when he lobbied the state Board of Medicine on behalf of his former employer, the Florida Medical Association. He was reprimanded by the House speaker two years later.

It's all so confusing, these lines between lobbyists and legislators.

But it wasn't Thrasher's intimate knowledge of the ins and outs of ethics law that persuaded Senate President Jeff Atwater to tap him for the chairmanship. Instead, it was his first-hand experience with mudslinging in the race that returned him to the Capitol.

Most notorious was a racially inflammatory mailing by anti-Thrasher trial lawyers, though attack ads were also launched by business groups that backed his election. Who did what and with whose money is murky because a judge recently struck down a law requiring these outside groups to come clean about their donors.

``The events that surrounded the recent District 8 election highlighted the importance of transparency in elections, particularly 527 political committees,'' Atwater said in a statement. ``I chose Sen. Thrasher to chair this committee because I believe he is best-suited for this task.''

In Tallahassee, committee chairs are the ultimate gatekeepers. If your bill is assigned to a committee chair who doesn't like it, well then, there's always next year.

``John Thrasher has played by the rules of the system we have, and maybe the insight he's gained from working both sides could lead him to make some changes in the system that will improve it,'' said Ben Wilcox of Common Cause Florida , a government watchdog group. ``Unfortunately, you see that revolving door at every level of government.''

It could be worse. Thrasher could have been chosen to head the energy committee at the same time his wife is lobbying for offshore oil drilling.

Except that honor went to Republican state Sen. Alex Diaz de la Portilla of Miami, who insists his spouse's position in the high-stakes debate over oil and gas exploration off Florida's coastline won't affect his position.

I guess we'll have to take his word for it. Florida's ethics and elections commission isn't known for keeping elected officials shaking in their boots. Thrasher's fine for his ethics slip-up in 2001 was $500.

In a Capitol awash in special-interest money, that's a dinner tab, not a deterrent.

Beth Reinhard is the political writer for The Miami Herald.

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