TALLAHASSEE -- Arcane parliamentary ploys deepened chaos in the politically cracked Florida Senate on Tuesday, resurrecting the possibility of a last-ditch effort to constitutionally safeguard vouchers while threatening passage of other issues in the last three days of this year's legislative session.

Tuesday's political maneuvers left one Democratic senator comparing the Republican leadership to communist Cuba.

Republican senators were also upset, saying the freedom to cast a vote based on one's will was being crushed.

An unexpected procedural move in the waning minutes of Tuesday's meeting of the Senate led to the revival of a highly contentious effort to ask voters this November to essentially override a Florida Supreme Court decision that found a voucher program unconstitutional. That bill, considered Gov. Jeb Bush's top priority in his last year in office, fell one vote short of the 24 needed on Monday, with a 23-16 tally that included four Republicans defecting from the party line.

Senators from both parties said Tuesday's decision to put the bill back into consideration violated a Senate rule that held such a revival could only occur on the same day of the vote on the bill.

A majority of the 40 senators, all Republicans who felt the rule allowed such a recall on any day, voted to revive the bill with a 22-17 vote.

Also contributing to the haze of conspiracy: An ongoing battle over who will be Senate president in 2008.

Bush and Senate President Tom Lee, R-Brandon, attributed the voucher measure's defeat on Monday to Republican senators angered by the overthrow of Sen. Alex Villalobos, R-Miami, from the 2008 leadership position.

The fallout from the usually cloistered world of internal politics in the Senate, which Republicans control 26-14, had GOP members wondering if jostling for power jeopardized bills on contentious issues such as property insurance reform and myriad education efforts, including Bush's push to institute majors for high school students.

Sen. Victor Crist, a conservative Republican from Tampa, said the power struggles and "strange interpretations of the rules" created "a lot of 'unusualness' we haven't seen for a very long time.

"The under-flowing politics, and the undermining and the backstabbing and the threats and the arm-twisting, have been unbelievable," said Crist, who voted with the Republican leadership on the Bush-favored voucher bill. "We're getting  to the wee hours" of the session, he said, "and it's a shame because there's really good policy that's falling ... and getting caught up" in the squabbles.

Sen. Nancy Argenziano, R-Dunnellon, has frequently been chastised by GOP leaders for not following the party line. She voted against the voucher measure and said the decision to revive the bill clearly broke the Senate rules.

"There's a rift here for a darn good reason," she said, speaking of Republicans who did not support the voucher bill. "We want to keep the Senate a free-flowing place of freedom, to vote the way you want, to vote to keep democracy alive. There are people who don't like people in my party to have differences of opinion."

With such pressure to toe the party line, she added, "representative democracy is probably dead."

Lee dismissed such complaints, adding that he felt it was "unlikely" he could sway those who voted "no" to now vote for the voucher measure.

And the lone Democrat who voted for the voucher measure, Sen. Al Lawson, D-Tallahassee, said Tuesday he would reverse his support based on Tuesday's actions.

Democrats have generally been treated as near equals in the Senate, despite being outnumbered nearly 2-to-1.

Democrats said Lee betrayed their trust by not informing them of the last-minute revival of the voucher measure with an interpretation of rules they found absurd.

"It's really a black eye for the Republicans," said Sen. Walter "Skip" Campbell, D-Fort Lauderdale. "They are trying to run the show by making the rules. I think the sense of fairness is gone. This is more communistic than it is anything else. This would happen in Cuba."

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