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Alabama is never short on political news stories, and 2024 was no exception to that rule.
From the fight over yet another gambling bill (and yet another failure) to the fight for a newly-drawn congressional district to librarians under siege and IVF a victim of pandering Alabama law, there were plenty of attention-grabbing stories this past year. So many, in fact, that compelling stories, such as the governor and the head of Veterans Affairs going to war with each other, a Democrat in this state actually flipping a House seat and Alabama lawmakers trying to imprison librarians who refuse to ban books, had to be left on the cutting floor.
Here are APR’s Top 5 stories of 2024.
The 2024 Presidential Election
Normally, for our end-of-year recaps, we try to steer clear of national stories, such as the presidential races, and stick to things that are more state-specific. But rarely has a presidential race captured the attention of pretty much every political junkie in every state for such a long period of time and for such a wide and strange number of reasons.
It started with the re-nomination of a guy who lost in 2020, and who then – no matter your perspective on reality – tried to overturn those results. Along the way, a number of Alabama residents were arrested and imprisoned for participating in that effort, but those arrests did little to dampen the support Donald Trump received in this state.
On the other side of the aisle was the sitting president, who had been mostly out of the spotlight for months, but who White House aides and Democratic higher-ups assured us was doing fine. Joe Biden won the nomination of the party, but the good feelings lasted only until the first debate in June. At that debacle, Biden struggled mightily to speak and respond, stumbling badly and leaving Democrats in desperation.
The solution: Let’s make Kamala Harris the nominee. For 100 days, that seemed like a good idea. On Election Day, it was a nightmare. Trump won, somehow managing to win in states where other Democrats in key down-ballot races won and managing to win even as Democrats nationally closed their deficit in the House.
In the weeks since, the country and this state are back to the 2017-2020 world of Trump presidency insanity. Already, his AG pick has been forced to withdraw after being accused of paying an underaged girl for sex, his Defense Secretary pick has been under fire for sex abuse allegations and drunken behavior and two other nominees have also dropped out. In Alabama, Trump-friendly politicians are angling for cabinet spots and lobbying Trump to move Space Command back to Huntsville. And the Trump Administration 2 hasn’t even started yet.
The Race for CD2
It was one of the most watched races in the nation, and an election that came about by the most improbable court action. Shomari Figures would ultimately win Alabama’s 2nd Congressional District in November, handily defeating Republican Caroleene Dobson, in a race that helped Democrats shrink the Republican majority in the U.S. House. Along the way, though, it was a race that was filled with statewide intrigue, as a broad field of candidates on both sides of the aisle jumped in.
Figures eventually bested a field of a dozen Democrats, but he got some unexpected help to do so. That help came in the form of millions of dollars poured into his campaign from various cryptocurrency companies. That money helped Figures overcome a problem with name ID and upset Alabama House Minority Leader Anthony Daniels. For Daniels, it was a heartbreaking defeat in a race where he essentially did nothing wrong, had no real flaws and outraised Figures in all traditional avenues.
On the Republican side, Dobson was another surprise winner. She bested longtime state Sen. Dick Brewbaker, who seemingly had a huge advantage in name ID going into the race. Brewbaker had represented the Montgomery area, where he owned a car dealership and his family was one of the most recognizable names in town. But Dobson had personal wealth and a solid campaign team behind her, and she was willing to go on the attack against Brewbaker.
In the end, though, the district that was nearly evenly split among white and Black voters preferred Figures. He won by 10 points, giving Alabama a second Black congressperson for the first time in state history.
The IVF kerfuffle
It began with an insane Alabama Supreme Court opinion. It ended in a national outrage.
To be fair, the ALSC’s opinion was only insane in its styling – pulling from obscure religious texts and quoting the Bible verbatim in portions – but was actually sound in its legal reasoning. Alabama law did, in fact, recognize an embryo as a human being, therefore granting it full protection as such under Alabama law.
The legislature had established that law when it passed, and then voters approved, a constitutional amendment in 2018. Combining that amendment with Alabama’s Wrongful Death of a Minor Act, which protects unborn children who are victims of crimes, and you get a situation whereby fertility clinics that routinely toss out unused or even unviable embryos are, in effect, committing mass murder. Punishable by law.
It’s possible that the justices on Alabama’s highest court were not fully aware of the fly they were about to place in the ointment, but it was a great big green one. The consequences, some might argue, of years of anti-abortion pandering without consideration of consequence or even reality.
Overnight, fertility clinics began to close. The outrage among families that had spent well into the tens of thousands of dollars in hopes of conceiving a child was palpable. And their arguments – that this decision negatively affected the sanctity of life and the opportunity to bring more life in the world – were sound, but ultimately pointless. As were the “fixes” employed by Alabama’s legislature to move around the ruling. None of them can actually grant the immunity they proclaim, and clinics – some of which have reopened – are still facing increased liability issues.
Because at the end of the day, the only true fix for this would be lawmakers admitting that life does not begin at conception, but rather somewhere further down the line – past the point of the embryo stage. And that would defeat four decades of political pandering.
A session of shenanigans and failures
The 2024 session of the Alabama Legislature was filled with wild swings, surprising votes, awful pandering and bewildering decisions, but it will mostly be remembered as a failure. And not just because the body failed once again to push a necessary gambling bill across the finish line.
Gambling’s failure was certainly a key portion of the session – and the economic consequences of failing to push through the best comprehensive gambling bill in a generation will be felt for years to come – but let’s also not forget the failure to fix the medical marijuana impasse, the apparent indifference to Alabama’s inhumane prisons, the failure to adequately fix the IVF fiasco and the failure to address Alabama’s growing health care access issues.
Instead of meaningful change in a mid-quadrennium session (which should have provided lawmakers the freedom to pass difficult legislation), we got pandering and a shameful grab of public school dollars. Lawmakers spent their time passing legislation – or attempting to pass legislation – that punished librarians for not removing certain books, that banned DEI and that funneled 100 million public school dollars to private companies.
In the meantime, the most popular piece of legislation – and the legislation that drew the most public attention – was gambling. It also promised to generate somewhere in the neighborhood of a billion dollars in tax revenue annually and produce more than 12,000 jobs. The economic impact was going to be roughly Alabama’s entire automotive industry in one fell swoop. And that failed … for no discernible reason.
The killing test
Even attorneys who deal daily with Alabama’s incompetent and corrupt corrections system didn’t believe it when the state first announced its intentions to perform execution with nitrogen gas. It was a method that had never been tested. It was a method that most people agreed would be essentially the same as suffocating a person. It was a method that, even if Alabama officials were ghoulish enough to try it, surely federal courts would intervene.
So, when the legislature passed a bill allowing for nitrogen executions, attorneys representing Alabama’s death row inmates encouraged them to agree to the method of execution, believing that it would be yet another stumbling block between them and their execution.
They severely underestimated … pretty much all of the awful.
Alabama officials moved forward with the plan to use the untested method. Federal courts, now filled with Trump-appointed judges, didn’t stand in the way. A couple of failures and the fact that we had no real idea what sort of suffering it might cause did nothing to deter the state.
And so, in 2024, Alabama killed three men by suffocating them to death. Witnesses describe those men as gasping and convulsing for extended periods of time during their executions. But still, no one has been moved to stop this.
