|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
Same crazy, different year.
Alabama politics in 2024 was much like all the years that have come before it – filled with insane people doing insane things while a handful of folks try to do good and keep this crazy train from running completely off the rails. More lawmakers got arrested, we decided to experiment with innovative ways to kill humans, there were elections and sessions and failures and even a success or two.
The names and acts change a little. The craziness never does. Here are my top stories from 2024.
The un-gerrymandering of CD2
It was the race that pulled back the curtain on Alabama’s gerrymandering.
After a federal court ordered the state to redraw its congressional districts – and the U.S. Supreme Court surprisingly agreed – state lawmakers refused to do so. So the court did it for them, implementing a district that was more evenly split racially. White voters still outnumbered minority voters in the district, but the numbers were closer.
The race was not.
Democrat Shomari Figures won by 10 points over a candidate with seemingly endless amounts of personal money to spend. Such a trouncing in a 2nd district with those demographics should have been clear evidence of what we should have known all along: While there are more Republicans than Democrats voting in Alabama, there aren’t an overwhelming supermajority more of them.
Yet, that’s how we function in this state, from top to bottom. Republicans, thanks to an incredible amount of brazen gerrymandering, have packed Democratic voters, most of whom are Black, into a handful of districts and then run roughshod over them in every legislative session.
Despite around 40 percent of the state voting for viable Democratic candidates (Kay Ivey and Tommy Tuberville each got less than 60 percent of the vote in 2018 when facing formidable Dems), our Alabama House is just 27 percent Dem and the state Senate is just 22 percent.
Those rigged numbers have helped foster an idea of Republican dominance, squeezing out rational compromise among the parties and sending us steadily down a road of extremism.
Figures’ victory showed what could be in the state, as he and Republican challenger Caroleene Dobson each campaigned in areas they might otherwise avoid in a less competitive district. That fostered some of the best, most important conversations of the election cycle and some of the most striking position changes from candidates.
Figures talked in bold terms about combating crime and addressing rising gun violence. Dobson surprised most Republicans by calling on Gov. Kay Ivey to explore Medicaid expansion, following her repeated discussions with citizens who fell in the coverage gap.
It was a glimpse of an Alabama that could be – one where politicians are actually listening to constituents and molding policy positions based upon the plights of real Alabamians.
Gambling fails … again
This was going to be the year that gambling finally passed. And then, it didn’t. Again.
To be fair to anyone who thought this time might be different, there were specific differences in the way the legislation was handled and in the way the interested parties supported it.
First off, Alabama House members actually put in some work to understand the problem and craft a well-reasoned, well thought out piece of legislation that would have both generated tons of revenue for the state and addressed many of the ongoing gambling issues that plague Alabama.
Secondly, the interested parties – the longtime dog track/electronic bingo casino owners and the Poarch Band of Creek Indians had settled into a truce of sorts and both sides supported at least the idea of a comprehensive plan for gambling. So, all of the stars were aligning.
Then, the Alabama Senate got involved. In the same way a toddler gets involved with that slime stuff they love to play with.
The result was an unmitigated mess: A bill that somehow left Alabama with the same number of casinos, but instead of full resorts that might attract tourists from all over the country, they were mostly historical horse racing casinos that would have generated a fraction of the revenue. In addition, the backroom games served to separate the fragile truce between the interested parties and the whole thing fell apart.
Leaving Alabama in the same position it’s been in for years: All the gambling of our surrounding states, almost none of the revenue.
Still no weed
Kids who were not yet born when Alabama passed its medical marijuana act, allowing for patients to receive the drugs, will this year be old enough to enter pre-K. And the state still hasn’t seen its first medical marijuana company start work.
That’s because the Alabama Medical Cannabis Commission remains locked in legal action brought by several companies who are challenging the licensing process undertaken by the commission. Those companies contend that the AMCC failed to follow the Alabama Administrative Procedures Act, the applicable state law that provides a clear set of parameters for any state agency awarding limited licenses in which there are multiple qualified applicants.
There is no question that the AMCC failed to follow those guidelines. And despite three do-over attempts to get it right and fix the process, the AMCC has refused to follow the APA guidelines.
As it stands now, the litigation has moved into a mediation phase, but there’s currently no end in sight to the ongoing stalemate. And with AMCC commissioners referring to the litigants as “bad guys” and refusing to rectify obvious blunders, those kids might be in high school before medical weed starts flowing to patients.
The IVF mess
It was one of the few times that I actually agreed with the Alabama Supreme Court. When the state’s highest court issued an opinion, which read like a Bible study class note, determining that Alabama law defines embryos as children, and as such, they are subject to protection as humans under state law, the rest of the country gasped.
But it was the right ruling. For once, the state’s Supreme Court justices actually followed the laws as written and issued a ruling – controversial and problematic as it might be – based on the law. Embryos are children in Alabama, and every fertility clinic in the state was committing mass murder on a regular basis – crimes for which they could be held liable by the parents of those embryos.
Now, to be certain, it’s an utterly insane ruling. And to prove that, simply ask any rational person that if a fire in a fertility clinic left them with a choice of saving 100,000 embryos or a single other human being walking around that clinic, which would they choose. We all know the answer, because we all know that embryos are not yet kids.
But the Supreme Court was right when it determined that Alabama’s laws, which place the beginning of protected life at the moment of conception, place that distinction on embryos. And that puts our state lawmakers in quite the pickle. Because years of pandering nonsense and scientifically unsupported hocus pocus junk about the sanctity of life has left them in the awkward position of either backtracking and admitting it was all BS or telling desperate parents that they can’t use reasonable, acceptable medical processes – in vitro fertilization – to bring new life into this world.
It was the single greatest FAFO of the year.
Alabama Dems still clowning
If you thought 2024 was going to be the year that Alabama Democrats finally stopped the in-fighting and bickering and started focusing on meaningful ways to beat Republicans and give state voters another viable alternative, well, you were wrong. Bigly wrong.
Instead, the Alabama Democratic Party leadership, with Randy Kelley at the helm and Joe Reed leading the party’s Black caucus, continued to pursue punitive actions against those who they believed wronged them in 2019, when the party was forced to implement new bylaws. Much of that action was focused on eliminating new caucuses that were formed in order for the party to be in compliance with the new bylaws, which mandated that ADP expand its definition of minority groups.
Party leadership was called to D.C. near the end of 2023 in an effort to work out a compromise and keep the party in compliance with those bylaws after Kelley and Reed pushed through new bylaws that eliminated many of the new minority caucuses. Another new set of bylaws implemented early in 2024 brought back many of those caucuses, with reduced voting power, but the in-fighting continued.
Things came to a head in the fall, when the DNC circumvented Reed and Kelley when choosing delegates to represent the state at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, where Kamala Harris was set to be nominated. Reed and Kelley responded by threatening a lawsuit, making critical remarks about DNC chairman Jaime Harrison and then failing to vote for Harris to be the nominee. Although both Kelley and Reed later denied they didn’t vote for Harris, the state was curiously missing two delegate votes at the convention.
Then, adding fuel to the fire, former U.S. Sen. Doug Jones called for ADP leadership to resign, because the party is “an unmitigated disaster.” That was followed by Kelley calling Jones a “hustler” who “couldn’t get elected dog catcher.”
In the meantime, there’s no apparent plan for candidate recruitment, increased get-out-the-vote efforts or organized opposition to regressive and harmful Republican ideas. So, yeah, still going great.
