Alabama lawmakers will once again have a bill before them that would put the Alabama Department of Archives and History under their thumb.
State Senator Chris Elliott, R-Josephine, has pre-filed a bill that matches legislation he shepherded through the legislative body last year, only for the bill to trip up on its final hurdle to law and ultimately fail.
Both the House and Senate passed the bill, which would put lawmakers in charge of appointing Archives board members, and would allow them to remove them at their pleasure. But a small change in the House required the bill to go back to the Senate for approval, where it got caught up in a Democrat filibuster.
Elliott has been pursuing the change to the Archives board makeup since it hosted a hourlong program that detailed the difficulties LGBTQ+ individuals and organizations have had preserving their history due to Alabama’s past and present discrimination. He and other Republican lawmakers called on the board to cancel the program, but it refused.
The bill, which will be Senate Bill 27 this session, would increase the number of members on the board to 17; there are currently eight members including the governor and his or her designee. The governor also has appointment power for the other seven members, each coming from one of the state’s U.S. Congressional districts.
The bill adds an at-large appointment for the governor, plus an additional eight at-large members primarily appointed by the Speaker of the House and the Senate President Pro Tempore.
There is currently no mechanism for the governor to remove appointees, but this bill would make it so that board members serve at the pleasure of their appointing authorities. This would give the governor a de facto majority of the board with eight appointees and his or her own vote. It also allows the political party in power to have nearly full control of appointments to the board: even the two members selected by the House and Senate minority leaders would be subject to approval of their respective chamber leaders.
