Money has a gravitational effect on politics. A little can tilt campaigns and policy. A lot warps the democratic process like a bowling ball dropped on a bed.
So campaign finance laws show how much our leaders care about a level playing field. Strong ones reveal the flow of money and restrict the ability of the richest 1% to dominate the conversation. They keep the public in mind.
And weak ones? Let’s take a look at last week’s political headlines in Alabama.
About every other day in Alabama, a woman suspecting she is pregnant seeks abortion counseling at an Alabama clinic without knowing how far into the pregnancy she is. She may be a mother with three young children at home. She might be in an abusive relationship. Or perhaps she is a student who someday wants children — just not now.
Once a clinic nurse determines the approximate stage of the pregnancy, she will refer the patient to an out-of-state abortion facility where the procedure is still legal. Meanwhile, staff at the Birmingham-based Yellowhammer Fund would work to guarantee a financial contribution for her travel, hotel, and child care costs, if necessary, and cobble together funding for the abortion care from additional funding sources. Yellowhammer’s work is a lifeline for pregnant people in Alabama, providing grassroots support and resources when they need it most.
This much we know: Alabama’s gender-affirming care ban will be law for the foreseeable future.
Attorneys for transgender young people and their families sued to overturn it. But after a three-year battle, the plaintiffs and the state moved to dismiss the lawsuit. The attorneys for the families said their clients had “to make heart-wrenching decisions that no family should ever have to make, and they are each making the decisions that are right for them.”
To be sure, the broader legal landscape looks threatening. The U.S. Supreme Court seems poised to uphold a similar ban on gender-affirming care in Tennessee. One can hardly blame parents for giving up on an unjust legal system.
There are two sorts of conservatism.
There’s the kind espoused by the 18th-century British politician Edmund Burke. It emphasizes restraint; reverence for tradition and maintaining political and social order through mutual duty. Laws must prevent mob rule at the bottom and tyranny at the top. Change is acceptable but not revolution. One should work with the world as it is, inside a moral framework aware of human shortcomings.
Back on the morning of Jan. 26, Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall praised the state’s prison officials for a “textbook” nitrogen gas execution.
“The [Alabama Department of Corrections] deserve a great deal of thanks and credit for being willing to be the one to step up, first in the country to do so,” Marshall said, adding that he suspected “many states will follow.”
This is what happened. Kenneth Eugene Smith convulsed for two minutes and gasped for at least seven more as he choked to death.
Over the past year, I have been on a speaking tour throughout the state – especially leading up to the General Election. The reason for visiting and speaking to civic organizations was to discuss the national presidential race and its evolvement, as well as how the race for the White House affects Alabamians.
It was one of the most unusual, interesting, topsy-turvy presidential contests I can remember. It was entertaining to say the least. After my talks, I left time for questions from the audiences. You would think that the first, and most important questions, would pertain to the presidential contest. However, that was not the most prevalent inquiry. In almost all 30 venues, the most asked question was who will follow Kay Ivey as governor and who is running for governor in 2026.
I don’t know what constituency supports gouging prisoners’ families.
Is there a well-adjusted person whose vote depends on making prison phone calls as expensive as shame will allow? Or in restricting contact between the incarcerated and their loved ones, making it more likely they’ll re-offend?
But there’s Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall’s name on a petition to the U.S. Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals, next to 13 other Republican attorneys general outraged that the federal government would try to stop an unnecessary cost.
I’m tired of the hateful nonsense directed at immigrants.
I’m disappointed that hardly any elected officials — either in Alabama or in our federal government — defend immigration as a vital, constructive force in our country.
I’m done with the idea that I have to treat people waving signs saying “Mass Deportation Now” and cheering bloody-minded attacks on peaceful communities as good-faith political actors.
And I despise the fact that we allow the most paranoid people in the country to set the terms of the immigration “debate.”
Jenice Fountain could not believe what she was hearing.
Was that Steve Marshall, the attorney general of Alabama, on talk radio, threatening to go after her tiny organization, which is dedicated to supporting pregnant Alabamians seeking legal abortion care?
Measles can do a lot more than give a child a rash.
It can start a 104 degree fever and cause eye-swelling. About 10% of kids who get measles get ear infections.
About 20% of people who contract measles go to the hospital. Five percent develop pneumonia. (If a child dies from measles, it’s often for that reason.) In rare cases, a child can develop encephalitis, a swelling of the brain that can lead to deafness or intellectual disabilities.
And it can spread with frightening speed, infecting 9 of 10 people.
One thing is clear from Marilyn Lands’ House District 10 victory: Abortion still motivates Democrats.
Lands turned a seven-point loss in 2022 into a 25-point romp on March 26. And for the first time since 2002 – when then-Democratic Gov. Don Siegelman almost pulled off a shocking re-election upset – Alabama Democrats came out of an election with more legislators than they had before it.
But the obvious question is whether Democrats can replicate Lands’ win around the state.
Last Tuesday, Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall issued a “statement on redistricting to the people of Alabama.”
It said his office would abide by a federal court order creating a second majority or near-majority Black congressional district while appealing the ruling.
That’s a standard comment when one loses cases like these. (The office on Friday appeared to have abandoned an immediate appeal of the order.)
But Marshall said a lot more.
In Wisconsin, Republican lawmakers are threatening to impeach both the state’s election administrator, who is highly regarded nationally, and a state Supreme Court justice despite a ruling by the state’s judicial commission that the justice had done nothing wrong — effectively nullifying a recent statewide election she won, Democrats say.
In North Carolina, a bill that would give the legislature control of state and local election boards — potentially allowing lawmakers to overturn results — could soon become law.
And Alabama continues to defy the U.S. Supreme Court by refusing to draw a new congressional district with a Black majority.
Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall got sued last week over some comments he made a year ago about the state’s near-total abortion ban.
Marshall went on a radio show last year to suggest that assisting an Alabama woman’s efforts to get an abortion out of state was “potentially criminally actionable.”
Physicians and clinicians say that read of the law violates their free speech, due process, and travel rights if they share any sort of information about abortion or reproductive care outside Alabama (still legal, to varying degrees, in about 35 states).
All signs point to a Titanic political year in 2022. In fact, as I look back over the last six decades of my observations of Alabama politics, next year may be the most momentous.
