This is an opinion column.
Eight and half years ago, Donald Trump was elbowing his way through a crowded field of Republican primary opponents. Hillary Clinton and her supporters were gleaming at the prospect of facing a push-over in the general election.
And I was looking into a future a lot of folks weren’t ready to consider — one that looked a lot like Alabama.
In a single year, Alabama had seen the heads of all three branches of state government — Gov. Robert Bentley, House Speaker Mike Hubbard and Chief Justice Roy Moore — forced out of office.
Our state government was in sorry sorts.
“And this Thing that has corrupted my state, robbed us of common sense, poisoned our decency, and made us loathe our neighbors — it is contagious and you are at risk,” I wrote then.
“Call it the Alabamafication of America.”
What I didn’t consider then was this thing coursing through Alabama hadn’t yet left its system. It’s still there today, and it has gotten worse.
If you woke up Wednesday morning wondering what comes next, you would do well to look at Alabama.
In hindsight, Bentley, Moore and Hubbard’s defenestrations now seem laughably quaint.
Bentley’s sin was that he got too fresh with an aide. While the whole thing seems to have been consensual, he pleaded guilty to an ethics crime and resigned.
Someone should have told him — when you’re famous, they let you do it.
Moore was pushed out for having defied the federal courts. This was when judges still held each other accountable, not when members of the U.S. Supreme Court doled out immunity to elected officials or took favors and gifts from political pals.
What’s a little Winnebago between friends?
Hubbard went to prison for breaking ethics laws he helped pass. Today lawmakers openly complain these laws are too burdensome, and they keep trying to repeal and replace the ethics code with something a little more chill — like making bribery a misdemeanor.
You don’t have to break the law when you make the law.
Today, Bentley, Moore or Hubbard could have done the exact same things and nobody would have touched them. Years of exposure to corruption and ineffective government has triggered numbness to public misbehavior, and ultimately paralysis.
Consider, the case of John Wahl. Two years ago, I wrote about the Alabama GOP chairman voting with a photo ID he made himself and then pushing to have a poll worker fired after he complained. This seemed like a big deal, as Alabama Republicans had fought so hard for voter ID.
But as it turns out, voter ID laws only apply to some people, not Alabama GOP big wigs.
Two Alabama Secretaries of State referred complaints to Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall.
Marshall has done nothing about it.
Speaking of Marshall, he did accept PAC-to-PAC campaign contributions, despite Alabama having a law against such things. The Alabama Ethics Commission came one vote shy of referring him for prosecution. When the head of the Alabama Democratic Party asked the commission if he could do the same thing, he was told it was a crime.
And the prosecutor who put Hubbard in jail? He was moved to a private sector career path, which is to say, Marshall fired him.
Marshall has now won reelection twice.
Gov. Kay Ivey hasn’t committed any crimes to speak of. The real scandals of her administration — to borrow a line from Crossfire’s Michael Kinsley — are what’s legal.
When the federal government gave Alabama a sackful of COVID stimulus funds, her administration invested that money in Alabama’s future, which is to say, a prison.
I’d like to tell you how much that prison will cost, but the number keeps changing. Once projected to cost less than $200 million, that price tag has more than quintupled. When it’s over, Alabama will have paid at least $1.08 billion, nearly all of it through secretive no-bid contracts.
How do they get away with it? The breakdown of political accountability, legal guardrails and voter outrage.
When prosecutors get fired for prosecuting public officials, pretty soon they quit charging public officials.
When the public shrugs its shoulders at a most expensive prison-ever, the prison only gets more expensive.
When ethics laws get in the way of a good time, lawmakers will inevitably rewrite those laws.
When voters don’t punish crooked politicians, politicians just do more crooked things.
What’s remarkable, looking back eight years, is that Alabama once had limits. When public officials colored outside the lines, we put them in a corner.
But slowly fatigue sets in and then apathy. Corruption becomes expected, then finally accepted — especially when the official is someone we like.
And now America, like Alabama, has gone numb.
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Publish date : 2024-11-07 19:14:00
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