Troy King update

By Jennifer J. Foster

The Locust Fork Journal reports that a spokeman for Troy King today denied rumors that King is preparing to resign.

Republican leaders are remaining mum on the resignation buzz and the rumors that started them. Locust Fork notes that Gov. Bob Riley’s press office has “refused to return multiple phone calls” from its writer; in addition, Alabama Republican Party Chairman and House Minority Leader Mike Hubbard has not responded to my request for comment, and ALGOP communications director Philip Bryan told me this afternoon that the party will have no comment.

Troy King in trouble

By Jennifer J. Foster

Are Troy King’s days as attorney general numbered?

LeftinAlabama.com seems to think so.

More as we learn it.

Ted Little responds

By Jennifer J. Foster

It didn’t take Ted Little long to respond to my analysis. I figured he’d have something to say, but—WOW!

To paraphrase that famous line from

Hamlet

, the senator doth protest too much, methinks.

I displayed his comments in the original post, but I’ve pasted them here, exactly as he wrote them, to make sure they don’t get buried:

Jennifer:  We have reviewed your long awaited blog on my articles.  Thank you for coming through.  I did note that you made reference to the Florida legislature and your experience there, and that you were impressed when Legislators did not compromise, and were willing “to go to the mattresses”.  My first observation is that the Florida legislature has never been known to be anyone’s role model of how the legislative process should run.  Consequently, in the future I hope you will refrain from telling us “how y’all did it in Florida”.  Furthermore, my experience has taught me you must “know when to hold ‘em and know when to fold ‘em”, and that that experience showed me we needed to compromise even though it was in the 11th hour.  My vote for cloture was to no avail, thus the special session developed and Higher Education came out worse than if the compromise had been reached in the regular session.  I say this to let you know that my decision to compromise was a good decisio!
n.  It was based on my understanding of the legislative process and my years of legislative experience, and my colleagues who said they were for Higher Education should have listened.

Right off the bat, Little begs more questions with his statement, “We have reviewed your long awaited blog ...“

Who is “we?“ Is there some damage-control outfit that’s assisting him with his columns? Is it the Democratic majority office? Is it campaign staff—two and a half years ahead of Election Day?

And if he’s defending his own vote for cloture (and all his “colleagues who said they were for Higher Education should have listened”), why does he need any help, anyway?

Secondly, it’s unfortunate that in Little’s fervor to defend himself, he completely misunderstood what I said. Nowhere in the post did I hold the Florida Legislature up as some sort of shining example of legislative courage. On the contrary, I can provide multiple examples of instances wherein plenty of legislators in power left their courage in their districts as a matter of practice when they came to the Capitol. (And, by the way, many of these examples would be strikingly similar to what we know of, and have seen in, the Alabama Legislature.) The example I used of someone understanding the difference between necessary and catastrophic compromise was my legislator, the one I served in the House, when he was working on a bill to prevent child abuse. Months had passed as he hammered out details of the new program. He had more meetings with more stakeholders, listened to more turf war whining than you can possibly imagine and probably walked 20 miles in all, between our chamber and the Senate, trying to incorporate everyone’s concerns and shepherd the bill through that chamber while protecting the heart of the agency’s mission: Preventing child abuse.

The time came when he was faced with a decision: Either accept a change that was demanded by one stakeholder—which would basically gut the bill—or stand pat. In refusing the change, he knew it might cost him the whole bill. But he decided that he would rather see it fail than pass in a form that made it useless to address the problems it was created to help solve.

Little’s right; that did impress me. It was courageous and it was difficult and it was the right thing to do.

Legislators must compromise. It’s a fact of the system; everyone knows it. But the point is that legislators must know when those compromises are necessary and desirable, and when they make a mockery of their values—and their constituents.

Little says he hopes I “will refrain from telling us ‘how y’all did it in Florida’.“ As I’ve just explained (and as even a rudimentary understanding of the post shows), I wasn’t bragging about the Florida Legislature—just sharing my own experience, and that of my representative, about compromise. Little’s tone here surprised me; it belies the dignity with which he has always conducted himself with me. It is disappointing, and it is sad.

Finally, Little says, “The Florida legislature has never been known to be anyone’s role model of how the legislative process should run.“

I guess I can’t fault his opinion there.

After all, if anyone knows anything about bad role models of legislative process, it would be a member of the Alabama Senate.

Marriage advice ... via Maureen Dowd

By Jennifer J. Foster

Marriage advice from New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd?

No. It’s “via” Maureen Dowd, not “from” Maureen Dowd.

(After all, she did once write a book titled, “Are men necessary?“)

Anyway, Dowd interviewed New Jersey priest Father Pat Connor, who for 40 years has given a lecture—titled “Whom Not to Marry”—to high school seniors (“mostly girls, because they’re more interested,“ Dowd writes). The lecture is meant to show young people how, as Patti and Don tried to tell us, “Sometimes love just ain’t enough.“

From Dowd’s column:

“Hollywood says you can be deeply in love with someone and then your marriage will work,” the twinkly eyed, white-haired priest says. “But you can be deeply in love with someone to whom you cannot be successfully married.”

So Dowd uses the occasion of the Brinkley/Cook—A-Rod/Mrs. A-Rod/Madonna marriage bustups to share Connor’s “mostly common sense” advice with us: Don’t choose a mate who has a radically different value system from your own. Don’t marry someone thinking you’re going to improve them. Don’t marry a man who caters to your every whim (“It’s good to have a doormat in the home, but not if it’s your husband,“ Connor says). And beware the man “overly attached to his mother and her mythical apron strings.“

Read the full article here.

Connor notes, “After I regale a group with this talk, the despairing cry goes up: ‘But you’ve eliminated everyone!’

“Life is unfair,“ he says.

Ted Little columns

By Jennifer J. Foster

Today I finally bring you my long-delayed analysis of State Sen. Ted Little’s recent columns in the Opelika-Auburn News.

Full disclosure alert: I have known Ted Little for 10 years this fall. I first met him when I was a journalism student at Auburn University. I attended one of his campaign kickoffs and wrote a feature story about it for one of my classes. He spent a lot of time conversing with me—at the rally about his career, and after the rally about the Monica Lewinsky scandal that was unfolding at the time. I asked him whether he thought that he and other Democrats would suffer deleterious effects that election season because of the scandal and what he thought about what had gone on in the White House. Although I remember verbatim his candid—and very frank—response, I will keep that conversation off the record, as I agreed to do when he agreed to discuss it with me.

Since moving back to Auburn, I have spoken to Sen. Little a couple of times, once to write an article about his trip to India as part of a state trade mission. We’ve had a good working relationship.

Now, to the columns. In them, Little offered his explanations for the dysfunction of the legislative chamber of which he is a part.

The first one appeared in the OA News on June 12 (read it online here). While explaining how the Senate crumbled into stalemate on the last day of the regular session, Little offered these comments:

The Legislature’s regular session was “embarrassing,“ and Alabamians “deserve better.“

“It is time for the partisan and political caucus politics to end. The Alabama Legislature, and indeed, the Alabama Senate, must realize that the 2006 elections are over, and temperaments and egos must lessen, so that the people’s work can be accomplished on time.“

“The Legislature is in gridlock … We were hired to work for you, not to go to Montgomery and play political games.”

Well, yes. But isn’t all that painfully obvious?

The 14-hour filibuster began, Little said, because legislative leaders couldn’t come to an agreement about what to do with the universities’ request for an additional $25 million.

Little describes himself as “a tireless supporter for our colleges and universities” and notes that “their presence in our communities and my Senate district is critical to our regional economy.“ But, he says, “at a certain point, a compromise has to be reached.“

Apparently, for Little, that point was reached at 10:30 p.m. on May 19, the last legislative day of the regular session.

“It was time to stop the filibuster,“ Little said. “At the end of the day, we have a responsibility to all levels of education.“

He explained:

I joined 16 other Democratic senators to end the daylong filibuster and save the education budget. But we needed one more vote, an 18th vote to accomplish that. Of the remaining 18 state senators, not a single one voted to end the filibuster on the State’s education budget. That’s how the education budget died.

So if I’m reading his play-by-play correctly, 17 senators—all Democrats—voted to end the filibuster. That left 18 senators—Republicans and Democrats—blocking the budget.

I’m no stranger to the concept of legislative compromise. When I worked as a legislative aide in the Florida House of Representatives, I watched my boss make some difficult decisions. One of the most important—and most difficult—projects we worked on was the creation of a major child abuse prevention agency. You might think that a no-brainer concept like child abuse prevention would find quick passage among elected officials. Not so. It was difficult for us to understand why people would make a conscious decision to protect their turf rather than vulnerable kids. But they did. It was a fight at every turn. At one point, after weeks of tough negotiations and constantly trying to play Solomon with the half-dozen or so heavily involved parties—which included lobbyists, state agency representatives, advocates for private agencies and others—he made a decision that ultimately sealed the fate of the bill that created the agency: Either it was going to pass the right way, with the tools it needed to be successful, or it wasn’t going to pass at all. He made the choice that he would rather see it die than pass in an inferior form that might create more problems than it had the potential to solve. Word got around, and at least one lobbyist swore with equal fervor that the representative’s version of the bill wouldn’t pass on his watch. In the end, it did pass, and I believe to this day that its success is due just as much to the representative’s sheer will to get it right as to all the hard work that was done to make it happen.

I tell you that story to say this: Sometimes, you have to go to the mattresses. Sure, political compromise is an integral part of our system. It’s meant to produce good legislation by tempering the hard edges of overreaching ideas. But it has the potential to muddy the water into sludge. “Go along to get along” is a reality of our political system, the unmanned flying desk set gifted to us by our Founding Fathers. Making nice is, according to the circumstances, both necessary and perilous. But it’s up to us to know the difference – as our tea-tossing forebears in Boston Harbor did.
Little added that “because we did not pass education budget, other important legislation … also died.” Well, not exactly. I seem to remember a little something about a bingo bill that spawned its own filibuster – one that lasted not for 14 hours, but for two whole months.

So, you see, it’s not that the members of the Alabama Senate don’t have the ability to go to the mattresses, oppose bad compromise and stand up for what’s good for the people of Alabama. It’s that they’ve lost the ability to know when they should.

Little’s second column appeared a week later, on June 20. (Read it here.)  It looked and sounded to me like the end-of-session talking points I remembered getting from the leadership offices when I worked in the Florida Legislature. Basically, staffers put together the high points of the session – and/or, the low points to blame on the other side, if you’re getting the info from a majority or minority office – for legislators to use in their newsletters, club speeches and the like.

This column was basically a recycled version of the one that had appeared a week before. Consider his comments on:

What was lost to the filibuster:
June 20: “We passed a ban on smoking in public places, cracked down on sexual predators and passed three important measures to fight illegal immigration, but, unfortunately, these bills died in the House of Representatives did not pass both houses of the Legislature.”
June 13: “Because we did not pass education budget, other important legislation, like the food tax cut and immigration reform also died … We also passed a crackdown on sexual predators and a smoking ban in public places, but both pieces of legislation failed to pass both houses of the Legislature.”

What wasn’t:
June 20: “Lost in the haze of filibusters during the regular session were legislative achievements. We protected the children’s health insurance from any cuts, ensuring that no Alabama child lost his or her health coverage, we protected senior citizens programs and we increased funding for Medicaid by $150 million. We passed a new college savings program for our families. All of this is now the law of Alabama.”
June 13: “We did have important accomplishments. During this session, the state Senate passed a new college savings program that is now law, and we increased funding for the children’s insurance program, protected senior citizens and increased Medicaid funding by $150 million, and we passed the General Fund budget.”

What’s causing the problem in the first place:
June 20: “It is time for the partisanship and political gamesmanship to end. We must put politics aside and focus on our priority: the people of this state … legislators must stop the partisanship, come together and do what is best for the people of this state.”
June 13: “We were hired to work for you, not to go to Montgomery and play political games … I dedicate my service to ending the political games that plague the state Senate and the Alabama Legislature.”

Little does say that he “gave notice … that I would accept no legislative pay for the special session.” Kudos to him for that. It did take legislators two chances to do their job, after all. I would actually prefer that they forfeit their pay from the filibuster-riddled regular session that made Part Deux necessary; the least they can do is refuse more than one payment.

Ted Little is a nice enough guy. But as I said last month, the problem is that the bitter partisan divide either makes every senator part of his chamber’s failed leadership or renders him powerless to stop its abuses.

Little concluded his June 13 column, “It is time to work for the people of Alabama.”

I would ask, when has it not been “time to work for the people of Alabama?”

Yes, it is time – time for the people of Alabama to go to work for themselves at the polls and put an end to this Senate madness once and for all.