As a couple, Alabama and the Democratic Party were more Nelson and Mary Clark Rockefeller than Mike Tyson and Robin Givens, if you know what I mean. If you don’t, look it up.
When the Republican Party finally seized control of the Alabama House after the 2010 midterm elections, it ended 136 years of unbroken Democratic rule. Given the Democratic Party of Alabama’s legacy of racism and brutality, one might have been forgiven for thinking this changing of the guard was a good and well-merited thing. Alas, one would have been wrong. The Alabama Democrats were on the mend, while their successors are revanchist reactionaries with they moral compass of a viper.
It would not take to long for this to become clear.
Powerful Alabama House Speaker Mike Hubbard has been arrested on felony ethics charges, accused of using public office for personal gain. Hubbard was indicted by a grand jury on 23 charges accusing him of misusing his office as speaker and his previous post as chairman of the Alabama Republican Party.
Acting Attorney General Van Davis announced the indictment Monday.
Speaker Hubbard was the Newt Gingrich of the Alabama Revolution. He was the self-proclaimed leader of the Republican takeover. And, exactly like Gingrich, he took whatever preexisting public corruption that existed and he turned it up to eleven.
Mike Hubbard is the one under indictment. He’s the one who now faces 23 Class B felonies, any one of which could send him to the slammer for two to 20 years. He is the one who faces losing the title of Alabama’s most powerful politician, of losing the job as Speaker of the House. He is the one – and this is no small thing — who faces disgracing the party he put in position to dominate this state.
That’s huge. That’s overwhelming and that – well that was sort of expected after all these months. But it turns out that’s not even the most interesting part of the story that broke over Alabama today. Because Mike Hubbard is not the most famous or noteworthy person tied up in this probe. He’s not the richest or perhaps even the most powerful.
When the Speaker is a graftmaster, there’s a line of graftees at his door.
And the people wrapped up in Hubbard’s alleged crimes in some ways are bigger than Hubbard himself. They are not just movers and shakers. They are flat-out Alabama royalty. Former Gov. Bob Riley – the one Alabama loved because he didn’t embarrass us — and his daughter Minda were solicited, according to the indictment.
So was Yella Fella himself. Auburn University trustee Jimmy Rane was asked to pay $150,000 to invest in Hubbard’s company, Craftmaster. So was former Sterne Agee CEO Jim Holbrook, political operative Dax Swatek, and honored Birmingham businessman Rob Burton, CEO of giant Hoar Construction.
The Business Council of Alabama, one of the biggest players in Alabama politics in the last decade, is tied to the charges against Hubbard, along with its president Billy Canary and its former board chair Will Brooke – who ran for Congress this year.
These are the people who got things done in Alabama. No, that’s not it. These are the people who get things done in Alabama.
The Republicans had claimed, with some justification, that the Democratic Party ran the state like mafiosi and that they would clean things up.
Many of them are the very ones who screamed the loudest – and so very rightly – that the Democrats had run this state like the Corleone Family, that Alabama needed to sweep them away and replace them with something honest and sincere. These are the people who made ethics their calling card and their legacy.
This is exactly like the Gingrich Revolution, which was fueled by the relatively petty institutionalized corruption that had built up over fifty years of uninterrupted Democratic rule of the House of Representatives and quickly replaced it with corruption several orders of magnitude more serious and damaging to the Republic.
And if these indictments are true – if it is shown that the architect of Alabama ethics reform didn’t just ask for money and favors but received both from people Alabama trusted, this won’t simply be an indictment of Mike Hubbard.
Oh, Hubbard is the one indicted in a legal sense.
But in a more general sense this is an indictment of all those who burned through trust in the time it took them to gain absolute power.
It is an indictment of business as usual. It is an indictment of partisanship as a way of life, of the seize-power-at-any cost culture that swept in on promises to rid the state of corruption and preyed on good will.
This isn’t just an indictment of the speaker of Alabama’s House of Representatives.
This is an indictment of Alabama.
It’s really just a case lesson on the false promises of the Conservative Movement. They don’t deliver better government. They take the low-level corruption that greases the skids of progress and transform it into an unambiguously criminal enterprise that frustrates the very functioning of government.
And then they point to their own ineptitude at governing to prove the case that government is inefficient and rotten to the core.
And then the pattern repeats itself.
Maybe it’s time that Alabama and the Democratic Party get some couple’s therapy. They need to get back together.
Is the Alabama Democratic Party still in debt? At least their website doesn’t look like some GeoCities thing anymore. Not only do the two factions have to stop the fighting, they have to embrace the 21st Century.
The same thing happened here in Hungary: the corruption of the Socialists was so endemic by the 2000s that “thief” became a constant Homeric by-name of the party, but when right-populist Fidesz took over all levers of power, they robbed everything in such a frenzy that barely anything remained to be robbed by now.
It’s the same old same old. If I may make one addition: part of the reason these conservative ‘revolutionaries’ end up orders of magnitude more corrupt than those they were elected to replace is that they believe their own propaganda. That is, the low-level corruption that greases the skids of progress was always featured as stifling total robbery in the conservative media (with real scandals presented with hyperbole and made-up scandals added to them), but at some point the leaders started to believe that all this is the truth, and they matched their own corruption to the imagined level of ancien regime corruption.
Chris Christie in NJ similar, and he cleared out all the potential opposition with his “corruption” sting operation first. But there’s no “believing their own propaganda” there, it was simply a major grift.
Sure but don’t forget the help Christie received from Norcross and his ilk.
Another reason why these conservative ‘revolutionaries’ end up orders of magnitude more corrupt than those they were elected to replace is there is more to steal. For all the corruption of socialists and dem/socialists, the commons are enlarged and strengthened during their tenure. And the poor rubes buy into the “government is corrupt and inefficient;” so, let’s give our roads, parking meters, schools, etc. to businessmen that know how to get things done right and at less cost.
Had WWII been outsourced by the Pentagon the way our current wars are, it would have cost four times as much and taken a decade or more to end. But the winners might have been different.
President Prescott Bush maybe?
I think that this is standard operating procedure in places where Democrats have had control for awhile. It’s pretty much how republicans managed to get control of North Carolina. It was just years of grinding low-level scandal-ish sorts of things that they pushed and then they presented themselves as the team to clean things up. Of course that’s not what they actually did, or ever do, but it’s a winning message.
Hope that doesn’t mean Alabama’s going to cheat on the Republicans and expire in the arms of some much younger, flirtier party.
Low-level corruption that greases the skids of progress?
what’s your question?
Progressivism need its skids greased by any corruption, low-level or otherwise? Seems from your own narrative this condition was the enabler of the subsequent ‘unambiguously criminal enterprise’ that replaced it and which we both now deplore.
Pretty much.
I can’t separate immigrant/minority-based urban machine politics from progressivism for the simple reason that we haven’t ever seen such a thing and couldn’t possibly get more the votes of various faculty lounges without them. There is a good-government anti-machine progressive movement in every major coastal city and in several more internal cities. But what ultimately matters for governance is who is in power, and progressives in power are predominately machine-produced.
And then the media explains to everyone that both sides do it.