Kyle Whitmire is the state political columnist for AL.com and 2023 winner of the Pulitzer Prize. Sign up for his newsletter, Alabamafication, below. It’s free.
Wes Allen, I have a couple of questions.
What is in a name?
And are you the Alabama’s secretary of state or would that be Alabama Solicitor General Edmund LaCour?
I ask because this sort of question has come up before regarding other people — mostly state legislators. Supposedly, it’s the Alabama Legislature’s job to draw the state’s congressional district lines and write the legislation accompanying that map.
But that’s not how it really worked.
After the federal courts, including the US Supreme Court, rejected the state’s first congressional map, lawmakers met in a special session to produce another one.
But somebody else did their work.
Depositions taken by plaintiffs challenging the state’s map revealed that the chairmen of the redistricting committee didn’t know who drew the map. However, one of those chairmen, Rep. Chris Pringle, R-Mobile, said he saw LaCour drawing maps.
It was less mysterious where the six pages of “legislative findings” came from that made their way into the bill. Far from being things found by the legislature, LaCour gave all that language to the lawmakers for them to pass off as their own. He did their homework for them. They simply put their names on it. Then the governor put her name on it.
Had the bill been truthful, perhaps it should have been called LaCour findings, instead. As solicitor general, LaCour is supposed to represent the state in court, but now it seems the state is representing him, with lawmakers taking his direction and passing his work as their own.
And now this puppet show includes you, Mr. Secretary.
Under a quirk of law, plaintiffs cannot sue a state, only state officials, which is why this case was initially called Merrill v. Milligan. After you replaced John Merrill in the Secretary of State’s office, the case was renamed Allen v. Milligan. You had little to do with that — then.
But this is now. And right now there is a state solicitor filing appeals and motions for stays under your name. He’s speaking for you and you should be mindful.
Because three judges already — two of them Trump appointees — have come as close as I’ve ever seen to a court calling a party (that’s you) stupid.
“The Secretary’s assertion that he is ‘overwhelmingly’ likely to prevail on appeal is as bare as it is bold: it comprises only three sentences crafted at the highest level of abstraction with virtually no citations,” the judges in their most recent order. “The Secretary simply says that his arguments were set forth in his earlier brief. But that brief came before we entered our injunction on September 5, so it does not engage, let alone rebut, any of our findings of fact or conclusions of law.”
Bare as it is bold, huh? I would have opted for “naked and unafraid,” but I’m not a federal judge.
“In any event, we find that the Secretary is likely to lose on appeal,” the three judges wrote before denying a stay.
Fair or not, this case will share your name, but from this point on, you will share in the blame, too.
And that is fair.
If a state lawyer walks into the U.S. Supreme Court and argues on your behalf for something you don’t believe in, then you have a duty to say so now. Your silence, from here forward, is your consent.
This week, the state solicitor LaCour again filed a motion for a stay — this time with the U.S. Supreme Court — making arguments on your behalf that seem just as thin as what’s come before.
“Absent a stay, the State will be compelled to cede its sovereign redistricting power to a court that will intentionally segregate Alabamians based on race,” LaCour wrote the court on your behalf.
The risk here isn’t that LaCour brands you a loser. It’s not impossible that he wins and it’s worth remembering what’s at stake if that happens.
What he wants is to gut the Voting Rights Act. That’s what’s at stake here. Not a map.
Rather, the law passed after the Selma to Montgomery marches. The law that passed after Bloody Sunday.
If successful, he will have undone what those Alabamians who crossed the bridge fought for.
If successful, he will have done what state police couldn’t do with tear gas and billy clubs.
Win or lose, this will have your name on it.
If that’s not what you want, now is the time to say so.
UPDATE: To make this column more than a rhetorical question, I reached out to the Secretary of State’s office for comment. His office provided the statement below after the column was published.
“The people of this state elected me because they knew I’d fight for them. This is not my first time dealing with the Federal Court,” Allen said in a written statement. “My bill to prohibit the use of transgender drugs on minors was initially blocked by the Federal Courts, but we kept fighting, and now the injunction has been lifted. I trust the Attorney General as we continue the course for the people of this State.”
Kyle Whitmire is the state political columnist for AL.com and the 2023 recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for commentary. Sign up for his weekly newsletter and get “Alabamafication” in your inbox every Wednesday.
Go deeper with more from Kyle Whitmire
Judicial activism? Alabama House speaker owes Alabamians the truth about Milligan case failure
This will cost us: In Milligan case, Alabamians will pay
Found this in the wastebasket: A discarded Republican map shows Alabama cheated Black voters
How Alabama hopes for a SCOTUS do-over: Alabama’s poisonous plan to get back to the Supreme Court and gut the Voting Rights Act
Meet the man behind the final map: The architect behind Alabama’s voting rights defiance
How Alabama blew its chance to gut the VRA: The moment Alabama’s lawyers turned a sure thing into blistering defeat
Black lawmakers fight to be heard: Legislating while Black in Alabama: CRT and the struggle for respect
Where it all started: How 155 angry white men chained Alabama to its Confederate past