Industry sign banking alabama word fast
hi welcome to all of our students fellows and board members this is the second of our third alabama or sorry second of our three alabama 101 lunchtime meetings and today we're lucky enough to have off me lathrum who is here he's going to be talking to us about alabama's constitution and our government structure so just very briefly he is the director of the legislative services agency and um previous to that he practiced as a lawyer in birmingham he's focusing on complex legislation he received his bs in economics from auburn and is jd from the university of alabama so a big role tied to that he is elected as a member of the american law institute he's also a commissioner with the national conference of commissioners on uniform state laws and he serves on the alabama supreme court standing committee on the rules of civil procedure he also is a member of the executive committee of the national conference of state legislatures and a member of the bar in alabama and texas and he's also able to practice before federal and uh circuit courts around the country so without any further ado i'm going to hand it over to othnie and he's going to take us through until about one o'clock and if there's any time for questions we'll take those as well so thank you all for being here fantastic thanks so much for that great introduction i'm really excited to be with you all this is something i've been looking forward to for a while i think we first started doing this last uh spring or setting this up and we've moved it a couple of times so i hate that we're virtual but uh i'm thrilled to be with you um so a a couple of things up front number one um you know i'm used to kind of doing this uh more in person so bear with me i'm not quite as experienced with zoom as probably each of you are um but i do want to try to make it as interactive as possible so i'll try to save some quest time for questions at the end but if you've got something while we're on it i'll try to pay attention and if you wave or if you write it in the chat box i'll do my best to cover it secondly covering the alabama constitution of 1901 in an hour is a pretty daunting task so we're going to breeze through some of this stuff pretty pretty quickly uh and uh and and so again if if i'm moving too fast on something that you think is really interesting let me know um and i'll slow down and dwell on that part uh or or attempt to a little bit more so i think i just shared my screen with you and of course what that means is i lost the chat box somehow so i'm going to try to see if i can bring that back real quick um let's see there we go all right so now i've got the chat box back so i'll make good on my promise to try and uh try and pay attention to that if you've got any questions so so first off um you know and if this was in person you know we'd holler back and forth a little bit more and i won't quite make you put that put you through that exercise but um a number of you probably have some preconsistent notions um about the alabama constitution if you do just throw the first word or two that comes to mind up in the chat box and then a couple of slides i'm good slides i'm going to come to those and we'll talk about those things so uh you know just your immediate reaction when somebody says alabama constitution i'd love for a few of you to put some stuff up there uh and we'll talk about those and and and first what we're gonna kind of talk about before we get to that one is that i think it's important to kind of lay some groundwork and talk about what is a constitution um and and so you know i really like having this conversation with grade schoolers because you get some great answers i mean it's really pretty impressive you know kind of instinctually what uh what what folks at a very early age kids at a very early age think about a constitution i won't put you all through that same thing especially given that the technology restraints um but but at its essence and and here's the legal definition this is what black's law dictionary which is kind of the go-to for us legal nerds on on defining uh words is it's the organic and fundamental law of a nation or state establishing the character and and conception of its government and laying the basic principles to which its internal life is conformed that's a pretty fancy legal answer so i like to shorthand that to essentially say a a constitution is a contract between a government and her people setting forth the terms by which they agree to be governed what does that mean what it means is we choose or our ancestors chose or were forced to be part of the united states right and at some point in time we formed a government and and that government in order for us to live as kind of a you know cohesive society needed to establish some contract between how it was going to operate and the people that live here right and and and and so what do i mean by that what i mean by that is you know there there's no kind of natural inherent law that governs how fast we should drive i mean there's some notions about you know what my safety might dictate what my concern for others might dictate my my risk reward about my own personal well-being but there's no kind of natural overarching law that governs that well when you're part of a society you choose you know kind of for the global good i'm going to give up my right to go 100 miles an hour in exchange for government kind of providing roads keeping them relatively safe paving them as best they can giving me means to get from alabama to california which i did a few weeks ago on a cross-country drive um and and so that's kind of i mean that's overly simplistic but but that's kind of what we're talking about is that we agree as people to give up certain rights in exchange for government taking on certain obligations um and and so that's what a constitution is um i'm gonna ruin the plot and go straight to the end the alabama constitution of 1901 is maybe the worst example of that that has ever existed it's just not what it was intended for there's some smatterings of that there's some stuff in there that you can look to and point it out but but it wasn't set up that way the constitution of alabama of 1901 was really set up as what i like to call a super code so it kind of micromanaged a whole lot of things that aren't part of that basic contract it put in a whole lot of speed bumps about how government has to operate because to be honest and and alabamians are still a little bit this way 120 years later it was a pretty distrustful people of government they didn't really want government to have a whole lot of inherent power they didn't want the people governing them to make choices you know for how their life would be led in a way that would be you know that they might disagree with and so this was a the constitution of alabama is a terrible example of that you know contrast perhaps the u.s constitution which is probably one of the better if not the best example of meeting that definition in the history of mankind um it certainly had some flaws uh as well you know probably more in the implementation of the con of the constitution than in the words itself but a very succinct document you know this is probably going to fail because of technology too but if you can see my very well annotated constitution of alabama here this portion of this is actually the constitution of the united states this is about a third of the constitution of alabama by contrast the constitute the u.s constitution and its 27 amendments which kind of very succinctly lay out you know this this contract as opposed to kind of this super code of of law in the alabama constitution um so now let's get talk a little bit about where it came from right so so the the 1901 constitution is actually our sixth constitution as a state and i know y'all already gotten a little bit of an overview of the history of alabama far better than that than i could give you my my perspective is kind of very limited to to government operation uh and the like but the the 1901 constitution is the sixth constitution why is it important to think about that well first off you know unlike the u.s constitution this wasn't kind of the noble envisioning of what a new land looks like right it's a much more kind of practical approach if you look back you know alabama became a state in 1819 just celebrated our bicentennial as a state last year um and so that statehood constitution or first principles constitution um you know was was was was 80 years earlier than the 1901 constitution you know then you kind of had you know that very painful part of the us history you know leading up to the civil war post-civil war um and in a period of of less than a decade we had three constitutions kind of right on top of each other um the the the the 1961 where we say 1861 excuse me where we seceded from the union you know kind of the 19 1865 which you know if i is kind of the equivalent i mean it was very rushly done it's you know you know last year as part of our bicentennial there was a great display at archives in history of our six constitutions um and and that 1861 one in particular looked like it was written on the equivalent of a legal pad in in 1861 i mean done very very hastily you know a very quick effort to get readmitted to the union uh then you had the 1868 reconstruction constitution which was much more of kind of the federal government coming in and mandating here's the list of things you have to do as soon as the federal government got back out of alabama we almost immediately passed the 1875 constitution uh which was you know it's kind of known as the results of the war to be reversed you know kind of alabama going back to its bad past a little bit as soon as you know mom and dad left the room and are no longer kind of keeping a direct thumb on things uh and then the 1901 constitution which was even kind of more that way um interestingly enough if you look back at uh kind of compare how things work today to how things worked then only our 1875 and 1901 constitutions were ratified by the people of alabama the other four were kind of done by this governing class and and and when adopted you know kind of magically became law even though it was only a very small set of sub people you know subset of people who were involved in it the 1891 was approved by congress that's how it was deemed ratified um and that wasn't uncommon um the in fact the first constitution in the united states to be ratified by kind of the electorate for the population as a whole was the 1857 minnesota state constitution and that kind of changed direction or started in the trend of people having a direct uh a direct voice um and and and so it wasn't until that 1875 and 1901 period where these constitutions uh you know were actually ratified by the voters uh and you can look back and it's very well historically documented and we could spend just days talking about kind of the voter suppression of how these particular documents got ratified how how who was allowed to vote were picked you know picked and chosen on those sorts of things a a very painful period kind of and and the arc of history um for alabama and other other southern states um in particular so now i'm going to scroll back up in here long so long long long longest ever so those those are some of the that's some of what i expected to hear uh you also hear a lot that it's racist and it's sexist um both of those things are are true too the the truth is um and it gets back to that kind of same notion of ratification by the people the the entire concept of the 1901 constitution was to consolidate the power of governance into the hands of landowners and significant landowners at that um and if you looked at who was significant landowners it was white men um and and and so you know which comes first the the the chicken or the egg you know the same sort of thing you can debate back and forth but there's no doubt that power was very centralized amongst a a the kind of upper upper crust of white males in the state who were the who who were the landowners it is very long we're going to talk about how many times it's been amended in just a minute and i showed you all the book it is long um i think it's the longest ever i've never personally verified that so so so i don't know that i'd say that under oath but i i certainly think that if not the longest that's right up there and uh and i have no reason to uh to debate that it is so let's talk a little bit and and this is why our constitution is so long is because of how many times it's been amended and and and kind of you know one of the things that you know and this builds on the fact that it was our sixth constitution a little bit um one of the things i tell people is i think no one would be more surprised that we still have the 1901 constitution 120 years later than the people who wrote it i mean these were people who had written five constitutions in their lifetime right in one generation of time they had rewritten the state constitution five times and in fact there were things in the constitution that by their very terms expired in less than a decade and and so they were speaking to kind of the immediate crisis of the day you know we're going to talk a little bit about how we don't have home rule how we limited you know what what local government can do and the reason for that was that we were dealing with you know some pretty significant um you know bankruptcies are the equivalent of the day of what bankruptcies were of local governments we had local governments who had gone into huge debt you know both both leading into the civil war and then post civil war rebuilding and and weren't able to pay their debts so you know we wanted to reign in how much authority they had to issue debt um you know we were addressing very specific timely issues in a way that caused us to repeatedly you know kind of rewrite that constitution so so so so i don't think they expected you know if if they got their crystal ball out and look to 2020 i think they'd be very surprised that we're still using um that document so it's been amended 948 times um so so so my kiwanis club speech for this current cycle is hashtag race to a thousand uh trying to sound a little cooler for my teenage kids um and i think we'll make it right i think i think you know one way or the other we're likely to make it to a thousand amendments by 2022 or the close of the current um state quadrennium that we're in and so let's talk a little bit about kind of why we have so so many amendments it's one thing to kind of just you know be interesting that we have a little bit let's talk about why so so one of the examples i love to talk about is section 93 of the original constitution and this kind of fits everything i was just talking about as far as motivation the state shall not engage in works of internal improvement let's just stop there what does that mean that meant that under our constitution the state couldn't build roads couldn't build courthouses couldn't build schools couldn't build ports that's crazy i mean those are kind of main functions of government is to to build these things for the common good of what needs to be done and so why was that why did you know why was that written into the constitution it was written into the constitution so that if government wanted to do those things if government wanted to spend a significant amount of money they had to come back to the voters and ask permission and so the first amendment to the constitution was that they can in fact do that right provided the state may under appropriate laws causes the proceeds to be applied to construction repair and maintenance of public roads right just a couple of years into the constitution they said hey guess what we were wrong we do need roads we don't need to have to have a vote of the people every time we need to build or repair a road so let's amend the constitution and give give government that right so that was the first amendment so if you look through 2020 we've amended the constitution 223 times on statewide amendments and 725 times on local amendments this local amendment bar is particularly interesting we're one of one of only a handful of states that so easily allow for a local consti
utional amendment so let's think back amendment to what we were talking about the constitution is the constitution is a contract between people and its government about how they'll be governed we think 725 times over the last 120 years that should be different in one county or one city than in the rest of the state just let just let that sink in for a minute i mean that's a pretty amazing concept we have exceptions to our core organic cover you know governing document that only apply to one county or one city 725 times um that's nuts i mean it it means you go county by county and don't even really know what the law is unless you're a constitutional scholar who knows what you know what's been going on over the last 120 years with these local constitutional amendments so i'm going to breeze through these next slides pretty quickly but they kind of give you a quick you know a quick uh summary of kind of when we've done this and you'll look one of our more active periods has been this last decade so so we'll talk a little bit about some of the stuff that was happening in the 50s and 60s in a few minutes that caused these spikes uh but but but pretty amazing to see and you'll see kind of a crescendo here coming on the local constitutional amendments as well just becoming more and more frequent so so so again the you know these just kind of tell you you know the other thing i hear a lot about is oh pass the constitutional amendment let the people vote they didn't you know they they vote them all down anyway that's really not true so if you look at this chart kind of covering the last 30 years back to 1992 each green box is an election cycle where we where we had a north of two-thirds ratification rate of the amendments that were proposed so on average you know we're ratifying far more constitutional amendments than we're turning down um at least in the last 30 years um and and that's pretty that's a pretty interesting concept given kind of how alabamians react in general uh to government you you you would think it would be you know few far fewer than that on average getting ratified all right i messed up my there we go all right so now let's talk about what i think i'm really supposed to be talking about which is the you know kind of the structure of the constitution and what it means for the structure of the government um and and and alabama and i'm gonna i'm gonna do this by kind of going through there's 18 articles in our constitution that are kind of you know the chapters so to speak of how um the the provisions and amendments of the constitution are organized and so we're going to breeze through these some of them we're going to cover really really quickly some of them like the legislature since that's what i do day in and day out are far more interesting so we'll spend a little more time on them um and and again feel free to throw up in the chat box any questions or comments as we go so article one declaration of rights this is kind of if you just looked at our state article one you'd say alabama's got an interesting constitution right i mean our article one is where most other states largely stop or where the federal government stops um it it kind of lays out you know if you think about maybe the the bill of rights this is where this stuff kind of is right section one i'm not so sure we were living this in 1901 but a very you know nice succinct aspirational all men are are equally free and independent endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights including life liberty and the pursuit of happiness that sounds pretty familiar to us right i mean i think that was a you know you know pretty well plagiarized with a with a couple of tweaks from the you uh for from a document we've all seen at the federal level right the second one's a little bit more interesting right i mean this kind of in that nutshell gives you you know the glimpse into what i was talking about how surprised they might be that this constitution was still in play 120 years later that all political power is inherent to the people and and by people you know insert landowners right and and and all that that meant but inherent to the people and all three governments are founded on their authority and instituted for their benefit so in other words government only exists to serve the people the landowners right and therefore they have uni inalienable and indefensible right to change their form of government however they beam expedient right this is kind of you know this is kind of a poke in the eye to the federal government too right this is kind of saying hey we're past you know that reconstruction period where we've got this checklist of things where the federal government's going to make us do them and we're going to kind of lay out really early in this document the government exists for us and we control what it looks like then you kind of skim through the rest of article one and and again it looks largely familiar to kind of what other constitutions what the u.s bill of rights looks right you know you know religious freedom freedom of speech and press um no debtors prisons imminent domain property rights right to bear arms right all that sort of stuff that's kind of ingrained in our mind is kind of the rights we preserve as citizens of the state and of the country um article two we're gonna just breeze right by it's the boundaries of the state not much we can do about that they're dictated obviously at the federal level um and and then it provides a process by which you know the the counties are to be formed and and and i think in 1901 we had the same 67 counties we you know we have today so we haven't really you know this hasn't been an area of of much up evil article through three distribution of powers this is really pretty fascinating right and it's an area where where the alabama constitution um you know kind of takes a branch uh uh of of a turn from the feds again too right and and and by that i mean you know all of us know this notion you know from schoolhouse rocks about three branches of government three co-equal branches of government guess what the federal constitution never actually says that you know the federal constitution sets up an executive branch and it sets up a legislative branch and it sets up a judicial branch the constitution never says they're co-equal never says that they're supposed that they're the exclusive purveyor of those those powers that was all done that heavy lifting was done by a u.s supreme court case in the early eighteen hundreds marbury v madison um unlike that kind of implied separation of powers the alabama constitution has an express distribution of powers provision sets up an executive branch a legislative branch and a judicial branch um says that that they shall each exercise that power given to them under the constitution and they shouldn't exercise each other's powers interestingly this is kind of where you start seeing though they're not really co-equal so so you know the again these people were kind of reserving power as much as possible to themselves so who does that mean you give it to you give it to a legislative branch so if you're going to have disproportionate power you kind of disproportionately give power to the legislative branch for a couple of reasons one the governor works full-time the legislature doesn't so there's a lot more time for the governor to get into mischief than the legislature to get into mischief um number two you know it's it's one person acting versus 140 people acting right you've got much more influence and kind of it's easier to kill something when you got to get you know a majority out of 140 than when it only takes one person to act so some of the things we see where they start kind of shading the power to the legislature simple majority veto you know under federal law and most other states you need a super majority to override a governor's veto here it's a simple 50 when we get a little later we're going to talk about another quirk of our constitution called the budget isolation resolution um and and and and just suffice it to say it usually takes much more than the simple majority to pass a bill so it takes fewer votes to override a veto than to pass a bill and the first incense under most circumstances and then equally on the judicial side they kind of shave power back to the legislature on a couple of fronts one they gave the legislature co-rule-making authority so the legislature or the court can set its rules um and and secondly no state court can enter an order that would cause state dollars to be spent differently than how the legislature appropriated them unless the legislature has an affirmative vote to uphold that order that's a pretty wild concept especially for people who are used to practicing law in federal court where judges all the time order the government to do this or order this to happen under state law the courts really don't have that authority if it causes money to be spent differently than how they're appropriated i'm going to note just for a second up here on a few of these slides you're going to see a ratification date of fairly recent um so hopefully we'll have enough time to talk a little bit about the efforts of reforming the constitution over the years uh but but the only effort that's ever made a whole lot of progress or at least some progress was what um a constitutional commission in the last decade that worked on a rewriting a few of the articles and those few articles were ratified um in recent history so distribution of powers didn't make a whole lot of substantive changes believe it or not originally the the executive judicial and legislative were departments not branches so so so some stuff to make the terminology a little bit better some you know taking out outdated language making it more gender and race neutral those sorts of things have been done in a handful of articles this is one of them uh that was ratified fairly recently so the legislative article again this is kind of where a lot of the work gets done under our constitution and it's kind of as important for what it doesn't include as what it does include so so we talked a little while ago about home rule um and and kind of our general lack of home rule what i'm what i mean by that is that most counties it's different for cities um and and and and you know if we had more time we go into more detail about why that is but most counties don't have the authority to set their own taxes or regulate land use within their county without coming to the legislature and getting a local law passed and so that whole process is kind of laid out in the legislative article what that looks like it sets the uh parameters for kind of when and how we operate so so just you know for for way of background the legislature meets annually today um and and and it comes into session each year for 105 calendar days and they can meet 30 legislative days in that 105 calendar day window and so it's a very limited duration of when the legislature is in session if they need to meet outside of that window it has to be done by a special session which can only be covered called by the governor to cover kind of an extraordinary um and that's pretty loose how that's defined but extraordinary circumstances to to bring them in um each kind of legislative cycle is broken into four-year categories um we call them quadrenniums um and and the whole legislature all 140 members are elected simultaneously each four years and so house members and senators have the same term of office so let's talk a little bit and we're going to move through these slides pretty quickly but but what has to uh you know what has to happen to pass a law or kind of what the constitution lays out um for for how laws are passed remember that these were the a lot of these rules date back to 1901 so they were kind of written you know to protect the status quo they were written to make it difficult to pass laws and they were written to kind of keep legislators on it so to speak right and there weren't copy machines there weren't uh you know there wasn't kind of advanced technology and so they wanted to have some extra hoops in place you know for that legislative process to kind of slow things down give everybody a chance to know what they're really voting on and and have a chance to learn it so section 45 single subject most states have this you know it's unlike federal law where you might get a bill that's two or three thousand pages long um and under state law you're supposed to have you know bills supposed to cover a single subject you know cover one thing not kind of an omnibus bill or territory um second each house you know gets to set its own rules for proceedings so at the start of each quadrennium each uh house of the legislature passes a set of rules uh you know sets up its committees elects its leadership those are only good in binding on that legislature so that four year period um section 56 and and then we also have a uh have a equivalent legislative privilege statutory section this is kind of the speech and debate clause you know you hear a lot that's played up sometimes in tv shows oh you can't arrest a legislator or a member of congress during session that's not exactly true um you can for felony violation of their oath of office breach of speech reach a piece you know you can write them a ticket but you can't you know you can't kind of detain them on their way to and from the legislature to block them from doing their business and and also anything they say while engaged in their business is protected so they have pretty you know you can't get them for libel or slander or you know that sort of thing for vigorously debating something during the course of passage of a bill um it can't become a bill can't become law unless it's referred to a standing committee it's got to be reflected in the journal again these are kind of speed bumps so to speak in the legislative process so that people have an opportunity to to know what's going on have to read it on three different days the three reading rule uh if you're if you want to raise taxes or revenue that bill's got to start in house again kind of a mechanism so people would know exactly where to go to look if somebody was you know doing that dreaded raising taxes activity um so here's the br the budget isolation resolution this is an interesting concept so so so really the legislature's only mandatory rule each year is that we have to pass a budget by which the state operates and i'm not going to talk a lot about the budget because i know y'all are going to have a whole session on budgeting and state revenues next week and so i'm not going to you know tread on that turf but i i do want to kind of introduce a couple of concepts that i think you'll hear built upon next week that are constitutional in nature and important to know so so the first is that's the primary role of the legislature pass a budget so at some point in time we amended the constitution to say hey if the legislature wants to pass something other than the budget and they haven't yet passed the budget we want to remind them that they're not doing things right and so you they have to first pass a resolution by a super majority a three-fifths vote to say hey we know we haven't passed the budget yet we're sorry we're going to bring up this other bill anyway and debate it so so back to kind of my veto conversation this is why i say most bills have to have more votes to pass than they do to override a veto because if we haven't passed the budgets you got to get a three-fifths vote the second kind of constitutional concept i want to talk about about budgeting that i think will be important next week to your conversation is earmarking and earmarking is is a phrase that means anytime revenue is directed someplace other than a state's general fund those funds are earmarked so if we if we if we pass a bill that says this money has to be spent on building roads that's an earmarked dollar that revenue is earmarked because the legislature can't control how to spend it it has to be spent on building roads alabama earmarks more money than anybody else in the country so so depending upon what our different revenue streams are looking like alabama is usually in th
mid 80's to low 90 percent of all revenue is earmarked the next highest state is michigan which is under 55 now that's a little misleading and we'll talk about why in a few minutes but nonetheless we earmark most of everything and then secondly we're one of only a handful of budget a handful of states it was three last time i looked that have a separate general fund budget and education budget and that's tied kind of directly to the earmarking conversation because each of the dollars in that education budget is an earmarked dollar that has to be spent on education and so you know earmarking kind of leads to that result i'm going to breeze through these real quick because i i want to respect our time but sections you know 105 106 107 kind of deal with that whole local law concept and and and what's so important about how this works you know since since we don't give the right to counties to act on their own behalf and so a couple of things that are important number one you know that we can't pass local laws that override general laws that's part of why we have so many local constitutional amendments because a local constitutional amendment can override a local law but a local law can't section 106 says that if you're going to introduce a local bill to do something that again most states would handle at the county commission level or local level you have to advertise it in a newspaper for four weeks before the legislature can consider it um so you know nowadays obviously you know probably the internet would be better than a newspaper but the idea being you've got to make it clear what you're doing give notice to the people so that they have an opportunity to to track it unfunded mandates most people think of unfunded mandates from the federal to the state level and unfunded mandate is when the federal you know government says hey states you've got to do this but they don't give you the money to do it well local government thinks of the state in that way you know we're all the time telling local government you have to do this service or provide this and don't give them the money to do it so section 111 is is what says if we're going to do that it takes a super majority vote we've got to know we're putting this burden on counties if we're not going to give them the money to carry it out article 5 is the executive branch establishes the the key executive branch officers governor lieutenant governor attorney general secretary of state treasurer auditor and commissioner of agriculture agriculture has always been alabama's kind of number one industry and so we're one of a handful of states where that's true where we actually have a statewide executive branch officer whose only job is to kind of look at how agriculture works in the state section 113 the supreme power of the state shall be vested in the chief magistrates filed the governor of the state of alabama uh and then article five goes on to kind of mostly delineate the power and authority of the uh of of the governor again shaded a little bit towards the legislature although i'll add a footnote to that you know if you've been paying attention you know the last six months or so there's a raging debate at the national level and at most state levels about and even at local mayors right mayor maddox has been you know kind of taking some heat up in tuscaloosa because you've got executives exercising kind of unilateral emergency powers during this pandemic and and doing things that usually would require their legislative bodies to take actions on so that's going to be something really interesting to watch in the next handful of years to kind of see how that how that bears out other than the governor most of these other officers the constitution just says they exist they get elected every four years legislature give them some give them something to do and then the legislature provides by general law kind of what their functions are uh the judicial branch article six uh you know we we've actually got a more consolidated judiciary than most uh states that's because in the in in the 70s then chief justice howell heflin most of y'all are probably even now you know too young to remember him as senator howell heflin who which is what he was when i was a child but uh in the 70s he was the chief justice and he reorganized the entire judicial branch of alabama and it was the first article to be rewritten and ratified it should have one of those little ratified in 1973 tags up here because it's most of article 6 is not original to the constitution but it creates the court system it kind of gives what inherent authority exists in the ports and lays all that out article seven is the impeachment article uh uh uh you know the legislature has the authority to impeach executive branch officers and judicial branch officers that are elected statewide um this one was one of those that was redone by the commission in the in the mid-2000s and ratified in 2016 which was about a year before we were in the middle of impeaching then governor robert bitly if we had it to do over again there's a whole lot of stuff that ought to be included in here that we didn't think about because we hadn't lived through an impeachment yet um but anyway we might need to re rewrite that one again um article eight suffrage and elections if you look back at kind of the you know kind of the racist vestiges a lot of the really problematic parts of our 19 constitution were centered in article 8. article 8 was the second effort at kind of article by article revision it was completely rewritten and revised in 1996 um prior to that time you had things like literacy tests referenced you had you you had poll taxes you had kind of all those vestiges of discrimination that existed in 1901 to keep people from voting um were still in the constitution most all of that was removed in in in the mid 90s um and and and and basically you know kind of it says who has the right to vote this no person convicted of a felony involving moral turpitude is still something that gets you know a lot of debate to this day um in part because it wasn't until a handful of years ago where kind of the legislature defined what was a crime of moral turpitude so it still left a lot of authority and local election officials to decide who could vote and who latin if they had a criminal background um and and so you know this this still isn't kind of a perfect uh provision but we came a long way on this article in the mid 90s um article 9 representation sets the number of legislators it really sets kind of a window of how you know what the minimum and maximum are requires redistricting every 10 years and kind of sets up a provision for for how we accept the federal census or what we do if the federal census doesn't happen uh and and just to the footnote next year is a redistricting year right we're living through the census right now um a lot a lot of heady stuff litigation going on about you know whether the census will play out properly during this pandemic really interesting to watch at the national level what's happening about all that stuff but at the end of the day sometime in the next year we'll have a new federal census and we'll be required to redistrict you know one person one vote kind of equalize the districts of of both our congressional seats and then our state legislative seats and a few other things article 10 is exemptions this is kind of your protection right there's there's protections in most constitutions ours included that protect your homestead or a portion of your homestead and a portion of your income if you get into debt trouble you know so like in a bankruptcy or the like those are in article 10. article 11 is taxation i'm glad i'm not covering budgets and taxation which will be covered next week but again just a couple of seeds to plant and and kind of how that conversation will will unfold you know so amendment 211 which was uh uh or section 211.02 which was amendment 61 passed in the 30s was our first income tax this is kind of the perfect example of alabama constitutional law uh because we tried to get an income tax in place the people weren't real keen on being taxes taxed as you might expect so uh so so how do you get there well you tell them what the money is going to go for so you earmark it so so since the 30s every dollar that's raised under our state income tax personally and federal has to be used to pay for public school teacher salaries so to this day you know our largest revenue stream almost four billion dollars a year today has to be spent on k-12 teacher salaries um and that's the only way we can get an income tax implemented was to convince the people that it couldn't be spent for anything else uh road and bridge fund you know there's a little bit of debate about this last year if you were in alabama and paying attention because we increased our gas tax for the first time in the generation about 30 years and that also you know earmarked and and this one makes a little bit more sense if you're going to if you're going to collect money on gasoline taxes you ought to spend it on the infrastructure and then 217 which gets a lot of a lot of heavy lifting if you're looking through kind of the vestiges of our state is our ad valorem tax structure so things like current use right that's where you get that agricultural land is taxed at such a fraction of uh of of say residential land and and that goes back again to kind of 1901 and and kind of landowners self-protection and kind of how they set this up article 12 corporations we rewrote this one and it was ratified in 2012 you know when we were digging through it you know it it this is back to that super code concept right had very granular regulations of how railroads have to operate how telegraph companies have to operate hadn't been a telegraph company in nearly 100 years but it was still in our constitution until 2012 article 13 banking same sort of stuff had a provision our constitution saying a bank couldn't have perpetual duration uh still had the gold standard even though the gold standard hadn't existed for nearly 100 years we got all that cleaned up in the early 2000s i want to spend a few minutes a little bit longer than i have on these most recent ones on on education right and this is this is kind of a really important part of our constitution and so i put up here for comparison first we'll talk about the 1901 language now if you skip to the last sentence you'll see obviously you know segregation was enshrined in our education article despite that i would argue that our 1901 section 256 was probably the most progressive education provision in any constitution as of that time because it required the legislature to establish maintain and organize a liberal system of education throughout the state that it had to be funded based on how many children were each in each school district and and while it's segregated it provided those the the you know it at least in words provided that concept and that protection irregardless of race um you know it and and and so there is at least something to be said for that in the time period of 1901 um and and then you'll kind of see everything so so so so while far from perfect um a a a very progressive notion of education and then what did we do we amended it in 1956 think about kind of historically 1954 was the landmark case brown versus board of education desegregation of schools what does alabama do we amend our constitution and we do it for all the wrong reasons right we try to create an argument of oh we're not segregating based on race we're segregating to avoid confusion and disorder and promote effective economical planning right we don't want to spend all this money on you know busing or bringing people around we've got all these reasons other than race to keep these schools separate but worse than that you go up here to the top and it kind of you know it kind of goes with this notion of you know gone are provide for a a system of liberal education and here instead is you know providing education in a manner an extent consistent with available resources and willingness and ability of individual student um and by the way nothing in this constitution shall be construed is creating or recognizing a right to education a public expense so this is a pretty huge step backwards you know 50 years after that very kind of progressive 1901 um language and and and probably is a pretty good signal about why it is so dangerous to have a constitution that can be so easily amended kind of with the ebb and flow of of of what's happening in culture around it uh these three articles we're going to kind of skip at once militia oath of office and miscellaneous you know that militia language is pretty interesting but not in the interest of an hour together on on this meeting and then article 18 covers kind of how you amend the constitution why is it so easy so so say it's a three-fifths vote of the membership and then it goes straight to the people so the governor has no say in the amending of the constitution this doesn't go to her desk she doesn't have a veto or executive amendment power once the legislature passes it we send it directly to the secretary of state who places it on the next general election ballot unless the legislature called for a special election to do it and then similar provisions for local amendments again one of the real outliers of this constitution is how easy we make it to have an exception for just one county uh or or one city so efforts at revision uh albert brewer who became governor he was lieutenant governor of the state of alabama uh when lurleen wallace uh passed away while in office and she he finished the rest of that term this was in the late 60s very progressive this is a you know when most other southern states were kind of ditching their 1900 era or post reconstruction era constitutions you know georgia tennessee mississippi all did that in the 60s early 70s um albert brewer formed a commission said hey let's get on track let's do it um didn't make very much headway and he was beaten by george wallace when he attempted to get reelected in 1972. um chief justice howell heflin we talked about that article 6 revision in the early 70s that was kind of the first attempt at doing a whole article at once instead of an individual section by section amendment process um interestingly enough bob james in his first term of office 78 to 82 put together a commission had a new constitution the legislature passed it and it was set to be on the ballot for ratification in 1983 and the supreme court blocked it said not so quick uh legislature you don't have the authority to rewrite the constitution all at once you can only do a piecemeal um and so the people never had a chance to ratify the the constitution that came out of that james revision uh commission effort um then in the mid 90s jack venable and the suffrage article we talked about that one in a little bit of detail then there was a riley commission in the early 2000s it was structured largely around the tax section we had an amendment one effort to kind of rewrite all of the constitutional provisions regarding taxes it failed very very badly at the ballot in the early 2000s um and and then senator del mar set up the constitutional revision commission in 2011 uh that that covered kind of this list of those ones that you saw that had those ratification dates in the 2000s um in november those of you who are uh registered voters in alabama there's a huge chance that kind of a a a redo on on a couple of key things in our constitution amendment four would give the authority uh to my agency the legislative services agency to recompile the constitution in total take out all racist language take out any provisions that have been uh overturned by competent courts um you know that are no longer constitutional consolidate things you know when we get done with it we'd bring it back to the legislature who would have to pass it by a three-fifths vote in 2022 and then it would be on the ballot in 2022 to be ratified um again wouldn't fix every issue in the constitution but it would at least kind of hit reset you know take out the most problematic parts hit reset on kind of the structure we'd start back over with th
constitution and no amendments instead of 950 amendments um and and then hopefully be able to tackle some of those harder issues in a one by one basis after that all right so i've been doing a ton of talking i have been watching the chat boxes i haven't seen any questions come up yet but i'd love to answer some questions in our last five or six minutes together um and so i don't know what's best i'm gonna try to switch let me stop sharing and switch back to gallery view if you got a question you can kind of raise your hand on the thing or just scream it out or or throw it in the chat box and and we'll do our best to answer whatever comes up come on i know there's got to be something i'll even take them from the advisors and board members all right so why is ours anecdotally considered worse than other states good question and and and and obviously this is gonna be a very high level answer to that question right i think the bulk of it is is that very few other states kind of with the history of succession secession during the civil war the vestiges of slavery that whole kind of baggage that we have as a state still have one as old as ours right i talked about a few minutes ago when we were talking about the brewer commission georgia mississippi tennessee most other deep south states uh sometime in the period between 1960 and 1980 kind of threw away their constitutions that looked like this and passed new state constitutions that look an awful lot like the federal constitution shorter much less specific much less micromanagement kind of ditched the segregation language ditch the racist language you know women can't vote language right and and kind of hit reset on their constitutions you know almost 80 years after the one we passed and still have is so i think that's the main reason i mean i think if you looked at the constitution that was in place at the turn of the 20th century in those other states other states that looked like us they would have been equally bad they would have been equally problematic but but at some point 70 or 80 years later they kind of started over and we kind of missed that we missed that vote um and and hasn't been updated at all yeah it's been updated okay so that is a language in the education article you showed us the one rather fades still the same today so that that's actually a fascinating question and the answer to it is it depends on who you ask so my answer is yes the 1956 language is still the operative language uh in the constitution um there are some who would argue that uh there are some that would argue that it is not that we're back to the 1901 constitution so why is that i'll give you the really quick answer in 1993 1994 time period educators and education groups sued the state of alabama about how we fund public education and in part you know their their argument was hey this this 1956 language is clearly unconstitutional the court should strike it and then when you reinsert the 1901 language it has all this you know good language about a you know a liberal-based education and then the state's got to fund it it was called the equity funding lawsuit you've got to fund education more equitably trial court agreed with those education interests bounced back and forth on appeals a few different times and ultimately the alabama supreme court threw it out without opinion on on on a ground mostly around you know hey you didn't have the right to sue to begin with um and and so what that means is you know there are some who would argue because of that trial court decision then the 1901 language is back what's operative however you know the better argument if you're sitting in the chair i'm sitting as kind of the code commissioner and keeper of the law is that a trial court doesn't have that authority it's got to go to the highest port of the state and have the highest port of the state throw it out before you actually take that language out of your constitution um but there's there there's kind of an argument about that um and and it has not been updated at all as of this date that is one of the things that would be updated if amendment 4 in 2020 passes what are the chances that marsha's proposals would allow ali to work on the rewrite passes i i don't know the answer to that i mean i showed you kind of the trends i mean the trends are that we ratify most of what goes out to the people um that said there was only one statewide amendment in march and it failed um and and if you were following that it's kind of it was you know i'd like to argue it's kind of a one-off it was the provision that would do away with an elected state school board um but it failed so i'm a little bit i'm a little bit worried about you know you know obviously you know most most well-heeled people most people are happy with their state in life kind of prefer the status quo right they don't like taking risk with changes you know stat status that kind of a mindset might lead to people being inclined to vote against it or at least that's kind of my concern but but but but i'm hopeful i think it's got a better than 50 chance of of passing it should be a really high election turnout you know there's a few other things people are paying attention to in the election in the election cycle hopefully that means people get out and vote and they get educated they vote yes on amendment 4. elaborate a little more on the reasons the supreme court ruled the way they did and state be manly sure so article 18 of the constitution which we talked about for just a minute is kind of how the constitution can be amended and it sets forth two primary ways in which you can amend the constitution the first is to have a constitutional convention and the supreme court said hey if you want to rewrite the whole constitution that's how the constitution says you should do it you should call a constitutional convention you should elect people to go sit in a constitutional convention and and you rewrite the whole constitution the second method under section 284 of the constitution is where the legislature can propose amendments and the court said hey amendment means something less than the whole right if it's if it's an amendment you're changing something inside the document you're not rewriting the whole thing and and so they used kind of that and again really high level answer but but they used that as kind of the basis of their ruling was you know amendment means something less than whole there's this other provision about a convention rewriting the whole constitution therefore legislators legislatures authority is limited to the amendment and and we don't think that involves the whole thing that's kind of why amendment 4 is structured the way it is right so amendment 4 would create a limited window for a new method of amending the constitution and that new method would be that the legislature gets to rewrite the whole thing and propose it out so so amendment four is kind of structured and written specifically to attack the grounds on which um state be manly caused that to fail um i've got that it's right at one which i think i think is the case um i'll leave it up to up to y'all i really enjoyed this time together i'm sorry again that was virtual maybe sometime over the next year we can get back together and do it in person uh you know i think you could spend days and days on the on the constitution of 1901 so i appreciate the opportunity to share this time with you all and thanks for having me you
