http://www.al.com/news/birminghamnews/index.ssf?/base/news/114604369115560.xml&coll=2 – Jefferson County Commission votes to join state tax holiday.

http://www.al.com/news/birminghamnews/index.ssf?/base/news/114604361715560.xml&coll=2 – Moore tops Riley in most recent campaign contributions, but Riley still far outdistances his opponent in total contributions.

http://www.montgomeryadvertiser.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060426/NEWS02/604260319/1009 - Strange leads fund raising in lt. governor’s race.

http://www.oanow.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=OAN/MGArticle/OAN_BasicArticle&c=MGArticle&cid=1137835597331 – Auburn and Opelika likely to join state sales tax holidays.

FROM TODAY’S ANNISTON STAR:

Alabama Citizens for Constitutional Reform remain optimistic despite defeat

By Brian Lyman
Star Capitol Correspondent

04-26-2006

MONTGOMERY — The legislation they wanted never came to a vote, but Alabama Citizens for Constitutional Reform still claims success.

Two bills calling for voters to decide whether to call a convention to overhaul the state’s 1901 constitution were introduced in the state House of Representatives and the state Senate this year.

The House bill was deadlocked in committee, with two local representatives — Steve Hurst, D-Munford, and Randy Wood, R-Anniston — voting against it. The Senate bill got a unanimously favorable report out of committee but never reached the Senate floor for a vote.

So constitutional reform dies for another year. But ACCR calls it a victory, noting 70,000 signatures were collected advocating the convention and that new polls show bipartisan support for constitutional reform.

Lenora Pate, co-chairwoman of ACCR, said the group plans to compile questionnaires from candidates for statewide office this fall and keep the issue before voters.

“All over the state, polling (organizations) show people do care about this issue,” she said. “With nearly 70,000 signatures for constitutional reform, legislators ignore that type of voice at their peril.”

A University of Alabama at Birmingham poll reported in state news media on Monday said 58 percent of Democrats and 53 percent of Republicans favor a constitutional convention.

Obstacles still face convention supporters, however, and the biggest one could be legislator indifference.

Alabama’s constitution, initially drawn up to deny blacks and poor whites the right to vote, limits home rule for individual counties, restricts their economic development and has been amended roughly 800 times since its passage in 1901.

Advocates of constitutional reform say a new constitution would help economic development and streamline government processes.

Sen. Ted Little, D-Auburn, who sponsored the Senate version of the constitutional convention bill, said he will reintroduce the legislation if he is re-elected in November.

“I just think there is a need for the citizenry to have an opportunity to look at the 1901 constitution to see if it needs to be revised, reformed or brought up to date,” Little said. “It is a simple question for people.

“If they say yea, then we set out a pattern to pick delegates. If they say nay, then it’s a moot question.”

Not everyone agrees with that approach.

Hurst, who opposed the House version of the bill in committee, said it would be better to address separately problems in the constitution — such as outdated language and taxing power — and submit the proposed changes to votes of the people, rather than tackle the whole document at once.

“It’s kind of like digesting an encyclopedia instead of one book,” he said. “Understanding the constitution is more difficult than understanding sections of it.”

Wood said he favors doing a revision “article by article, and that way we keep special interests out of it.”

Little’s bill would have limited the fund-raising ability of candidates for a constitutional convention.

“If you’re talking about special interest, there’s no group more overwhelmed with special interest than the Legislature of Alabama,” Little said.

Several powerful lobbying groups in Montgomery oppose a constitutional convention.

The Alabama Farmers’ Federation has voiced concerns that increased home rule would benefit cities at the expense of rural areas and would open the door to increased property taxes. The Christian Coalition of Alabama says a new constitution would open the door to legalized gambling.

John Giles, the executive director of the CCA, says the referendum proposal ignores the amendatory process contained in the current constitution. He said a legislator’s vote for or against the convention would not have anything to do with his trust in the voters.

“If (the legislator) voted yes, they say ‘I would think a convention is a good idea,’ and the people will decide whether to have a convention,” he said. “If no, they say the amendatory process is sound, it’s time-tested and shows that people have the right to vote.”

Polling aside, Hurst and Wood said they got little feedback from constituents on the issue.

Hurst said he received one phone call in favor of reform during the entire session. Wood said the only calls of support he received were from Jefferson County, outside his district. Legislators as a whole seemed uninterested in the issue this year.

“It’s an election year, and people are more interested in getting home and getting ready to run for re-election,” Wood said. “ I just don’t think it’s on top of any legislator’s agenda.

“Let’s face it: We’ve been doing pretty good for the last few years with the one we’ve had.”

Jess Brown, a political science professor at Athens State University who has worked on and supports constitutional reform, agrees that reform is a hard sell at the polls. Most voters, he says, do not link the constitution with other issues, such as education, taxes or business development.

“At this juncture, constitutional reform is basically the agenda of some elites, the agenda of a certain subset of elites,” Brown said. “It’s the agenda of some newspaper editors, some academics, judges and bar association leaders, and a few business leaders.

“But except for that small group or coterie of people, I don’t think constitutional reform is a highly salient issue with the rank-and-file voter.”

Brown notes that other state constitutions have been overhauled only when governors have put it front and center, as former Georgia governor George Busbee did to get the Peach State’s 1983 constitution approved. Gov. Bob Riley has said he supports incremental reform.

Brown rejects incremental reform, saying it would do nothing to address the problems in the state constitution. Still, he says a constitutional convention would be impractical because legislators and lobbyists would be uncomfortable with the results.

Brown proposes an independent commission like the one that revised the state’s judicial article in the early 1970s.

“That general approach gives legislators and lobbyists a little more comfort zone, that there won’t be a revolution and they’ll lose control,” he said.

Pate of ACCR also rejects incremental reform and says a convention is the best way to address the issues with the current document.

“To get legislators to hide behind some shield that says special interests will dominate a convention is using that as a red herring,” she said. “The controls and special safeguards built into legislation come nowhere near as ripe for special-interest domination as in the current Legislature.”

Editorials

Legislators miss the bus

In our opinion

04-26-2006

With gasoline prices inching up to $3 a gallon for unleaded regular, the cost of getting to work or school or anywhere else is becoming a major concern for the average Alabamian.

So you would think that with the can-do attitude that characterized the last legislative session, one of the things that our legislators could do was address the question of public transportation.

But you would be wrong.

This past session, Sen. Roger Smitherman, D-Birmingham, tried. He introduced a bill to put on the ballot a constitutional amendment that would have added public transportation to the list of things on which fuel and road use taxes could be spent. (Need we point out that here is another example of how our antiquated Constitution straightjackets our Legislature by making it difficult for government to respond quickly to obvious needs?)

A public hearing was held where citizens’ advocacy groups spoke in favor of the measure. However, the Department of Transportation and the road-building industry — which dominates that agency — spoke in opposition and the opposition won. The committee never voted on the bill.

Similar legislation was proposed in the House, with similar results.

Now, we understand the reluctance of those involved to share scarce resources. We also understand that it will take more than $3-a-gallon gasoline to make Alabamians give up their cars. And as long as the love affair with automobiles continues, well-maintained highways will be a top priority.

However, while gasoline prices may ease once the summer is over, the fact remains that in the years to come, transportation costs will continue to eat away at family budgets, taking up income that could be spent on other things. The result will be bad for the economy and bad for Alabama.

Last legislative session, our senators and representatives proved that they could work with each other and with "special interests" to reach a consensus on critical issues. Now is the time for legislators to do it again.

Higher energy costs are with us for good. Finding a way to use less energy is both an economic concern and a strategic priority.

And Alabama must do its part. Legislators and lobbyists, bureaucrats and businessmen must get together with those who speak for consumers and find a way to include public transportation as a spending priority. As the price at the pump goes up, time to act grows shorter.

Op-Ed Columns

What does Parker do with his time?

By Jim Vickrey
Special to The Star

04-26-2006

What is my fellow churchman Tom Parker doing with his time? It’s certainly not the work of an associate justice of the Alabama Supreme Court, the position for which he is being paid handsomely by taxpayers.

Appellate cases go into his office at the Judicial Building and seem to disappear into a black hole of inexcusable inaction. So bad is his record of stewardship at the court that through April 21, he had authored only two published majority decisions. Two, not counting an "advisory opinion" last year, which was not joined in by any other justices.

Such a damning record of judicial inactivity would embarrass most judges on any court, especially one on a state’s highest court. (Chief Justice Drayton Nabers, who spends half his time administering the unified court system, authored 12 times as many last year. The average for 2005 of the other eight justices is 43.25.)

Parker has thereby made himself the personification of Gladstone’s admonition: "Justice delayed, is justice denied." Justice, according to Black’s Law Dictionary, 6th ed., is "the constant and perpetual disposition of legal matters or disputes to render every man his [sic] due" (emphasis added).

So what does Judge Parker do with all of the time he’s not spending dispensing justice on the job? He devotes himself to such activities as personally attacking his fellow judges in newspaper essays for not doing what they are required by state and federal oaths and the U.S. Constitution to do — follow the precedents of higher courts. He insults the entire Alabama Bar, including me and every other lawyer in the state, by having distributed at its Good Friday Hall of Fame induction ceremony a personal attack on late U.S. Supreme Court Justice and former U.S. senator from Alabama Hugo Black, an inductee chosen unanimously by the bar’s 72-member governing board. Parker erroneously states that Black "personally launched the war to kick God out of the public square."

Parker also continues misstating the factual and legal record of Justice Black’s participation in religion cases of the latter’s court, which has never "ruled against prayer [per se] and … Bible reading [per se] in public schools." It has ruled that officially sponsored prayer and devotional Bible reading are unconstitutional. If a judge can’t get that distinction right, then he has no business being on an appellate court where such is the essence of its work.

When he announced his last-minute intention to ask Alabamians to promote him to chief justice, Parker’s "spokesman," not he, tried to explain away his abysmal inactivity in his present job in this way: "Writing opinions … is discretionary and Parker prefers principled quality of [sic] bureaucratic quantity"; moreover, he has "considered and voted on just as many cases as his colleagues."

What that leaves out is that the primary work of any appellate court is to explain why it reached its carefully considered and researched conclusions of fact and law, on all but the most obviously unjustified appeals. Without such, neither lower courts nor lawyers would have definitive guidance regarding future legal disputes, which is the major part of the common law system.

For Parker to argue that "writing opinions … is purely discretionary" in all cases is to tell litigants and the people of Alabama they have no right of access to the rationales of cases. Furthermore, it is to fail to point out errors made by lower courts; harmonize decision rules used by the legal system; and ensure that results in one case are sufficiently principled to permit their application also to other, like cases.

To perform his duties, he must issue principled opinions rather than press releases, by authoring opinions that his fellow justices can agree to join for the reason a former Arkansas Supreme Court justice once described like this: Preparing "a formal opinion assures some measure of thoughtful review of the facts in a case and of the law’s bearing upon them" and helps to avoid "snap judgments and lazy preferences for armchair theorizing as against library research and time-consuming cerebral effort."

The great English jurist Sir Edward Coke said: "Reason is the life of the law; nay, the common law itself is nothing else but reason." Determining the bases of decisions for future reference (something Justice Parker’s provided just twice) is thus much more important than knowing how he feels about his personal relationship with other members of his court or binding U.S. Supreme Court precedents or even Chief Justice Nabers or Justice Black. An appellate judge who doesn’t write majority opinions is simply misusing his time on the court and ought to be ashamed of himself. Indeed, he ought to consider resigning if he cannot change his ways.

Jim Vickrey of Montgomery is a former college president, a professor of rhetoric and a lawyer who has argued cases before the Alabama Supreme Court.