Election Challenge Dismissed for 4 Democratic Senators

Last night’s story about Judge Charles Price’s dismissal of Mark Montiel’s election challenge involving four Senate Democrat heavyweights has an interesting nugget.

The suit claimed that the four senators (Senate Rules Committee Chairman Lowell Barron, D-Fyffe; Senate Majority Leader Zeb Little, D-Cullman; Senate budget committee Chairmen Hank Sanders, D-Selma; and Roger Bedford, D-Russellville) did not file proper campaign finance reports for the Democratic primary last June.

You be the judge. What is the most interesting part of this story?

• Was it that the four were acting in accordance with common practice based on a a 1990 Attorney General’s opinion filing campaign finance reports in unchallenged elections?
• Or that the lawsuit did not include 25 unchallenged Republican legislators who also did not file campaign finance reports?
• It could be that the case dragged on long enough that the Judge agreed that because the senators are in office, “only the state Senate has jurisdiction.”
• Or this… that I almost overlooked… (emphasis added)
  

  … Price sided with arguments raised by attorneys for the Democratic party and attorney general’s staff that the four senators are already in office and only the state Senate has jurisdiction over their service.

  A note about the effort of the “attorney general’s staff” to preserve the election of these four powerful Democratic senators…

  There appears to be no love lost between Republican AG Troy King and plaintiff Mark Montiel, his challenger in last year’s GOP primary.

  Not only did Montiel challenge King in the primary, but Montiel filed a civil suit against King and later asked for criminal charges related to King’s use of PAC money.

  Then there is the chapter about Montiel successfully challenging the constitutionality of the legislature’s community service grants. When a judge ruled that Montiel could not use his old lawsuit filed in 2004 to challenge the new community service grant law in 2006, AG Troy King filed a lawsuit within hours (before Montiel could re-file) to challenge the constitutionality of the new statute. This took away a plum campaign issue for Montiel, and also put the Attorney General on the wrong side of a suit challenging the constitutionality of a state law.

Montiel is “anxious to get the case to the Alabama Supreme Court.”

The similar (yet different) lawsuit challenging the election of Sen. Larry Means (D – Attalla) is pending before another Montgomery judge.

Related Articles:

• Means Case Separated
• Troy King on Wrong Side of Suit?
• Top 10 Most Interesting Questions: #7