Bill Aims To Block Alabama Parties From Disqualifying Candidates For Certain Donations
TUSCALOOSA, AL — A pre-filed bill in the Alabama Legislature proposes prohibiting political parties in Alabama from disqualifying candidates for receiving campaign contributions from a particular person or political action committees.
{p/p}House Bill 6 , authored and pre-filed by State Rep. Phillip Pettus, a Republican from Lauderdale County, comes after several high-profile instances of qualified Republican candidates being removed from the ballot after GOP leaders discovered donations were deemed to be questionable to the candidate's loyalty to the party.
The most relevant local example of what this legislation could address occurred during the last state election cycle in 2022 when the Alabama Republican Party's Steering Committee voted to remove Tuscaloosa businessman and Senate District 21 candidate Tripp Powell from the GOP primary election ballot.
Had the process gone as it normally does, Powell would have faced off against longtime Republican incumbent Sen. Gerald Allen — one of the most powerful figures in the statehouse.
ALSO READ: COLUMN | The Political Assassination Of Tripp Powell
At the time, Florence pawn shop owner and GOP Steering Committee Vice Chair Josh Dodd told Patch that the party had the inherent right to deny ballot access to a Republican officeholder or candidate who either publicly participated in the primary election of another political party or publicly supported a nominee of another political party.
As Patch previously reported , a similar instance occurred in 2018 when former Tuscaloosa City Councilor and City Board of Education member Lee Garrison was dropped by the party in his bid for a position on the state Republican Executive Committee after party leaders took issue with his vocal support of Maddox in his role as the mayor of Tuscaloosa.
Powell's case is different, though, since it was Garrison's vocal support that got him removed from consideration for a prime position within the party's internal structure, while Powell's ouster came as the result of an inconsequential $500 donation he made to the failed 2018 Democratic Primary campaign of Tuscaloosa Mayor Walt Maddox as he ran for governor.
Sources told Patch at the time that at least one party leader went so far as to bring up past financial contributions made by Powell's parents to Maddox — despite these donations being made to Maddox's nonpartisan mayoral campaigns and not his 2018 bid for governor.
What's more, this particular instance occurred while, at the same time, party leadership allowed a candidate to run in a crowded GOP primary for the Alabama Public Service Commission despite being arrested for domestic violence-strangulation while on the campaign trail — an offense that the party bylaws at the time said was cause enough for dropping a committee member or candidate.
This alleged hypocrisy led many in Tuscaloosa County and other parts of the state to accuse the Alabama GOP of changing the rules as it went along but little, if any, action was taken in the immediate aftermath.
House Bill 6, which has been referred to the House Constitution, Campaigns and Elections Committee ahead of the 2025 Legislative Session, would amend state law to prohibit any political party from disqualifying an individual from running for office based on receipt of contributions from a particular person or political action committee.
The specific wording of the bill is important here as it relates to the two local anecdotes previously mentioned because it only amends the law for contributions to a candidate while not specifying if this would extend to past contributions by candidates to other campaigns, as was the case with Powell in 2022.
Tuscaloosa Patch has reached out to Pettus for clarification on the language of his bill and will update this story accordingly.
The previous incarnation of the bill met its demise last legislative session without getting out of committee but does seem to have some bipartisan support in the mostly conservative Tuscaloosa County legislative delegation, including State Rep. Curtis Travis, a Democrat from Tuscaloosa, and State Rep. Ron Bolton, a Republican from Northport serving his first term in the legislature.
State Rep. Cynthia Almond, a Republican from Tuscaloosa who previously served as Tuscaloosa City Council president, also expressed that she thought the legislation that the bill "seems like a good thing."
Bolton told Patch that he supported the bill during the last Legislative Session and said he challenged party leadership on the issue last summer.
"This is a sensitive issue when the party starts telling me who I can and can't work with," he said.
State Rep. Bill Lamb, a first-term Republican from Tuscaloosa who served nearly four decades as Tuscaloosa County's chief financial officer, offered up an opposing viewpoint, telling Patch that he views the proposed legislation as the government trying to tell political parties how to run their primaries.
To Lamb's point, political parties in Alabama exercise full control over their party primaries and set their own rules for how they are carried out.
"The reason I'm against it is that the party is not the government," he said. "I don't know if the government should be telling the party what to do."
The 2025 Legislative Session is set to convene on Jan. 14, 2025.
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