“Follow the money” has been a term coined to describe where candidates get their political contributions. During a 2010 special session, the Republican-led legislature enacted a variety of laws to clean up the way money was spread around to candidates. One new law prohibited PAC-to-PAC transfers, in order to provide transparency to discover who is actually providing campaign money to candidates.
A component of another one of these laws is just now going into effect. The law prohibits organizations, like the Alabama Education Association (AEA), from receiving dues through payroll deductions unless they certify that the dues money is not used for political purposes. The state should have never been in the business of helping a political organization collect dues that would be used for political purposes.
Just a few months after the law was passed in 2010, the AEA and others sued in the federal court in the Northern District of Alabama to keep the law from being implemented. The court issued a preliminary injunction to block the law from taking effect. For over three years, this law sat dormant. However, this injunction was overturned earlier this year, allowing the law to finally be put into effect.
The AEA and other like organizations had until June 30 to certify that the money they collected from dues was not going to be used for political purposes. The organization failed to do so. AEA spokeswoman Amy Marlowe said that promising not to use payroll funds for political purposes would have “silenced AEA”.
With over 95,000 members in Alabama, automatic payroll deductions were a huge source of income for AEA. The organization now must attempt to transition its members to a bank draft system. The dues will now be right in front of them, instead of automatically taken out before they received their paychecks. Although AEA claims the change will not largely hurt their membership numbers, Senate Pro Tem Del Marsh said that with the new bank drafts, members “may look more closely at what the teachers association is doing.”
For an organization that reportedly pumped $7 million into the Alabama Republican Primary, with the goal of electing candidates who would be blindly loyal to the AEA, this could mean rough waters ahead. The AEA funded races against many incumbent Republican legislators, including Speaker Mike Hubbard and Senate Pro Tem Del Marsh, in an effort to regain the control they had over the legislature when Democrats were the majority. The effort by the teacher union was a colossal failure, they have little to show for throwing away millions of dollars in the Republican Primary.
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The new law should keep organizations like AEA accountable to their members. Instead of an “out of sight and out of mind” payroll deduction, members will now see their due withdrawals and take a more vested interest in monitoring the actions of AEA.
“That’s the biggest challenge AEA has. They are a liberal organization that supports other liberal organizations, and many of their members are not,” Senator Del Marsh said.
The Alabama Education Association will now have to answer to their 95,000 members as to why they spent so much money during the primary election, with little result. As Republican Senator Bryan Taylor said, “[T]axpayers have a right to expect that their tax dollars will not be used to advance a private organization’s political agenda.”
Rank and file members of the AEA are hard working teachers and support personnel who want what is best for the children. The teacher union has historically held little accountability to its members, instead relying on scare tactics to force their cooperation. The special interest group is far more interested in attempting to regain power than they are in protecting the students, teachers and school administrators of our state. The dues of our hard-working educators should not be a fundraiser for politicians who promote values far off from their own.
Now that this law has finally taken effect, it is our hope that members will be inspired to stand up within their organization and force their true voices to be heard. Keeping organizations accountable will ensure the interests of members are not misrepresented or forgotten.
Bill Armistead is the Chairman of the Alabama Republican Party
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