Republicans in the Alabama Senate are considering their options if members of the opposing party keep filibustering through the 2025 session.
Minority Leader Bobby Singleton (D-Greensboro), State Sen. Rodger Smitherman (D-Birmingham) and others slowed the process down Thursday after they activated a filibuster against a bill on the calendar to reform the board of the Alabama Department of Archives and History.
Democrats took turns for several hours. Singleton said GOP state lawmakers and congressional leaders “kiss the ring every day” out of fear of being ousted in a primary challenge.
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“Dodge [DOGE] is robbing us blind! And when it happen,” Singleton said, “everybody around here going to be, ‘Well, we should have did something. We should have said something.’ To blame everybody up in Washington, but this is our state.”
State Sen. Chris Elliott (R-Josephine), who sponsored the bill being filibustered, discussed what Republicans might do next.
“What’s likely to happen is some portion of some negotiation,” Elliott said on FM Talk 106.5 Friday. “And then there are options like cloture, which is a nuclear option that puts us in a very combative posture, which is very difficult to move pieces of legislation along.”
Elliott said the Democrats overreacted in how they opposed his bill.
“The question is just, really, can we get back there with our Democrat colleagues after seeing what happened yesterday, which, again, was just hyperbolic,” he said. “It was over the top and if that’s how that, you know, that’s the posture, then it’s going to require response of some sort.”
While they were in favor of the measure, Democrats also stalled on legislation by State Sen. Arthur Orr (R-Decatur) to require state buildings to install adult-sized changing tables in state buildings.
Orr explained on Friday that they won’t let Senate Democrats hold up the process indefinitely.
“We’re not the U.S. Congress,” Orr said on WVNN. “In other words we’re not going to go on and on and on forever, or for two years, for sure.”
“We have the limited 30 days that we have, and so we have to be very strategic on when we start dropping the hammer, and because once we do it, it’ll affect the rest of the session. And so we’ve got a lot of things to do, housekeeping measures, and in the Senate, we have confirmations, which are tremendously time can be tremendously time consuming. You’re talking about well over 100 confirmations that happen every year, sometimes 200 so anyway, we got a lot more business in the house has to deal with. And so we just got to be strategic. And when we when we go nuclear and cloture our loyal opposition.”
Yaffee is a contributing writer to Yellowhammer News and hosts “The Yaffee Program” weekdays 9-11 a.m. on WVNN. You can follow him on Twitter @Yaffee
