State Sen. Sam Givhan (R-Huntsville) is firing back at Doug Jones’ wild claim that Republican leaders dragged their feet on killing the state’s grocery tax.
Givhan joined Alabama Speaker of the House Nathaniel Ledbetter (R-Rainsville) and Senate President Pro Tem Garlan Gudger (R-Cullman) at Star Supermarket in Huntsville on Friday to announce that full and permanent repeal of the tax will be the first order of business when the Legislature convenes for the 2027 session.
But the GOP-led movement to do so predates the current election cycle and certainly the next quadrennium.
Alabama taxed groceries at the full 4% state sales tax rate for decades. The Republican supermajority cut it to 3% in September 2023 and to 2% in September 2025, then suspended it outright for May and June of this year.
Former U.S. Senator Doug Jones (D-Mountain Brook), the Democrat nominee for Governor, responded on social media by accusing Republicans of an election-year conversion.
“Well it’s about damn time,” Jones said. “Your Democratic colleagues have been proposing elimination of the tax on groceries for years, I have been talking about it since I started my campaign, but it takes the realization of the possibility of losing the governorship and a bunch of seats in the legislature 2 weeks before the election for you guys to have an election year conversion for something that should be happened years ago while you have been in charge.”
Well it’s about damn time. Your Democratic colleagues have been proposing elimination of the tax on groceries for years, I have been talking about it since I started my campaign, but it takes the realization of the possibility of losing the governorship and a bunch of seats in… https://t.co/hojaFW6MHs
— Doug Jones (@DougJones) October 17, 2026
Givhan answered the charge Tuesday on WVNN’s “The Yaffee Program.”
“We’ve already cut it in half, and Senator Jones has been working from the Gadsden area…. I’m sorry, Doug Jones wasn’t there and lobbying the Legislature to do this two years ago or three years ago when we started doing this and put it in play,” Givhan said. “This is Republican initiated, and you know, couldn’t have happened without Republicans. So yeah, it’s just they’re flailing about a little bit because they’re mad that I guess they think…we stole their thunder. We’ve been talking about this for a while.”
Givhan said Democrats ran the state’s budget into the ground for years before Republicans took the majority in 2010.
“Legislatures would go in there and they would just spend money like drunken sailors, and some people say that’s an insult to drunken sailors,” he said. “And then just when they didn’t have enough money, it just would be proration.”
“That didn’t happen under Republican watch, and we’ve actually gone from a billion dollar deficit when the Democrats were in charge to having a billion-dollar surplus, and of course we saved that,” he added. “Everybody wants us to spend that all the time, but we have to save it because we know someday a bad day is coming, and we want to be, you know, we don’t want to have proration.”
Givhan warned Republicans not to get complacent and sit out the November election.
“It’s not that there are more Democrats here,” he said. “It’s that there are Republicans that are not as excited, and there are Republicans that are disenchanted with the top of the ticket. Don’t think you’re going to see that going down ballot so much. The concern is that, well, maybe if people are not happy about the top of the ticket, they’re not happy about the President, they just stay home, they don’t show up and vote. And so you know we’ve got some very important local races here, and so it is, you know, the old adage is all politics is local, but you know there are national implications that are frustrating voters right now.”
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 X @Yaffee.
