Folsom's power play

I mentioned last week that six conservative Democrats in the Alabama Senate have teamed up with the twelve Republicans in a bid to wrest control of that body away from a more liberal faction led by President Pro Tem Lowell Barron (D.-Fyffe).

Well, it seems that Lt. Governor-elect Jim Folsom, Jr. doesn't care much for the idea. He is doing everything he can to prevent a schism in his party, including offering himself up to replace Barron as the leader of Democrats in the Senate. If Folsom's proposal is accepted, it will require the Senate to hand back to the Lt. Governor at least some of the broad powers that it stripped away in 1999, when Steve Windom became the first Republican in over a century to hold that office. (In 1999, most of the powers formerly exercised by the Lt. Governor were given to the President Pro Tem - currently Barron.)

From today's Huntsville Times:

The [six Democratic] dissidents, who call themselves the Senate Leadership Group, have - with GOP approval - already named Sen. Jim Preuitt, D-Talladega, as their candidate to lead the Senate.

Leaders on the other side predict that the Senate will be organized around Democratic Lt. Gov. Jim Folsom Jr., who will try to reassert the more traditional powers of that office for himself.

Let's hope that Folsom and Barron's efforts fail, not just because the bipartisan "6-plus-12" group would be friendlier to both Governor Riley and to Alabama taxpayers, but more importantly, because taking away the Lt. Governor's extraconstitutional powers in 1999 was one of the best things the Senate has done in recent memory. Prior to that time, the Lt. Governor had been far too powerful for his own good and for the good of the state. He basically acted as a super-legislator, with more control than anyone else over moving legislation through the Senate.

To delegate such broad authority to the Lt. Governor was a fundamental violation of the separation of powers doctrine, and it was arguably a violation of the Alabama constitution, as well*. While returning to those bad old days might serve the interests of liberals in the legislature, it would represent a full-scale assault on the interests of the people they represent.

* The Alabama Constitution makes the Lieutenant Governor the "ex-officio President of the Senate" and gives each house the power to determine its rules of proceedings, but it also states that "the legislative department shall never exercise the executive and judicial powers, or either of them; the exectutive shall never exercise the legislative and judicial powers, or either of them; the judicial shall never exercise the legislative and executive powers, or either of them; to the end that it may be a government of laws and not of men."