by Glynn Wilson

The Bush Justice Department and the administration of Alabama Governor Bob Riley continue to play offense in the great ongoing political war against the rule of law in America. The war is being played out on Alabama soil like some of the great battles of the Civil War, only this time, the federal government is on the wrong side of history.

In a move that can only be described as political theater, as opposed to honest, objective law enforcement, United States Attorney Alice Martin sent henchmen from the U.S. Marshals Service all the way from Birmingham to Montgomery this week to make a show of serving subpoenas on members of the Alabama Legislature.

If not for long-standing Legislative rules, they would have stormed into the Legislative chamber, with TV cameras from Birmingham in tow, to put on a real show.

But in the end, the show did not have the ratings power of the recent CBS News “60 Minutes” segment on the political prosecution of former Alabama Governor Don Siegelman, so Karl Rove must be sorely disappointed down there in his Rosemary Beach bungalow not far from the Alabama line.

According to the official Bush and Riley administration mouthpiece, the Birmingham News, two Alabama Board of Education members and a former acting chancellor of postsecondary education, which oversees Alabama’s two-year colleges, are among those who have been subpoenaed to testify before a federal grand jury investigating alleged corruption in the state’s two-year college system.

Vice chancellor Don Edwards told the News Friday that his department had received subpoenas for state school board members former vice chairman Ethel Hall of Fairfield and current vide chairman David Byers of Birmingham. Edwards said former acting Chancellor Renee Culverhouse, president of Gadsden State Community College, has also been subpoenaed.

And according to the Associated Press, at least nine present and former legislators, including two of the Senate’s most powerful leaders, have been subpoenaed in the Bush Justice Department’s probe of alleged corruption in the two-year college system.

According to their attorney Michel Nicrosi, four state senators were issued subpoenas to testify, including President Pro Tem Hinton Mitchem, D-Union Grove, Rules Chairman Lowell Barron, D-Fyffe, Judiciary Committee Chairman Rodger Smitherman of Birmingham and Dean of the Senate Bobby Denton, D-Muscle Shoals.

Other sources say Rep. Blaine Galliher, R-Gadsden, has been issued a subpoena, along with Rep. Jack Page, D-Gadsden and Rep. Neal Morrison of Cullman.

Morrison resigned from the Legislature last year when he was named president of Bevill State Community College in Sumiton.

Other legislators who have confirmed personally or through attorneys that they have received subpoenas include House Majority Leader Rep. Ken Guin, D-Carbon Hill, Rep. Merika Coleman, D-Birmingham and Rep. Craig Ford, D-Gadsden, bringing the total harassed so far to 14 Democrats and one Republican.

Alabama Democratic Party Executive Director Jim Spearman called into question the method by which U.S. Marshals attempted to serve legislators subpoenas to appear to testify in a grand jury proceeding. Reporters were apparently tipped off by calls stating U.S. Marshals were coming to the Alabama Statehouse to serve some legislators, he said in a press release.

“The drama surrounding these actions and the U.S. Department of Justice’s disruption of a legislative session for the routine serving of a summons to appear in court sends a poor signal to Alabama citizens who are already complaining about partisan political interference into the federal prosecution of former Democratic Governor Don Siegelman,” Spearman said. “These ladies and gentlemen have not been charged with a crime and could have been served by other means in their local communities, not in Montgomery during a legislative session in front of TV cameras and reporters.”

State law actually prohibits serving members of the legislature while they are in session. Section 29-1-7 of the Alabama Code protects members from this kind of action by U.S. Marshals yesterday. In fact, the Marshals could have violated this law by their disruption of the session and have been charged with a misdemeanor.

“Thursday’s action only strengthens our resolve to insist that the U.S. House and Senate as well as the U.S. Attorney General immediately launch an inquiry into Alabama’s federal justice system to assure Alabama citizens that politics and partisanship have not been used in prosecutions or in the serving of subpoenas,” Spearman said. “If Republican operatives had any advance knowledge of yesterday’s serving of subpoenas at the Statehouse, they should have to testify before Congress under oath.”

According to sources in Montgomery and Birmingham, the subpoenas call officials to testify before a grand jury being convened on March 13 and 14 in Birmingham, when Bush appointed prosecutors apparently want to talk to lawmakers who have worked in the two-year system about what kind of work they did to earn their salaries.

Hall, who has been on the state school board for 21 years, said she has no idea what federal investigators want.

“I haven’t done anything wrong and I will answer what questions I can,” she said.

Walter Braswell, an attorney who represents Rep. Randy Hinshaw, D-Meridianville, who works for the Central Alabama Skills Training Consortium, said he has spoken with the U.S. attorney’s office about this apparent fishing expedition.

“I’ve been told this is sort of a survey of all legislators who also have some employment or contract with public education,” Braswell said. “They want to hear how they came to have their jobs, exactly what they did and how they were evaluated.”

Some of the subpoenas were issued in the Statehouse, some in the parking lot and some at people’s homes, sources say.

Postsecondary Chancellor Bradley Byrne has said his department had an agreement with federal prosecutors for subpoenas to be sent to the him when employees of the system are to be served. Why that agreement was violated is anybody’s guess at this point, although it is known that Byrne, a former state senator from Baldwin County who was Riley’s hand-picked choice for chancellor, has been touted as Riley’s potential heir apparent as governor in 2010.

“What they did was illegal,” said a key legislative aide who spoke only on condition of anonymity. “The key question is going to be, why did they have to use these tactics? It’s completely out of control.”

The timing is also at issue, coming in the wake of a key legislative victory for the Democrats in Cullman and the national attention over the Siegelman case.

“It’s not coincidence,” the aide said. “This is tit for tat. They feel the need to remind people that Democrats are bad.”

There’s the active campaign by Governor Riley to take over the Legislature by 2010. And then there’s that active perjury complaint pending against U.S. Attorney Alice Martin, which now might get a closer look by Democrats who control key committees in Congress.

As we often like to say: “It’s a war and no one is safe.”

Pam Miles, a member of the Democratic Party’s executive committee and a long-time supporter of Siegelman, compared the tactics to the Gestapo in Nazi Germany and said some of the people now coming under fire may wish they had done more early on to stand up against the Bush Justice Department’s treatment of Siegelman.

“And when they came for me, who will stand up for me?” she asked. “If people had stood up for Don Siegelman, maybe we could have avoided some of this.”

The law:

Section 29-1-7
Privilege of members from arrest and civil process.
(a) Members of the Legislature of Alabama shall in all cases, except treason, felony and breach of the peace, be privileged from arrest and shall not be subject to service of any summons, citation or other civil process during their attendance at the session of their respective houses and in going to and returning from the same.
(b) Whoever knowingly and willfully denies to any member of the Legislature the privilege and immunity granted herein is guilty of a misdemeanor and, upon conviction, shall be punished by fine not exceeding $1,000.00 or by imprisonment for not more than one year, or by both.
(Acts 1959, 1st Ex. Sess., No. 88, p. 148.)

Special to the Locust Fork Journal

No Comment
by Scott Horton
Edited by Glynn Wilson

Teacher, legislator Sue Schmitz

Editor’s Note: If you know Sue Schmitz, we would love to hear your stories about her and learn how people who know her feel about this story. Please feel free to make comments in the end, anonymous or otherwise.

February 1 - The morning calm in the small Alabama town of Toney, near Huntsville, was broken at 6:15 Thursday morning when a team of five FBI agents, accompanied by a prison matron, pounded on the door. When the man of the house answered, he was forced into the yard, shirtless in the early morning cold.

They came for his wife, Sue Schmitz, a diminutive, 63-year-old retired social studies and civics teacher who has lived in the town for 38 years. She was dragged out of her bathroom, where she was taking a shower, and handcuffed - breaking her flesh and scraping her wrists as she was hustled off to prison.

Who was this threat to society? Sue Schmitz is a well-respected state legislator who is loved in her community and by her students and is truly legendary for her passion for civics and outreach to the disadvantaged. The dream of her life was to let the fire of civic spirit catch on in communities and among families on the margin of society, where the danger of drug abuse and criminality are the highest. She dedicated her life to it.

She launched a program called “We the People,” designed to build civic spirit and interest in participatory democracy among school children. And Ms. Schmitz’s advocacy of civic engagement led directly to her conflict with U.S. Attorney Alice Martin, who considers it to be a criminal act.

You see, an idea has taken hold in Alabama since George Bush took over the White House and Bob Riley took over the statehouse, that there is something wrong with being an educator and a legislator too. In fact the Riley administration, led to some extent by the Newhouse monopoly press in the state, declared war on having community college employees serve in the legislature and even passed a law banning the practice, never mind the constitutionality of the question.

The Alabama Republican Party is busy revving up its plans for the fall elections, and this incident provides a unique opportunity to see its various limbs moving in perfect concert.

The party’s objective is to take control of the legislature. The party’s leader, Governor Riley, announced that if he can raise $7 million, the party can take control of all three branches of government - by 2010. They already control the state judiciary, including the Supreme Court.

Riley is busy mustering every tool at his disposal to accomplish that goal. That, of course, is all politics as usual – the sort of thing that goes on in states in every corner of the country. But there’s something exceedingly rotten in Alabama. And it’s revealed when we take careful stock of how Governor Riley and his party go about implementing their plans.

First, where do we read about this? On the editorial page of one of the three Newhouse newspapers that have a lock on the state’s print media market, and which operate as the press service of the Republican Party. The Mobile Press-Register, which otherwise publishes fawning pieces about Governor Riley’s cowboy boots and describes Karl Rove as a persecuted genius, now tells us that the G.O.P.’s plan to “take control of the legislature” (their words) is a wonderful idea.

Indeed, it gets the official seal of approval of the paper. You can read this on line at the Press-Register’s website, but why not read it at the website of the Alabama G.O.P.? After all, they are all part of the same operation. Why bother maintaining the pretense of independence?

Here’s the core of their story:

Most Republicans are advocates of reform, perhaps because they’ve been on the outside looking in at a deeply entrenched system. The Democratic Party has controlled the Legislature for more than a century. That kind of political dominance breeds complacency, cynicism and corruption.

Got that? Republicans = reform. Democrats = corrupt. No need to deal with individuals and their record of service. No need in fact to actually explore any political issues, like education or taxation. That would just confuse your poor, tired mind. The labels are all you need to know.

Let’s keep in mind that the state government is in the hands of the G.O.P., and the legislature in theory provides oversight. What happens to the process of oversight when the executive and legislature are in the hands of the same party? I think we all know the answer to that: corruption.

Voters often exercise just the kind of wisdom that the Founding Fathers envisioned by providing for opposing parties to live in an uncomfortable cohabitation. Uncomfortable for the politicians, that is. For those concerned about the hoggishness at the public trough that inevitably accompanies one-party crony rule, it can be the best solution. So when the Press-Register writes about “corruption” and “reform,” just remember that they mean those terms in the Orwellian sense.

The last several years have seen an explosion of no-bid state contracts in Alabama in which cronies of Governor Bob Riley are involved. What happens when newspaper reporters in Montgomery submit stories about these scandals to the three Newhouse newspapers? Alas, I’ve tracked that process, too. The stories don’t run and the reporters get chided.

The Press-Register is absolutely right. There is a culture of “deeply entrenched” corruption in Alabama, and they’re a significant part of it. But for the Press-Register the seat of corruption lies not there, but in the Alabama Education Association, the organization that represents school teachers.

Why? Because the AEA has crusaded for improvements to the state’s secondary education system, and has backed the Democrats, who generally support spending more money on education. You’d think a newspaper would favor reducing the state’s illiteracy rate, but you’d be wrong. After all, this is Alabama.

So the G.O.P.-loyal newspapers lead the charge into the campaign, calling for voter contributions to G.O.P. coffers to fund taking over the legislature. And they also crank out political propaganda for the G.O.P. in the form of stories that pass for news coverage.

At the core of this is the work of the Riley Administration’s court chronicler, Brett Blackledge at the Birmingham News. Blackledge has earned his stripes with a crusade looking into Alabama’s two-year college system, where he is fearlessly rooting out corruption. Funny how everything he writes is perfectly choreographed with Governor Riley’s themes of the week and seems seamlessly joined with criminal investigations conducted by the United States Attorney, about which Blackledge is impeccably well informed. And strange that his investigation of the two-year college system neglects to mention that Governor Riley ran it.

Still all of this pales in comparison with the single most wondrous fact about the Blackledge reportage – only Democrats ever figure in the crosshairs.

Mind you, there’s probably no shortage of corruption in this college system, feather bedding and the like. No shortage of allegations have come to me, Blackledge and the U.S. Attorney’s office concerning corruption. A great many of them involve figures connected to Governor Riley and the G.O.P. But, alas, there doesn’t seem to be enough ink or newsprint to allow Blackledge to write about those cases. Or perhaps there’s another reason. It would be what my politico friends call “off message.”

And today we see the typical pincer movement involving the Alabama Republican Party’s election campaign’s third arm, the U.S. Attorney’s office. Specifically, Alice Martin, the sometime U.S. Attorney, sometime G.O.P. candidate for elective office.

Martin fully understands the benefit to the party and its election efforts of criminal prosecutions being commenced that target elected Democrats, are geared carefully to the election cycle, and are hyped extensively to the party media apparatus. And yesterday, as Sue Schmitz was dramatically dragged from her home in Toney, Alice Martin went before the press with an announcement which will feature prominently in Republican campaign literature for the coming years. She announced an indictment that Blackledge signaled, with his usual perfect clairvoyance in all things prosecutorial, was in the works months back.

Sue Schmitz’s day was dramatically interrupted by her arrest. She had never before had a conflict with the law in any way. And yesterday morning, she had just been preparing to take a group of school kids from underprivileged backgrounds on a tour of the state capital, Montgomery. Here’s how the AP reports the story:

“We charge that Representative Schmitz’s only substantial ‘work’ was to work her official position in the Legislature to land a job through the postsecondary system,” U.S. Attorney Alice Martin said in a statement.

Schmitz was employed from January 2006 until October 2006 by the CITY Skills Training Consortium, an arm of Alabama’s troubled two-year college system. The federally funded program operated at 10 sites statewide to help at-risk youth referred by juvenile courts develop academic, behavioral and social skills. The indictment claims Schmitz made as much as $53,403 annually as a program coordinator despite rarely showing up and doing virtually nothing for the money.

Let’s just pause and look at what’s going on here. A massive federal case has been launched, at a likely taxpayer cost in excess of $2 million, against a social studies teacher, who it is alleged (on the basis of sharply disputed evidence) was not putting in as many hours as she should have in teaching her classes. This has to count as one of the more absurd (if not malicious) cases I’ve seen in recent years.

And remember, this is a Justice Department that can’t spare an FBI agent to look into, or a prosecutor to handle, a gang rape case involving Jamie Leigh Jones, or any of the dozens of other cases involving rape, assault and homicide in Iraq. They’re not “priorities.” On the other hand, bringing charges against Democratic office holders has been a very high priority from the day Bush took office, and it continues to be so today.

More than this, note how party connections flavor the U.S. Attorney’s interest in cases of feather bedding.

Recall that a Missouri criminal attorney conducted a detailed investigation into the service of Mark Everett Fuller as District Attorney in Coffee and Pike Counties. His study, presented in a sworn affidavit and backed up with documentation, showed that Fuller was an absentee district attorney. He drew his salary for the job, but he spent his time out of state, largely in Colorado, attending to the business that he owns and operated and which continues to provide most of his income–Doss Aviation. The affidavit was submitted to the U.S. Attorney and the Justice Department. No investigation of its allegations occurred.

The allegations of “feather bedding” in the case involving this Republican official were many times greater than the one charged against Schmitz. But what happened? Nothing. The U.S. attorney was not interested. As a prosecutor told Time’s Adam Zagorin, different rules apply with respect to the “home team.” Fuller went on to be the judge designated to handle the highest profile political prosecution in the country, involving former Governor Siegelman. Now we’re seeing more evidence of the two distinct flavors of justice dispensed by Republican prosecutors in Alabama: one marked with a “D” and the other with a “R.”

U.S. Attorney Martin seems to have a problem with the truth. She’s currently under investigation for giving perjured testimony in connection with an employment litigation. I lay out the details of the accusations against her, which are quite compelling, here. However, Martin serves at the pleasure of the president, and, as comedian Jon Stewart would say, it clearly pleasures him for her to continue to serve. And it pleasures Karl Rove and the G.O.P. state organizers even more.

“My client is a wonderful, dedicated educator. It’s been her life’s work. These charges are garbage,” said her attorney Buck Watson.

He also noted that he had advised the U.S. Attorney that if they decided to indict his client, she would come in on her own, and he would handle it–an offer spurned in favor of the heavy-handed arrest squad.

“I’ve never seen anything like this before,” he said. “It’s bizarre.”

I spoke with several of Schmitz’s colleagues, who were shocked by the charges. And it’s spreading a message of cold fear in the community. Others with whom I communicated were afraid to have their names appear in print.

“This is a political vendetta. Anyone who objects to what they’re doing will become a target,” one teacher told me.

So why would a federal prosecutor put such tremendous resources into arresting and prosecuting a retired social studies teacher? Schmitz is an irresistible target. She’s a Democratic member of the state legislature. Note how Alice Martin’s loudly trumpeted indictment works in a perfect trifecta:

* The battle plan rolled out to retake the legislature, announcing “corrupt Democrats” as the target.

* The Newhouse papers run the call to arms and funds, and print a sequence of stories designed to make it all credible.

* The U.S. attorney’s office in Birmingham announces the indictment of a “corrupt Democrat” retired school teacher..

And today, as expected we see stories in the Newhouse papers announcing the indictment, with predictably tendentious commentary. All of this is geared at helping smooth the way for a successful prosecution, and more to the point, a successful Republican takeover of the state legislature. It is a pattern that Alabama has witnessed over and again in the past six years.

The charges against Schmitz will of course have to be proved in a court. And whether they are meritorious or not, Schmitz will be put to hundreds of thousands of dollars of legal expense and is having her reputation tarnished, all courtesy of the taxpayers. Whether the charges stand or fall, all of this activity has one clear-cut beneficiary: the Alabama G.O.P. and its plans “to take control of” the state legislature.

Funny, but the ballot box doesn’t figure very prominently in that effort.

Scott Horton is a New York lawyer who writes a blog column at Harpers.org. A slightly different version of this article ran first today on that Website. It is printed here with permission.

Editor’s Note: If you know Sue Schmitz, we would love to hear your stories about her and learn how people who know her feel about this story. Please feel free to make comments below, anonymous or otherwise…

Hmmm, we saw this earlier today and wondered what to make of it. Sounds like a Bush-Rove-Delay move to force every Republican to march in lock-step with the neo-con right, or face all kinds of political and social wrath.

Republican legislative candidates who began qualifying Tuesday had to sign a “first-of-its-kind pledge” to support the choices of the House and Senate Republican caucuses for leadership positions in the new Legislature, according to the Associated Press.
***
Rep. Mike Hubbard, R-Auburn, said he’s unsure if Republicans will pick up the 11 House seats they need to gain a majority in the lower chamber. But even if they don’t, they can have an impact on the next leadership and the next rules by voting as a bloc, he said.

Reminds me of the Wallace days - and a certain reich in a certain European country.

Read the full AP story, before it comes out in Wednesday’s newspapers…