Like the 'Kansas experiment,' Alabama is currently enacting one-party politics.
By Kyle Swenson Kyle Swenson Reporter for Morning Mix Email Bio Follow May 16 at 6:38 AM With a quick scribble of her pen Wednesday afternoon, Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey essentially made abortion in her state illegal in all circumstances, with zero exceptions for rape or incest. Doctors who perform the procedure face a penalty of up to 99 years in prison.
From guns in schools to gay rights to the death penalty to Confederate monuments, the governor has signed laws from the conservative movement’s wish list, turning the Alabama into a test kitchen for an unopposed GOP agenda. The track record has turned Ivey, a quiet veteran of state politics who eschews the carnival barker-antics that typically land governors in the national spotlight, into a front-line figure in the culture war.
The “real-live experiment,” as Brownback called it at the time, was actually one-party politics at work, a moment when a single agenda could be enacted with no opposition. But rather than jump-start the state’s economy as intended, the cuts caused deficits to explode and growth to stall. By 2017, the legislature had dialed back many of the measures, and the political fallout cost the Kansas GOP in last year’s midterm elections, including a loss in the gubernatorial race to Democrat Laura Kelly.
“She’s not a pushover,” a childhood friend told the Advertiser in April 2017. “She’s a Christian and a lady, but she’s not soft. People better be on their toes with her.”“I did it with thanksgiving and also the recognition that this is not my administration,” Ivey said after she was sworn in. “This is the people’s administration, and it is my job to provide them with honesty, openness and transparency.
That same month, Ivey signed legislation that allowed faith-based adoption organizations to refuse to place children with gay parents, according to the Associated Press. Critics blasted the measure as discriminatory. “You say we are protecting history,” Democratic state Sen. Hank Sanders of Selma, an opponent of the bill, said at the time. “We are not protecting history. We are protecting monuments that represent oppression to a large part of the people in the state of Alabama.”
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