Legislative session ends with debate over police immunity bill

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The Alabama legislative session wrapped up this week, but not before some contentious debate in the final hours on Wednesday night. The bill at hand was one that would expand legal immunity to police officers under certain circumstances. It ultimately passed and was signed into law by Gov. Kay Ivey on Thursday. That’s where we start our final legislative update of the session with Todd Stacy, host of Capitol Journal on Alabama Public Television. He spoke with WBHM’s Andrew Yeager.

This interview was edited for length and clarity.

We’ve talked about this police immunity bill throughout the session. You even predicted that it would generate a lot of debate on the last day of the session. What ended up happening in the final hours?

They went all the way up to midnight and the police immunity [bill], that was a big part of it. There were other issues but everybody knew that was the only statewide legislation that was going to be able to pass. The Senate debated for really all of eleven hours because they went in at one o’clock. But at the end of the day Republicans had the votes. It was only a matter of timing. The Democrats could filibuster and filibuster and as long as the Republicans wanted them to at least have their say and feel like they’re not being dismissed or anything.

This was a Republican priority. They were going to pass this bill. They passed it around 10:30 which gave it plenty of time to go back downstairs to the House which concurred and that was the end of the session.

Also, Gov. Kay Ivey signed a bill into law Wednesday that would put new limits on consumable hemp-derived products, things such as gummies and drinks. And while it passed the legislature fairly comfortably, there was a lot of lobbying from multiple sides around this bill. Tell us about that.

That’s right. I mean, you would think something like this makes common sense because it is an unregulated industry, right? They passed a hemp bill years ago that was really just meant for like rope and clothes and things like that. But because of some loopholes, people have been able to sell, basically, delta-8 products, THC products. There are drinks, as you mentioned, gummies, which is just kind of unregulated marijuana industry. So this bill sought to regulate that, not completely make it make it illegal. It puts some guardrails on it

The the hemp industry itself, which is making a lot of money off of these products, they didn’t like it. So they pushed back pretty hard. But also from the conservative side, the Alabama Policy Institute, called for Governor Ivey to veto the bill because they said it didn’t go far enough. They said that the state should just have an outright ban on these products, which again, it’s not. It’s truly just making making it regulated. Making it 21 and up. And taking some of the less scrupulous products off the shelf.

Well, one lighthearted tradition is called the Shroud Award. This is for the deadest bill of the session. What won the Shroud Award this year?

It’s a fun tradition. You’re kind of poking fun at your colleagues, the bill that died the worst. And that was a bill from State Representative Ron Bolton, which would change the regulations around car seats. Car seats for kids. That was going nowhere because it really got into the nitty-gritty details that nobody wanted to talk about.

But I will predict this bill, or at least some iteration of it, will come back because this actually is an issue. There’s been a report, a couple of reports, linking car seats and all the different regulations with car seats to a decline in birth rates because parents don’t drive vehicles with enough car seats in them so they stop having kids. So this is actually an interesting issue and sometimes a bill that wins the Shroud Award one year will come back another year and pass. A great example of that was Free the Hops years ago, if you remember that.

That was the bill that had to do with the percent of alcohol and beer. Well, you’ve covered a number of legislative sessions now. What sticks out to you about this particular one?

It’s been a slog. It always kind of is. There was a lot of filibustering, a lot of delay in the Senate. That was kind of the signature issue of the session of how long it took to pass even local bills. And so I think one takeaway from this session is you’re probably going to see some rules changes in the Senate. Everybody I think appreciates the filibuster. I don’t think anybody wants to get rid of the filibuster. That is a Senate tradition.

But the Democrats this year started using it on local bills, and that’s been a change. That’s not usually done. Local bills are non-controversial bills that kind of crop up from the county commissions or the city councils. We don’t have much home rule in Alabama, so even local things that aren’t controversial still have to go through the legislature. And so, when the Democrats started filibustering those bills and slowing down whole days, that really rubbed people the wrong way and caused the legislature to be unproductive. I think you’re going to see some kind of rule change either next year. Or after the next term, you know, the next quadrennium, limiting debate on just on local legislation while preserving the filibuster for statewide legislation.