If Tommy Tuberville’s alleged Florida life makes you question his qualifications for Alabama governor, let me offer a few other concerns.
Our senior U.S. senator has called most immigrants “garbage.” He compared city residents to rats. Tuberville said Black Americans “do the crime.” He attacked Muslim Americans in dangerous ways.
There’s also the general unpreparedness he’s brought to the U.S. Senate; his apparent belief that his only constituent is Donald Trump, and the strange influencer vibe that leads him to appear on a vile Sandy Hook denier’s broadcast.
But the residency question is important. For what it says about Tuberville and our state.
We have a (mostly) clear-cut legal issue here. The Alabama Constitution requires candidates for governor to be “resident citizens of this state at least seven years next before the date of their election.”
What “seven years next” means isn’t perfectly clear. But at least one scholar of the state constitution thinks that legal precedent requires gubernatorial candidates to live in Alabama for seven continuous years.
Kyle Whitmire at al.com has laid out the timeline. Tuberville was a loud and proud resident of Florida in 2017, saying in an ad filmed for ESPN that year that Santa Rosa Beach was “a great place to live.”
Tuberville, facing questions about his love of the salt life, has pointed to a homestead exemption his wife and son claimed on Auburn property in October 2018 as proof of Alabama residency. Problem: He voted in Florida in 2018, after the exemption was granted.
Another problem, as The Washington Post reported in 2023: Tuberville appeared to have sold his Alabama properties. Tuberville’s office — and then-Alabama Republican Party chair John Wahl — insisted that he was still living in Auburn. (Tuberville added his name to the Auburn property deed in May 2024).
This is ambiguous evidence, at best. And GOP gubernatorial candidate Ken McFeeters, who has filed a formal complaint with the Alabama Republican Party, says travel receipts filed by Tuberville suggest he’s spending most of his time in the Sunshine State.
The senator could settle the issue by releasing state income tax forms. Alabama has a state income tax; Florida does not. If he’s paid Alabama income taxes since 2018, he has a good case.
Tuberville has not released those forms. Which means we have to rely on two shaky vessels to get to the truth.
One is the Alabama Republican Party. It may pursue McFeeters’ complaint in good faith. It’s unlikely to throw its leading gubernatorial candidate off the ballot. The state party can find any kind of excuse to protect incumbents and preferred candidates from challenges.
That leaves the Alabama courts, where this seems destined to end up. Alabamians should have confidence that our appellate judges will reach a reasonable, objective conclusion after considering evidence, legal precedent and the language of the state Constitution.
Our all-Republican appellate courts give us no reason for that confidence, if recent history is a guide.
In 2013, the Alabama Legislature passed a bill giving school districts the option of securing exemptions from school regulations. In a backroom deal, Republicans rewrote the law into a near-voucher bill — the Alabama Accountability Act — then jammed it through a conference committee and the House and Senate.
A lower court judge found the rewritten bill violated numerous provisions of the Constitution, including a ban on legislation having more than two subjects. The Alabama Supreme Court said: no it didn’t. As Associate Justice Mike Bolin put it, “new matter may be included in an amended bill, so long as that new matter is germane to the general purpose.”
So if legislators ever want to take a bill giving bonuses to math teachers and add sections privatizing Alabama public schools, the Alabama Supreme Court says that’s fine. As long as it has a Republican sponsor, I suppose.
In an earlier Accountability Act suit in 2013, the court proclaimed — again, with Bolin writing — that “The Alabama Constitution does not require the legislature to conduct its meetings in public.” Section 57 of the Alabama Constitution requires the doors of both chambers to be open. Even the Alabama Legislature thought that went too far.
Our justices in 2020 engaged in a tendentious reading of the Open Meetings Act to block the public’s right to know about electricity prices. Justice Jay Mitchell, now a candidate for Alabama attorney general, blew through clear precedents to all but end IVF treatments in the state in 2024. Even the Alabama Legislature thought that went too far.
Elected Republican judges keep showing they care more about GOP priorities than the rule of law. If Republicans need Tuberville on the ballot, it’s likely Republican judges will torture the statutes until Tuberville’s position is secure.
So it’s likely the verdict will be left to voters. And voters should consider how the residency issue speaks to Tuberville’s willingness, or lack thereof, to be honest with the people he wants to govern. Given repeated opportunities to clear up the issue, he has chosen evasion.
And when you couple the silence on that with the senator’s loud contempt for many Alabamians, voters may properly ask who Tuberville plans to serve as governor. Wherever he lives.
- Brian Lyman is the editor of Alabama Reflector. He has covered Alabama politics since 2006, and worked at the Montgomery Advertiser, the Press-Register and The Anniston Star. A 2024 Pulitzer finalist for Commentary, his work has also won awards from the Associated Press Managing Editors, the Alabama Press Association and Robert F. Kennedy Center for Human Rights. He lives in Auburn with his wife, Julie, and their three children. Alabama Reflector is part of States Newsroom, the nation’s largest state-focused nonprofit news organization.
