What are friends for? Not this …
Now-former Alabama House Speaker Mike Hubbard, in the time-dishonored tradition of political crooks who get busted, maintains this was persecution, not prosecution.
The preponderance of evidence, and the verdict of a jury in Lee County, said otherwise.
Late Friday night, Hubbard was found guilty on 12 of 23 felony corruption charges and removed from office. Now free on $160,000 bail, he is scheduled to be sentenced on July 8.
This is a man who rose to political power largely on the promise to reform a statehouse led for more than a century by Democrats who, he wrote in an op-ed, had created a culture of “corruption, crime and cronyism at the highest levels of state government."
Hubbard was right about entrenched corruption. But he didn’t reform it. He refined it.
As House speaker, Hubbard became arguably the most powerful single political figure in Alabama. And as his trial revealed in contemptible detail, he used that power to do favors for his “friends,” who repaid his “friendship” generously.
Like “Yella Wood” mogul Jimmy Rane, who got his friend to shift state money to Marion Military Institute, which Rane had attended; and who later invested $150,000 in Hubbard’s printing business.
Like Business Council of Alabama director Billy Canary, who helped Hubbard in his first run for office — and who, after Hubbard became speaker, helped Hubbard set the legislative agenda. (Emails from Hubbard introduced at trial included unveiled threats that unless more money came in, those meetings would stop.)
This was the recurring theme throughout the Hubbard trial. It wasn’t even about power for the sake of advancing a political agenda — at least not Hubbard’s agenda. This was about the tawdriest of political ends — money. From start to finish, it was all about the money.
State GOP Chair Terry Lathan said in a statement that the party is “deeply disappointed one of our leaders abused the trust placed in him, and grateful that the rule of law has prevailed.”
That might sound more credible if the House — Republicans and Democrats alike — hadn’t reelected Hubbard speaker in 2014 … after his indictment.
Hubbard’s sordid career is proof of the very contention with which he began it — that corruption has for decades been entrenched in Alabama politics. Changing parties hasn’t changed anything but the names on the office doors, and in many cases not even those.
Blogger Kyle Whitmire of al.com wrote of a press conference in which lawmakers rallied around the embattled speaker:
“Congressman Mike Rogers not only stood by Hubbard in that press conference,” Whitmire wrote, “but he took the microphone to blast prosecutors for ‘Chicago-style gutter politics’ because when Alabama politicians don't have anything meaningful to say, they try to bring it back to Obama.
“This wasn't Chicago-style politics. This was Alabama-style politics, and nobody was as good at it as Mike Hubbard.”
Mike Hubbard is a rightly convicted criminal. If his sentence doesn’t reflect that, there is no hope anything in Alabama will change. None.
This story was originally published June 14, 2016 at 4:42 PM with the headline "What are friends for? Not this …."