Senate President Pro Tempore Garlan Gudger, R-Cullman, adjusts his glasses at a lectern in the Alabama Senate on May 6, 2025 at the Alabama Statehouse in Montgomery, Alabama. Gudger claimed after a bill ending PSC elections was withdrawn that financier George Soros had helped elect Democrats to Georgia's Public Service Commission. (Brian Lyman/Alabama Reflector)
There’s a saying astronomers use when we get reports hinting at that ever-elusive first contact or close encounter.
It’s never aliens.
In other words, don’t get ahead of the evidence. You say there could be life in the Venusian clouds or massive constructions around a faraway star? Amazing, if true. But don’t dismiss that “if.” Mundane explanations are common; exciting ones are rare.
And in both those cases, the less-dramatic answers prevailed. The scope of the universe is long, and it tends toward banality.
Alabama politics are often metaphysical, but rarely cosmic, even if we tend to crater on measures of well-being. Still, our Republican legislators could take a few lessons from the stargazers. Particularly after some of the wild statements they’ve made about our power bills.
If you’re one of Alabama Reflector’s many carbon-based readers, you know that January and February were pretty cold in the state. This meant more power usage. Which meant high power bills. And mounting anger over Alabama’s electricity costs, among the highest in the South.
In Georgia, where power rates aren’t quite as high as ours, frustration over utility bills helped elect two Democrats to the Georgia Public Service Commission last year. Alabama politicians saw the problem and leaped into action. They introduced legislation to end Public Service Commission elections and silence the voice of the public. Problem solved.
The bill was later withdrawn amid outrage — Alabamians do not like politicians canceling elections — but Senate President Pro Tem Garlan Gudger, R-Cullman, made a kind-of/sort-of defense of the idea behind the legislation, even as he proclaimed it dead.
“After environmental extremists funded by the most liberal Soros groups captured the Public Service Commission in Georgia, the importance of preventing the same outcome from happening in Alabama became an urgency,” he said in a statement.
That Soros would be George Soros, the billionaire financier who Republicans blame for every setback. As far as I can tell, there is no evidence that Soros or Soros-related groups contributed to the two Democrats now on the Georgia Public Service Commission.
It’s notable that in Gudger’s mind, Democrats winning an election proves democracy is unworkable. To be sure, we can’t say how deep these feelings run, or how much the thought of George Soros fills him with terror. Invoking the financier’s name at this point is a conservative tic, like using the phrases “Democrat Party” or “liberal media.”
But it seems someone wrote a script about Soros (titled “Gaslight,” I presume) and passed it around the GOP caucus to justify the PSC power grab. Because a few weeks earlier, Rep. Chip Brown, R-Hollinger’s Island, the sponsor of the bill, also named the financier when attacking Energy Alabama Director Daniel Tait, a critic of the legislation.
Conservatives often use information, like money or political standing, as a cudgel to beat their enemies. The truth of the matter is less important than how much damage it can do to the opposite side. So I’m not surprised that they’re throwing around these Soros theories without appearing to give them much thought.
There’s a simpler explanation for our high electricity bills. That’s a 40-year-old process that guarantees utilities a profit and shields their rate-setting decisions from public scrutiny. And if state politicians want to look for powerful entities working the system, Alabama provides many examples.
Like the mysterious, coordinated attacks on PSC Commissioner Terry Dunn in 2013 and 2014 after he called for formal rate hearings for state utilities. Or the roughly $4.2 million Alabama Power appears to have routed to several vaguely-named political action committees ahead of the 2022 midterm elections. Or an Alabama Power lobbyist seeking a nonprofit’s support for ending PSC elections.
But that would require our politicians to confront power. Which can be inconvenient. Far easier to come up with some nonsense about an outsider doing the damage. Rep. Mack Butler, R-Rainbow City, has introduced a bill to open up the rate process. But with the legislative session coming to a close, it faces an uphill fight.
Besides, actually facing the issue would challenge the delusion central to so many Alabama political careers: That the state is a perfect and well-tended garden where everyone knows their place. Strife only erupts when an outsider kicks mud around or rudely notes all the weeds choking the flowers.
But we know who let the weeds grow. We know who’s let Alabama’s power bills soar without proper oversight or advocacy for the households shouldering the burden. It wasn’t Soros. It was leadership in Montgomery that allowed a harmful system to thrive, either because the system or the silence around it served them well.
There’s no foreign conspiracy. No cosmic explanations are necessary. It’s never aliens. It’s never outsiders. Alabama’s problems are always our own.
From Alabama Reflector Post Url: Visit
Author: Brian Lyman