MONTGOMERY, Ala. – A judge convened lawyers for both sides Monday for a hearing on the latest challenge to U.S. Sen. Tommy Tuberville’s residency as he seeks the governor’s office as the Republican nominee.
Monday’s hearing was the first public discussion of the challenge filed by two Alabama residents earlier this month. The plaintiffs, who are military veterans, allege that Tuberville has not resided in Alabama for the last seven years, making him constitutionally ineligible to hold the office of governor.
The nearly two-and-a-half-hour hearing had a narrow focus and centered around Tuberville’s motion to dismiss the case. His team argues that the court doesn’t have jurisdiction to decide the case at hand and that to do so would constitute the judicial system improperly intruding into elections.
Montgomery County Circuit Court Judge Brooke Reid weighed whether the court is the right place to hear the remaining quo warranto claim, which is typically reserved for already-elected public officials. Both sides mentioned several election contests and quo warranto cases found in Alabama case law, but both parties and the judge agreed that there’s no perfect match to Tuberville’s case.
The two sides are now awaiting a decision from Reid on whether or not she will dismiss the case. Either side has the right to appeal Reid’s ruling about the motion to dismiss immediately, which would fast-track the appeals process.
The plaintiffs’ attorneys argued that though they haven’t found a case in which the courts applied quo warranto to a nominee for political office, they also haven’t found a case where a judge ruled that to do so would be out of line.
Their lawyers also argued that there’s no legal precedent for the case because a similar situation has never happened.
“We’ve certainly never had somebody try to run for governor who didn’t live in the state of Alabama, so that is absolutely true,” attorney Barry Ragsdale said.
Alabama Daily News reported last year that the Auburn home Tuberville claims as his primary residence has had a homestead exemption applied to it since 2018.
The Tubervilles own two properties in Walton County on the Florida Panhandle, according to records from the county appraiser’s office. Neither property has had a homestead exemption filed by Tuberville in the last seven years. Homeowners can only claim one homestead tax exemption.
The Alabama Constitution of 1910 mandates that the governor be a citizen of Alabama for “at least seven years next before the date of their election.”
Ragsdale held that it should be up to the courts, not the Legislature, to rule on whether Tuberville meets the requirements for governor established in the Alabama Constitution.
The defense, on the contrary, argued on Monday that it should be left up to the voters in the general election or the Legislature after the general election.
Tuberville’s attorney, Joe Espy, said that the challenge to Tuberville’s residency is well known and that Alabamians overwhelmingly voted for him anyway.
“Now they don’t want to accept the voice of the people. We do,” Espy said. “We want to accept the voice of the people and want to follow the Constitution of Alabama. It’s just as simple as that, and they don’t want to.”
The defense repeatedly argued that the Alabama Constitution gives the state’s political parties, not the courts, the power to decide their own nominees. They also said that the lack of relevant case law means the courts shouldn’t be involved in the residency challenge.
Tuberville attorney Bert Jordan called the matter “fundamentally non-judicial” during the hearing. He said that the Constitution and state statutes about election contests intentionally exclude the judiciary.
“It is constitutional that you have no power,” Jordan said to Reid during the hearing.
The defense also argued that Tuberville’s landslide win in the May 19 primary and the Alabama Republican Party’s subsequent dismissal of a post-primary challenge from opponent Ken McFeeters should put the matter to rest.
They contended that the only legally-appropriate route forward would be to file a quo warranto claim after the general election, which the Legislature would decide after a court-like hearing.
The plaintiffs’ attorneys strongly disagreed with this notion and maintained that a quo warranto motion before the general election is appropriate because Tuberville, as a major party’s nominee, is a quasi-public official. Ragsdale said during the hearing that the Alabama Constitution “supersedes popular will.”
“This is a typical question that courts decide all the time, and we believe the courts and the judiciary are who should pass on whether or not the Constitution has been violated,” Ragsdale told reporters after the hearing. “As I said to the judge, we don’t vote on whether people get constitutional rights here, and that’s what they’re basically saying, that as long as Senator Tuberville gets enough votes in the general election, the Constitution doesn’t matter, and we don’t believe that’s true.”
Ragsdale said he believes that this case will ultimately be decided by the Alabama Supreme Court.
Most of the hearing was lawyerly talk, with both sides engaging in lengthy explanations of past cases and detailed ruminations about the role of the state’s Constitution in election contests.
Asking many questions of both sides, Reid, who was appointed to the bench by Gov. Kay Ivey in 2019 and later ran for the bench as a Democrat, admitted that the existing case law does not paint a clear picture of what the correct answer is. She said that she is doing her best to thoughtfully explore all of the cases brought up by both parties. She added that she will make her decision as quickly as possible given the time-sensitive nature of the trial.
The plaintiffs’ initial complaint listed Secretary of State Wes Allen as a defendant, as well as Tuberville, but they agreed to remove Allen from the case after legal action over the weekend.
In a motion to dismiss filed by Allen when he was still a defendant, the secretary of state asked the court to dismiss the case quickly so that the proceedings would not interfere with “time-sensitive preparations” for the general election. The law mandates that the secretary of state certify the list of candidates with probate judges statewide 69 days before the election so that counties can start printing ballots.
For the upcoming November election, the certification deadline falls on Aug. 26.
Barring a change, Tuberville will face Democrat and former U.S. Sen. Doug Jones in the general election on Nov. 3. The match-up is a repeat of the 2020 election that first sent Tuberville to Washington.
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