“I told the judge right to his face we didn’t like to see this place. We’re in the jailhouse now.” – traditional song adapted by Jimmie Rodgers

For me the most interesting part of studying government is when there is conflict among the branches of government.

We are seeing it on a large scale with President Donald Trump testing how far and quickly he can push his policies forward despite some federal court rulings saying he may be overstepping his authority.

Even a Republican-led Congress has seriously considered limiting Trump’s ability to impose broad tariffs without its approval.

We can also find conflict on a smaller scale in our own state government. A bill has passed the Alabama Senate and is now under consideration by the House of Representatives that would remake how the Alabama Pardons and Paroles Board is chosen in the future.

Most of the following background on this issue comes from AL.com’s extensive reporting efforts on the Board.

The germination of this bill might be traced back to 2018 when Jimmy O’Neal Spencer, who had been in and out of prison for most of his adult life, was charged with the murder of three people in Guntersville, one of whom was a 7-year-old boy, while Spencer was out on parole.

The furor surrounding the Spencer case led Gov. Kay Ivey to appoint Leigh Gwathney, a former Alabama assistant attorney general, as the chairwoman of the three-person state parole board the following year.

Alabama’s parole rate for eligible prisoners dropped precipitously beginning in 2019 – Gwathney’s first year – and continued to drop until it bottomed out in 2023 at 8 percent. The year before Gwathney’s appointment it was just above 50 percent. The rate has risen back to around 20 percent since 2023.

Gwathney’s tough stance soon began to run afoul of some of the most prominent legal figures in the state. Former chief justices of the Alabama Supreme Court Sue Bell Cobb and Roy Moore have both been critical of Gwathney’s tough approach to granting parole.

Beyond the issue of who may or may not be deserving of parole, Alabama’s prison system faces the additional problem of managing an overcrowded and understaffed prison system especially when parole rates dropped as far as they did.

The criticism against Gwathney and the Board has only grown in the years since her appointment. In the last year, those critics have included the Republican and Democratic leaders of the Legislature’s joint committee on prison oversight – Sen. Clyde Chambliss, R-Prattville, and Rep. Chris England, D-Tuscaloosa.

At a hearing last October, both men expressed frustration with the Pardons and Paroles Board for what they believe to be a lack of response for information requested by the legislative committee and failures by the Board to follow its own policies concerning parole.

However, a week after the hearing Ivey was quoted as saying she had not “been focused on replacing” Gwathney when her term expires in June. This may have led to the introduction of the bill currently under consideration, sponsored by Chambliss, that would make several changes to the Pardons and Paroles Board.

A few of these changes include expanding the board’s membership from three to five, requiring Senate approval of any appointment to the board and allowing the board to choose its chairperson instead of the governor deciding that.

While Ivey may not like losing some control over the appointment process of the board, the bill provides some more effective checks and balances for the appointment process by requiring the Senate to act in order for an appointment to the board to go through.

There has been a concerning tendency in recent decades for legislative branches in both the federal government and in many state governments to cede some of its power to the executive branch.

This is because tasks like confirming appointments and monitoring the performance of agencies can be time-consuming, are often unnoticed by the public, and can occasionally become tricky depending on the political conditions of the time.

Nevertheless, part of the legislature’s job is to serve as a check against the executive branch from abusing its authority. Maintaining a representative democracy and managing the legislative process are often messy, but this is what you sign up for to serve in Congress or in a state legislature.

As Congress may find out if Trump follows through on tariffs and the public sours on the idea, it is difficult to pull back some of the powers you delegate. That should also be a lesson for all state legislatures.