RAINBOW CITY — In the era of transgender athletes, abortion-on-demand and vaccine mandates, Alabama Attorney General chief counsel Katherine Robertson believes state sovereignty is more important now than ever, no matter who's running Washington, D.C.
On Saturday, Robertson spoke at a breakfast meeting with members of the Etowah County Republican Club in Rainbow City, explaining how the Attorney General's Office works as the "last line of defense" against federal overreach. She said that despite the AG's best efforts, sometimes their hands are tied when the state accepts federal funding.
In 2016, when she was the vice president of the Alabama Policy Institute, Robertson wrote an in-depth report on how Alabama was "selling our sovereignty" in exchange for federal funding. She said that too often, those funds come with strings attached to policies and ideas that do not align with conservative values.
"Alabama's a poor state. We bring in a lot of federal money. What if Washington figures out how addicted we are to federal money and starts tying strings to it that we can't go along with?" she said about why she wrote the report. "Back then, that was way before we knew anything about where all this was heading, the boy, girl stuff, and all that. But I said, you know, Obama's flirting with this idea of these gender-neutral bathrooms and public schools. What if they really leaned in on that and started trying to tie our federal money to that? I wrote that in 2016; do we have a plan? Well, they did lean in, and we didn't have a plan."
She said the "reprieve" experienced under President Donald Trump's first term was short-lived once former President Joe Biden took office. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Alabama, like many states, received a significant amount of federal relief funds. The catch — no raising taxes for three years.
"Alabama needed it. The economy was down, but you can't lower taxes for three years? So we sued. We ultimately won that case, but that was the first condition. Then came the vaccine mandates," she said. "... We've got laws on the book saying you can't do this, but then they've got these massive Federal contracts and federal grants that are saying they can. How is this going to shake out?"
With great effort, Robertson said the AG's office won three of the four lawsuits brought to protect Alabama workers and that not one state employee lost their job due to the federal vaccine mandate.
However, after the pandemic came Biden's attacks on public schools through Title IX.
"How can the federal government tell Alabama public schools what to do? Money. They don't have any direct control over our schools, but they give us a lot of money that we live off of," she said. "We were in federal court in Birmingham three weeks before the school year started in August, trying to make sure we could have separate bathrooms. I mean, it was crazy. Ultimately, we got in an injunction."
She continued, "That's something that has always worried me a little bit about our state. It's not that we should or even could turn down all the federal money, but you got to have a plan because when you're three weeks away from the start of the school year, and you got one little lawsuit standing between you and totally remaking the school, that's not a good — I'm very confident in our team — but that's not a great plan. Your last line of defense can't be your only line of defense."
During the breakfast meeting, when State Rep. Mack Butler (R-Rainbow City) asked about the Alabama Department of Public Health's ubiquitous ads for COVID vaccines, Robertson said that was likely another example of federal money influencing a state agency.
"There are some obvious dangers, as I've already outlined, of state agencies being sort of run by the federal government. That wasn't what the 10th Amendment had in mind or what the founders had in mind. I'm not trying to be naive to the fact that if the federal dollars were to go away overnight, I mean, we'd have some very serious problems. You just have a plan for that. And, we don't have a substitute for it right now, but well, when you do take those. They can tell you to do whatever they want, rarely what you want."
Robertson praised Trump's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) efforts to cut waste and shrink the federal government, saying they could help states get off the government dole.
"One thing I think is great about what they're doing with DOGE and all this is, I think somewhere down the line, if they can keep on this track, they're going to realize that even though Trump's going to use these tools for good, the next guy may not," she said. "So I think the more they try to shrink the size of the federal government, hopefully, we'll go back to a model or start talking again about a model of more block grant funding or ways to give the states control… If we could find a way to cut these strings that are, you know, making us beholden to the federal government in so many ways, we will be better prepared for the next antagonistic administration."
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