The record, on the record
Waggoner's votes, scored from a working-Alabamian lens.
Seven categories. Fifteen floor votes. Every bill number. Every roll call. Every source you can open yourself.
The takeaway
- Six of seven categories grade HURT from a working-family perspective. Education grades MIXED.
- Sen. Waggoner has served in the Alabama Senate since 1990 and currently chairs the Senate Rules Committee — the body that controls which bills reach the floor.
- Every vote below carries a bill number, a chamber outcome, and a primary-source link. If any of it is wrong, email [email protected] and it will be corrected here.
Alabama runs the 12th-most-regressive state-and-local tax system in the country, and Montgomery controls the wage floor, utility governance, and corporate-incentive cap that decide how much of a paycheck a Hoover or Pelham family keeps. Waggoner's votes here are the record of what happens when the local decisions that would give working families room to breathe get overruled from the state capitol.
Preempted Alabama municipalities from setting a minimum wage, paid-leave standard, or other employment floor above state law. Voided Birmingham's $10.10/hour ordinance the same year.
Waggoner: Yea. Passed Senate 23–11.
Locked every Alabama city at the $7.25 federal floor and stripped municipal authority to raise it.
Also scored in Labor →
Raised the Alabama Jobs Act corporate-incentive cap from $375M to $475M per year (rising through 2027) and reauthorized the Growing Alabama Credit.
Waggoner: Yea. Enacted with broad GOP support.
Expanded a program whose "worker-financed" mechanics (e.g., the Bessemer occupational-tax pass-through that flows to Amazon) tax the very workers whose employers get the subsidy.
Restructured the Birmingham Water Works Board into a state-appointee-heavy regional utility ("Central Alabama Water"). Cut Birmingham's board share from six of nine seats to two of seven, transferring appointing authority to the Governor, Lt. Governor, and suburban county commissions.
Waggoner: Co-sponsor. Yea. Senate passed 30–0; House passed 66–27 on party lines. Now under federal challenge in Muhammad v. Waggoner.
Moved a rate-setting body one step further from the ratepayers who elect Birmingham officials, without any assurance that CAW would hold rates.
Also scored in Democracy →
Alabama's floor sees fewer discrete "labor" bills than a bargaining state, because right-to-work is enshrined in the Alabama Constitution and most union questions are preempted federally. That makes the labor-adjacent votes that do reach the floor unusually load-bearing — and Waggoner's have consistently landed against the state's largest membership organizations.
The 2022 AFL-CIO endorsement, addressed: The Alabama AFL-CIO endorsed Sen. Waggoner in the 2022 general election as one of nine Republican incumbents on a mixed slate — an accommodationist state-fed pattern of endorsing rules-committee chairs regardless of floor-vote record. The
2026 AL AFL-CIO endorsement of this campaign, announced August 6, 2026, reversed that pattern.
Repealed the Teacher Tenure Act and Fair Dismissal Act — ending the dismissal-hearing protections that the Alabama Education Association (Alabama's largest public-sector union, ~89K members) had built its representation around. Included here despite the year because AEA still lists this vote as its reference point for AL Senate scoring.
Waggoner: Yea. Passed Senate 18–16 — Waggoner was the eighteenth "yes." The margin.
The single most consequential anti-teacher-union vote in modern Alabama Senate history.
Also scored in Education →
Wage-preemption votes are consistently scored as labor votes by AFL-CIO state feds because local wage-floor ordinances are, in practice, union-driven policy wins (Fight for $15, SEIU-led coalitions).
Waggoner: Yea. Passed Senate 23–11.
Voided Birmingham's union-coalition-backed $10.10/hour ordinance and eliminated the local-ordinance lever unions had been using across the South.
Also scored in Working Families ↑
The Alabama Senate has largely refused to expand Medicaid, and its floor votes on healthcare in the Waggoner era have centered on reproductive access, immunization, and the medical-cannabis program that finally passed after years of blocking. Working families in SD-16 encounter this record every time they navigate a pediatrician's office, an OB-GYN referral, or a school vaccination form.
Criminalized abortion at any stage with no exception for rape or incest. Class A felony for the physician who performs it. This is the statute Alabama's current post-Dobbs ban rests on.
Waggoner: Yea. Passed Senate 25–6.
The "no rape/incest exception" element specifically forecloses the case where working families most consistently name a medical decision that should be left with the family and its physician.
Broadened religious exemptions to K-12 immunization requirements and extended the same exemption framework to public higher-education institutions — widening the pathway to unvaccinated seatmates in shared classrooms.
Waggoner: Yea. Passed Senate 26–5.
Lowered the classroom vaccination floor as Alabama pediatricians are documenting rising vaccine-preventable outbreaks. Hits working families with immune-compromised or medically fragile kids hardest.
Legalized medical cannabis in Alabama through the Alabama Medical Cannabis Commission — the state's first legal medical-cannabis program after years of blocked attempts.
Waggoner: Yea. Passed Senate 20–10.
A cross-pressure "credit where credit is due" call. Provided a legal pain-management option that working families with chronic conditions had been shut out of.
Spencer teaches in Pelham City Schools; this is the category his personal identity most directly speaks to, and the category where Waggoner's record is most mixed. This scorecard reflects that mix honestly.
Streamlined statewide teacher paperwork and reporting burden, aligning it with what AEA and school-district superintendents had asked for through the interim study.
Waggoner: Yea. Passed Senate 27–0.
Reduced non-instructional load on Alabama's ~48K public-school teachers and gave classroom time back to classroom teachers.
Repealed Alabama's Teacher Tenure Act and Fair Dismissal Act — removing the process protections that had governed teacher dismissal, RIFs, and reassignment for decades. Change credited by AEA and by Peabody Journal of Education contributors with accelerating the mid-career departure rate that Alabama school districts have been fighting ever since.
Waggoner: Yea. Passed Senate 18–16 (one-vote margin).
Still felt in every school he represents.
Also scored in Labor ↑
Democracy votes decide who gets to make decisions, and how easy it is for a voter or a locally-elected body to be heard. Waggoner chairs the Senate Rules Committee, which controls which bills reach the floor. That structural power sits behind every vote below.
Provides that county and municipal library boards serve at the pleasure of their appointing authorities — replacing defined terms with at-will removal by the county commission, city council, or town-council body that appointed them.
Waggoner: Yea. Passed Senate 23–7.
Shortens the distance between a book challenge and a board purge; makes the library board a downstream political appointment rather than an independent local body.
Also scored in Free Speech →
Made it a Class B or Class C felony to distribute, order, request, collect, or return a completed absentee ballot for another voter, with narrow exceptions.
Waggoner: Yea. Passed Senate on party lines.
Chills the standard practice of a neighbor, nursing-home volunteer, or church-based civic group helping an elderly or disabled voter get their absentee ballot to the drop box.
Same vote as Working Families #3, scored separately here for the democratic-legitimacy lens. Transferred appointing authority over a Birmingham-serving utility from majority-Birmingham to majority-suburban and state-appointed hands, without a referendum of the customers served. Currently under Contract Clause + Equal Protection challenge in federal court.
Waggoner: Co-sponsor. Yea. Senate 30–0; House 66–27 on party lines.
Same structural pattern as SB10: local governance body reconstituted from Montgomery, without a vote of the people served.
Source: see Working Families §1
Also scored in Working Families ↑
Alabama environmental votes in the Waggoner era have followed a consistent shape: preempt local or state rulemaking, weaken cleanup-fund minimums, and expand extractive-industry lease authority. Working families feel these on their utility bills, at fishing spots and swimming holes, and — when a Superfund-style site is not cleaned up — on their property values.
Bars the Alabama Department of Environmental Management from adopting or enforcing any air- or water-pollution standard stricter than the corresponding federal EPA minimum, unless the Legislature separately authorizes it.
Waggoner: Yea. Passed Senate 27–7.
Hands EPA-floor-only environmental policy to Alabama regardless of local conditions — including the North Birmingham 35th Avenue Superfund neighborhood ADEM has been criticized for underregulating for a decade.
Authorized conversion of oil and gas wells to disposal-well use and expanded lease authority for state trust lands under the State Oil and Gas Board.
Waggoner: Yea.
Expands industry lease authority without corresponding cleanup-bond increases; the same well-plugging orphan-well liability that ratepayers eventually inherit.
Amended the Alabama Drycleaning Environmental Response Trust Fund by cutting the required minimum trust balance from $1M to $250K and weakening ADEM's role in overseeing cleanups.
Waggoner: Yea.
Reduces the guaranteed pool available for perchloroethylene-plume remediation at former dry-cleaner sites, many of which sit adjacent to residential neighborhoods.
Alabama has passed a compact set of high-profile speech-adjacent laws in the last three years — DEI restrictions in public higher education, library-book challenge rules, and cultural-education content restrictions. These land hardest on public-employee educators (a disproportionate share of Alabama's unionized workforce) and on public-facing library staff.
Prohibits Alabama's public colleges, universities, and state agencies from funding a DEI office or program, from teaching "divisive concepts," and requires colleges to enforce restroom use by biological sex.
Waggoner: Named co-sponsor. Yea. Senate passed 22–6 on 2024-02-22.
Restricts what public-university faculty may teach; opens Title VII-adjacent exposure for public employees required to police speech in shared workspaces.
Same vote as Democracy #1, scored separately here for the free-speech / library-worker lens. By making library boards at-will removals, SB10 gives politically-motivated majorities a faster path to purge boards over specific book-collection decisions — the operative pressure point for library-staff free-speech questions.
Waggoner: Yea. Passed Senate 23–7.
Increases the chilling effect on Alabama Library Association members and public-library workers deciding which titles to acquire or shelf-place.
Source: see Democracy §5
Also scored in Democracy ↑
Sources. Every vote here carries a bill number and a roll-call link. Primary sources are LegiScan and the Alabama Legislature (alison.legislature.state.al.us). Secondary sources are Alabama Reflector, Alabama Political Reporter, Alabama Daily News, AL.com, WBHM, and WBRC. If a source seems wrong, email [email protected] and it will be corrected here.
Window. The scorecard focuses on the 2018-2026 legislative cycle where possible, with two exceptions plainly year-labeled: HB174 (2016 local-wage preemption) and SB310 (2011 teacher tenure repeal). Both are still routinely cited by AEA and the Alabama AFL-CIO as reference votes.
Grades. "HURT," "MIXED," and "HELPED" are scoring calls made by this campaign from a working-Alabamian lens. Reasonable people can grade differently; the underlying votes and roll-call outcomes are the fixed facts.
Cross-scored votes. A vote can honestly belong in more than one category (wage preemption is both a Working Families vote and a Labor vote; the Water Works takeover is both a family-utility vote and a democratic-legitimacy vote). Cross-scored votes are marked with a small "also in" tag so the double-count is visible.
What we did not include. Bills that ultimately did not receive a Senate floor vote or that Sen. Waggoner did not vote on. Voice votes without a recorded tally. Any bill on this campaign's hold list.
The record is the record. Now let's change what it looks like.
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