This is an opinion column.

The truth matters. Those who aren’t truthful before Congress should be punished.

Or at least, that’s what U.S. Sen. Chuck Grassley said earlier this month, when the Senate Judiciary Committee met to approve Alabama Solicitor General Edmund LaCour to the federal bench.

“The rule of law requires truthfulness before Congress and this body’s constitutional oversight role demands it,” Grassley, R-Iowa, said.

In a more truth-centered world, LaCour might have been sweating, but Grasley wasn’t talking about him. Rather, Grassley was talking about former FBI Director James Comey, who had been indicted on perjury charges the day before.

Likewise, other Senators on the Judiciary Committee took turns offering their opinions of the prior day’s events before passing LaCour and four other nominees to the full Senate —

Without any further comments about LaCour’s testimony.

Without any further inquiry into whether LaCour had told the truth when testifying before them weeks earlier.

The truth matters, it seems, except when it doesn’t.

When LaCour testified before the committee in September, Sen. Dick Durbin peppered him with a few tepid questions. Durbin, D-Illinois, asked LaCour about his involvement in Alabama’s fight against a court-ordered congressional redistricting and whether LaCour had helped the state defy the federal courts.

LaCour said the state had not defied the courts.

“When it comes to defiance of court orders, I don’t think any court order has been defied in that case,” LaCour said.

That might be what LaCour thinks, but it doesn’t seem to be what the judges who handled the case thought, said out loud or wrote in subsequent court orders.

Take, for instance, U.S. District Judge Terry Moorer, one of two Trump appointees on the three-judge panel that blistered LaCour in an August 2023 court hearing.

“So, Mr. LaCour, what I hear you saying is the State of Alabama deliberately chose to disregard our instructions to draw two majority-black districts or one where minority candidates could be chosen,” Moorer said then.

LaCour began to mutter something about the Legislature’s position when Moorer bore down harder.

“I am not asking you your position,” Moorer interrupted. “Did they or did they not? Did they disregard it? Did they deliberately disregard it or not?”

At this point in the case, Alabama — with LaCour as its lawyer — had already lost once before this same three-judge panel. The state had already appealed and lost again before the U. S. Supreme Court. It had been ordered to draw a second district where Black voters would stand a chance of electing a candidate of their choosing. Instead — with LaCour’s help — the state drew another map with only one such district.

In the 2023 hearing, LaCour said that following the court’s order and the Constitution was not possible.

Only, it was possible — after the judges appointed a special master who drew the congressional map Alabama uses today.

But the issue here wasn’t whether LaCour had merely represented a stubborn client. Testimony in the case revealed that LaCour had gone further — helping the Legislature to draw its maps and inserting legalistic talking points called “legislative findings” into the legislation.

Before the Senate committee, Durbin asked LaCour about this, too.

Again, LaCour was less than forthcoming.

“There is some evidence that came out during litigation that state lawyers were advising state officials on issues of state law, which is something that the Attorney General’s office in Alabama and in many states do with pending legislation,” LaCour told the Senate committee.

Let’s take that apart one piece at a time.

Some evidence was testimony from the two Alabama lawmakers who chaired the Alabama redistricting committee — state Rep. Chris Pringle, R-Mobile, and state Sen. Steve Livingston, R-Scottsboro.

Pringle testified under oath that LaCour had helped draw the maps.

“He was in the room across from me in reapportionment working on maps,” Pringle testified when asked how he had known LaCour was involved.

Likewise, Livingston testified that LaCour had given them the legislative findings to include in the legislation. Pringle and Livingston said they didn’t know what those legislative findings were for.

But someone else figured it out — the three federal judges handling the case.

Before the Senate committee, LaCour portrayed his involvement as customary and not unusual for the attorney general’s office to do.

But the federal judges didn’t buy it.

Lawyers advising lawmakers might not be unusual, the judges wrote.

“But the last-minute, unsolicited arrival of these legislative findings forecloses any assertion that in real time, as the Legislature drafted its plans, there was anything ordinary or usual about the process,” the three judges said in a court order last May. “Whatever else this sequence of events tells us, it leaves precious little doubt that the Legislature intentionally chose not to satisfy the remedial requirements found in our order.”

In other words, the way the lawmakers adopted LaCour’s talking points made it clear to them that the Legislature had intentionally disregarded its court order.

The judges said they tried to give the state the benefit of the doubt, but LaCour’s “legislative findings” had made that impossible.

“Quite simply, these legislative findings made it impossible to achieve what federal law required,” they wrote in the order. “When a legislature both purposefully refuses to satisfy the remedial requirements unambiguously found in a federal court order and then intentionally takes steps to make them mathematically impossible to satisfy, reality overwhelms the presumption of good faith.”

Good faith, like the truth, used to matter. Only not so much to Congress.

Instead, Alabama’s senators Katie Britt and Tommy Tuberville endorsed LaCour without a hint of hesitation or misgiving. Britt, who serves on the committee, got to voice her support more than once.

“As a fellow native of the Wiregrass, obviously the entire region is proud to see you serve,” Britt said.

Last week, the Senate, in a single vote, approved LaCour’s appointment along with more than 100 others. It was a Republican procedural bypass around stubborn Democrats who wanted to consider appointments the old-fashioned, slow and boring way.

Let’s be clear. Alabama attempted to dilute the voting strength of Black citizens. When federal courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court, ordered the state to knock it off, Alabama kept at it anyway. It did so in an attempt to gut what was left of the Voting Rights Act — a law passed in reaction to Alabama’s historic mistreatment of Black voters. And one of the architects of that plan to gut that law was LaCour, who at best misrepresented the facts of that case to a politically pliant committee.

And now that man is going to be a federal judge.

He’s going to be a judge because those men and women on that committee — which includes Britt — don’t care about the truth.

Heck, they don’t even care about being lied to.

Just ask Judge LaCour. ,

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