Keep Your Hands To Yourself!!

Rep. Duwayne Bridges, R-Valley, informed Rep. Randy Hinshaw, D-Meridianville, and any other member of the House who is thinking of voting for him without his permission to keep their hands to themselves.

Bridges formally registered his dissent on a bill that would remove the state-portion of the sales tax on food (HB274) into the Journal of the House.

"Let the Journal record that I did not vote in favor of HB274 and that I remain personally opposed to the measure," he wrote in a letter to the clerk of the House. "Let it further lodge my official complaint that my machine was voted contrary to my position by a member of the opposite party without permission or authority and at a time when it should have been locked and protected from abuse."

Hinshaw has admitted that when the final vote came, he voted for absent members which caused the bill to pass with the 63 votes necessary to pass the measure.

Bridges was on a job recruitment mission to Korea and China on that day, and he said if he had been here he would not have voted for the measure.

Bridges wrote in his letter that House Minority Leader Mike Hubbard, R-Auburn, had made the motion that his machine and the machines of other absent House members be locked for the remainder of the meeting day.

When House Rule 32 (requires members to vote their own machines) was invoked and then rescinded by Rep. Jack Williams, R-Birmingham, that should not have affected Hubbard's motion, he said.

"If I asked someone to vote my machine and they did, I thank you for that," Bridges said from the House floor Tuesday. "But when someone from another party votes for me while I'm gone--I find that wrong and I think it's wrong for someone to do that.

Bridges said at first he believed that the leadership in the House orchestrated the move, but now he believes that Hinshaw was simply being sneaky.

"I never authorized that gentleman to vote my machine," he said. "Unless I ask you to vote my machine, keep your hands off of it, and to that individual--don't you ever touch my machine again."

Whether Bridges' complaint is too little, too late remains to be seen.

The Senate Finance and Taxation Committee on Education voted Tuesday to give HB274 a favorable report, which means that it could go to the full Senate as early as this week.