Goodbye to Twinkle Cavanaugh, the regulator who did little regulating

Yahoo

4 days ago

The Alabama State Capitol in Montgomery, Alabama as seen on Feb. 4, 2025. (Brian Lyman/Alabama Reflector)
Twinkle Andress Cavanaugh is a political pioneer of sorts.
In her campaigns for the Alabama Power Rubber Stamp Squad — excuse me, the Public Service Commission — Cavanaugh had one message: Being a conservative Republican is the only qualification for office.
She trumpeted her opposition to abortion rights, even snagging Mike Huckabee to back her up on that. Later on, she campaigned for re-election in part on her opposition to 'socialism and liberal 'woke' ideas.'
What did any of this have to do with the Public Service Commission? Zero. The PSC, at least on paper, regulates utilities. It does not restrict abortion. Or college courses. Cavanaugh could have just as easily campaigned on disappointment in Auburn's 2012 football season. The PSC has as much power over Gene Chizik as women's health.
Once she became a regulator — first as a member and then as president — Cavanaugh proved a doormat for the utilities. She supported the rate stabilization and equalization process. That guarantees Alabama Power a profit and shields it from questions about its decisions. Rates went up with hardly a peep from the commission.
Terry Dunn, a fellow Republican on the PSC, wanted Alabama Power to explain how it charged customers. Cavanaugh signed onto a cosmetic change to the process that did little to shake the status quo.
Or lower your power bill. Alabamians pay some of the highest prices for electricity in the South. Both in our homes and our businesses.
There could be non-mercenary reasons for that. But we can't say for certain. Cavanaugh and her colleagues, ostensibly tasked with protecting the public from high prices, showed no interest in learning why our rates are high, much less confronting power suppliers about them.
The PSC in 2015 trumpeted an Alabama Power rate adjustment that would have saved customers – by the utility's own calculations – one penny a day over a year. Cavanaugh used that opportunity not to call for further reductions, but to bash the federal government.
That was always the real target of her ire. In turning aside a challenge from Dunn in the GOP primary for PSC president in 2016, she lambasted Obama-era regulations aimed at reducing coal emissions and improving public health.
She also prevailed in a general election contest against Democrat Laura Casey in 2020, whose platform included calls to make the rate process more transparent.
In each election, Cavanaugh showed far more interest in attacking national Democratic figures like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez than in making electricity in Alabama affordable.
The PSC's low profile helped her. So did straight-ticket voting. It allows a parakeet with an R next to its name to win an Alabama state office.
But Cavanaugh showed that embracing an extreme form of political peacocking meant one didn't even have to bother with the pretense of using public office to advance the public good.
She loved Trump, jobs and burning coal. She hated abortion, the 'woke agenda' and Democrats. When conservative media turned to new targets, so did she. Her political agenda always seemed to be whatever Fox News happened to be discussing in the moment.
And as it turned out, hating the right things could land you a job that had nothing to do with those things. An electricity regulator could ignore the power bills in mailboxes in Linden, Alabaster or Dothan so long as she shook her finger at a young woman seeking reproductive health care.
These politics of conservative hallucination used to stand out. Now it's common practice.
Sen. Tommy Tuberville, our putative governor-in-waiting, plans to campaign against Joe Biden, who is not on the 2026 ballot. He says he will stand with veterans, which should be news to officers who were up for promotion back in 2023. (Or to 80,000 VA workers who could lose their jobs in August.) He claims that tariffs Trump has imposed will help Alabama farmers, even as China's retaliatory tariffs threaten a major market for them.
And of course, he attacks DEI and 'woke' ideas of inclusiveness and human decency, attacks that are sure to be repeated ad nauseam in the coming year in ads showing Tuberville holding guns, walking into a church, or walking into a church with a gun. GOP primary voters ask for nothing more.
After all, they don't care that Trump has 34 felony convictions. Or that he bungled the COVID response. Or that his tariffs are threatening the economy. He wears his hatred of their perceived enemies like a maroon stovepipe hat. As long as that's visible, they will tolerate all his incompetence and corruption.
Cavanaugh is now going to work for Trump, serving as Alabama's 'director of rural development' in the state. Considering the administration's antipathy toward public investment and infrastructure, I would expect her to do little in the way of developing rural areas.
But she can still talk about how much she dislikes abortion. Because in Alabama politics, performative hatred matters more than accomplishment.
SUPPORT: YOU MAKE OUR WORK POSSIBLE