He voted to kill the money. Then he stood next to the check.

THEN EXPLAIN TERRI SEWELL.

Alabama sends seven members to the United States House.

Robert Aderholt voted yes. Barry Moore voted yes. Gary Palmer voted yes. Mike Rogers voted yes. Dale Strong voted yes. Terri Sewell — a Democrat, from Birmingham — voted yes.

Shomari Figures voted no.

Six Alabamians read that bill and voted to fund it. One voted to stop it. That one now has a press release about the runway.

Terri Sewell is not a conservative and nobody has ever accused her of being one. Every other member of this delegation, both parties, read the same pages and reached the opposite conclusion. If there were something in that package a person of conscience could not swallow, he had a whole state's delegation to find one ally in. He found none.

THEN LOOK AT HOW CLOSE HE CAME TO WINNING

The bill passed 217 to 214.

Three votes.

Twenty-one Republicans voted against it as well, and 193 Democrats. Had two more members gone the way Figures went, H.R. 7148 fails on the floor. The Department of Transportation never gets the appropriation. The FAA has nothing to award. There is no runway grant, no announcement, no thrilled.

Understand what that means. This was not a symbolic protest vote cast safely from the losing side of a lopsided tally. He was three votes from getting exactly what he asked for. If Shomari Figures had had his way that afternoon, Montgomery Regional Airport would have gotten nothing.

He got the outcome he voted against, and then he claimed it.

HE ALSO LEFT SOMETHING OUT

The grant is discretionary. It came through the Airport Improvement Program, run by the Federal Aviation Administration, inside the United States Department of Transportation — a Trump administration agency, under Secretary Sean Duffy.

Somebody in that administration looked at Montgomery and decided Montgomery should get it. It was not owed. It was not automatic. It was chosen.

You would not learn any of that from the announcement. In the announcement the money simply appears, and a congressman is standing beside it.

YESTERDAY WE DESCRIBED THE MACHINE. THIS IS THE MACHINE RUNNING.

Yesterday this brief laid out how a state's authority gets bought rather than taken — a check with conditions attached, handed over often enough that eventually nobody remembers deciding anything locally. We quoted the congressman describing his own job to WSFA in March: leverage the position, bring resources back home.

Here is that theory with a roll call attached to it.

Vote against the appropriation. Wait for the agency to make its award. Announce the award. Let the district understand that money arrives because a man in Washington is well positioned, and not because Alabama sent its own money there in the first place and got a fraction of it back.

None of it is illegal. Not one step. That is precisely the thing worth seeing. This is not corruption; it is the job as he understands it, performed openly and with pride. He is not embarrassed, because under his theory of government there is nothing here to be embarrassed about.

And the arrangement only holds together as long as the money keeps flowing from somewhere else. A congressman whose value is measured in grants announced needs the grant machine to keep growing. The day it stops, so does he.

SEVENTY-FOUR DAYS

Rhett Marques spent twenty-six years running a tire shop in Enterprise and eight years in the Alabama House cutting taxes that Alabamians already paid — the grocery tax cut in half, the tax on diapers and baby supplies ended, taxes on retirement income cut.

That money did not have to be announced. Nobody had to award it. No agency decided whether Montgomery qualified.

It never left in the first place.

On November 3, District 2 decides which of those two things it wants representing it.

Wall of Shame — Today: Coca-Cola United

Today on the Wall of Shame: the Coca-Cola Bottling Co. United (Birmingham) has put $2,000 into Rep. Shomari Figures' campaign account. Figures then voted no on no-tax-on-tips and no-tax-on-overtime for the beverage workers the bottler employs. The Wall of Shame exists for one reason — so that total stops growing. https://take2back.com/wall-of-shame.html