Late on Friday afternoon, Jack Sharman, the special counsel hired by Alabama’s state House Judiciary Committee to oversee its probe of GOP Gov. Robert Bentley, released his long-awaited report of the governor, and … Bentley looks doomed. The report says that Bentley, whose 50-year marriage came to a shocking end in 2015, used state law enforcement officers to try and cover up an affair with a top aide, Rebekah Mason. It also says that Bentley tried to charge people who had recordings of his explicit conversations with Mason with crimes. Yet just before the report was dropped, the governor once again insisted that he would not resign.
Both chambers of the legislature are dominated by Republicans, but few members of Bentley’s party seem to want him to stick around. On Thursday, state Senate leader Del Marsh urged Bentley to resign, and state House Speaker Mac McCutcheon echoed that call a day later. But Bentley has remained defiant ever since tapes of his conversations with Mason leaked a year ago, and it looks as though he’s going to need to be forced out.
In Alabama, 60 percent of the state House must vote to consider impeaching a governor, though it only takes a simple majority to actually impeach. If the chamber does impeach Bentley, his powers would pass to Lt. Gov. Kay Ivey, a fellow Republican and a potential 2018 candidate to succeed him. If the state Senate convicts him, then Ivey would become governor in her own right. The only way out would be an acquittal by the Senate, but if Marsh’s comments are any indication, that’s not at outcome Bentley should waste much time hoping for.