This is an opinion column.

What you heard last week — actually what you probably heard nothing about, if it went as planned -- were the creaking, rattling ghosts of the Alabama’s past, and present, and future.

Merry Christmas, y’all.

Ebenezer Scrooge ain’t got nothing on your Alabama Supreme Court: Let the fight against corruption die, and increase the surplus … impunity of the powerful.

The court appointed Sonny Reagan as a member of the Standing Committee on the Rules of Conduct and Canons of Judicial Ethics, as reported by the Southeast Sun in Reagan’s neck of the woods. It was a statement about what ethics means these days, and what it will mean in the future.

Because there was no ghost of a mention of a past in which Reagan, while working as an assistant attorney general, was told he would be fired – if he did not quit first -- for leaking information to lawyers representing former House Speaker Mike Hubbard and other public officials who were the subject of investigations. So he quit.

"Deputy Attorney General Henry T. ("Sonny") Reagan, for a period of months, had undisclosed communications with individuals affiliated with people indicted or under investigation by the Lee County Special Grand Jury," Acting AG Van Davis wrote back then. "Reagan also took other action to impede or obstruct the investigation."

Then-AG Luther Strange, who had recused himself from the Hubbard investigation, wrote that "Reagan's conduct fell far short of the high standard of honesty, integrity, and professionalism that the people of the State of Alabama have a right to expect of employees of this office."

So the Alabama Supreme Court, hiding behind robes bought by Big Mules and powerful people hoping to protect themselves from the teeth of the once-proud Alabama Ethics Law, put him on a three-person committee as an arbiter of good conduct and ethics.

God bless us, every one.

It is a statement by this court, saying Alabama will look at its ethics law in a new way, which is a lot like the old way, when Democrats ruled the state to protect themselves. Which is to say it is no way at all.

These new GOP justices are as much the scoundrels as their Democratic forebears, nothing more than political animals who for votes will display no mercy for the common man but will move heaven and hell to protect their own kind.

It is just like the past. It is a sign of the future.

Mike Hubbard, of course, was convicted by a Lee County jury and sentenced to four years in prison in 2016. He has been out ever since, his appeal lingering before this Alabama Supreme Court.

Sonny Reagan testified in a pre-trial hearing for Hubbard’s defense, telling how prosecutors in the AG’s office really wanted to convict Hubbard, and said so in the office in no uncertain terms.

Reagan did not sway the judge. And no witnesses would sway the jury, either. Because jurors saw the same evidence those prosecutors saw and apparently felt as strongly about convicting him. It saw emails from Hubbard as he tried to use his office for profit, including one in which Hubbard lamented to former Gov. Bob Riley that they never should have passed a tough ethics law in the first place.

“Who proposed those things?!” he wrote. “What were we thinking?”

Which is exactly what the Supreme Court is thinking now.

It will demean this ethics law. It will try to cast doubt on the law and the prosecution of Hubbard. It will let him go or slash his sentence, and Alabama will look out the window and ask what day it is.

The same as it has always been.

John Archibald, a Pulitzer Prize winner, is a columnist for AL.com. His column appears in The Birmingham News, the Huntsville Times, the Mobile Register, and of course Birmingham Magazine. Write him at jarchibald@al.com.