On the afternoon of August 10, 2017, Mike Rogers stood in front of a room of constituents in Oxford, Alabama and took questions. A man named David Land had one about money.

Land walked with a cane. He told the room he'd been injured in Bosnia serving in the U.S. military.

His question was about campaign contributions from Mike Hubbard, the former Speaker of the Alabama House, to the 2010 judicial campaign of Rogers's wife, Beth Rogers, who was elected a Calhoun County district judge that year.

Hubbard had been convicted in June 2016 on 12 felony violations of Alabama's ethics law and sentenced to four years in prison. Beth Rogers's 2010 campaign finance filings, the Anniston Star reported, show $20,000 in contributions from "Friends of Mike Hubbard."

Land warned Rogers that the question was "going to get your hackles up, I assure you," then asked how Rogers could give money to Hubbard, who then gave money to Rogers's wife "to facilitate her election." Land said he had already contacted the state Ethics Commission about it.

Rogers said Hubbard is "one of my closest friends." Then he said this:

"And he gave her money because we're friends ... so you keep my wife out of this and be a man or we'll take it outside."

Several people in the audience applauded.

Land stood up. Others told him to sit down. He took his seat after the Oxford police chief, Bill Partridge, came over and spoke to him.

After the meeting, Land filed a complaint with the Oxford police over what Rogers had said to him.

A sitting congressman offered to fight a constituent for asking a question

Strip away everything else and that's what happened. A voter asked an elected official about a documented $20,000 in campaign money from a man convicted of a dozen ethics felonies, and the official's answer was an invitation to step outside.

Not "that's a fair question." Not "here's the timeline." Not even "no comment." Be a man or we'll take it outside.

The man he said it to uses a cane and was wounded on active duty.

(For what it's worth on the underlying facts: Hubbard's case went through years of appeals. In April 2020 the Alabama Supreme Court upheld six of his convictions and reversed five. He went to prison. The convictions Rogers was being asked about were real.)

The other thing he said that day

Later in the same meeting, Karen Barwick of Pell City asked Rogers a simple question: would he hold more town halls, so he could hear from constituents?

Rogers said he has staff working throughout the district who know what people want and need — and that the argument that he needs to hold town hall meetings to find that out is "laughable."

He then made it true. That August 2017 meeting in Oxford appears to be the last public, in-person town hall Mike Rogers has held.

Nine years of laughable

In April 2025, the group Indivisible Auburn-Opelika organized their own "People's Town Hall" at the Opelika library and invited Rogers. He didn't come.

Committee member Lee McInnis told WRBL, in an account picked up by Raw Story:

"So as far as I can tell, Mike Rogers hasn't held a town hall meeting in eight years."

McInnis added:

"But I think it breaks the basic social contract that our elected representatives have. They were elected to represent the people of the third District of Alabama. If he is not going to meet with a broad spectrum of his constituents, he does not know what his constituents think and he does not know how to represent."

They recorded the town hall anyway and sent a copy to his office.

That was more than a year ago. The count is now nine years.

Rogers is not unusual in this — French Hill has gone a full year with a 90-year-old constituent protesting outside his office every Thursday, and constituents put Scott Franklin's face on a "MISSING" flyer. What's unusual is the reason Rogers gave for stopping. Most of them plead scheduling, or security, or the telephone. Rogers said out loud that hearing from you directly is unnecessary, because his staff already know what you need.

What he's avoided being asked about since

Nine years is a long stretch of American history to skip.

In that time Rogers has become chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, voted for a budget bill the Joint Economic Committee projects will cost 23,506 people in his district their health coverage, and — as chairman — shut down his own committee's inquiry into a military strike that killed two survivors of a shipwreck after eleven days.

There are 36,374 households in Alabama's 3rd District on SNAP — about 12% of the district, including 18,325 households with children. None of them have had a chance to stand up in a room and ask him about the food-assistance cuts he voted for.

His staff, presumably, already know what they need.

Source

Congressman gets earful from constituents at Oxford town hall event — The Anniston Star, August 11, 2017.