Unfit for the Alabama bench...or the U.S. Senate

This appeared in Monday's Washington Post:

It was dispiriting that Roy Moore won the Republican nomination to the U.S. Senate the same week that Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., announced he would be leaving it. But the rot runs deeper than either event would suggest. When Senate leadership is content with the kind of process and dishonesty we witnessed with health care and now tax "reform," neither event should come as a big surprise.

Certainly Moore is unfit to be a senator. Over the course of his Alabama pri- mary campaign to fill Attorney General Jeff Sessions' former Senate seat, he pulled out a gun in front of a crowd, falsely claimed that certain Midwestern towns had fallen under sharia law and suggested that "maybe Putin is right" for promoting repressive anti-gay policies. If Moore were to be seated in the Senate, he would do so after having been removed twice from his position as chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court — once for his refusal to take down a monument to the Ten Commandments from the courthouse and once for defying the Supreme Court's legalization of same-sex marriage. He has declared that the rule of God must reign supreme to that of law. In 2006, he demanded that Keith Ellison, D-Minn., newly elected to Congress, be barred from taking federal office because Ellison is Muslim.

While President Donald Trump campaigned against Moore at the recommendation of Senator Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., it would be a mistake to disregard the similarities between Trump and the insurgent judge. Both have questioned Barack Obama's citizenship and displayed disdain for the rule of law.