The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
WHY ALABAMA EX-JUSTICE IS LIKELY TO WIN SENATE RACE
Senate candidate defeats incumbent Luther Strange.
PIEDMONT, ALA. — Roy Moore, a former chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court, seems to keep score on everything.
On campaign fundraising, he can tell you how often he is outspent. He rattles off the courts whose views, he argues, support his unwavering opposition to same-sex marriage. And as he recently recounted at a breakfast with pastors here in northeast Alabama, he knows just how many presidents of the United States have had to reckon with him, a lawyer from rural Gallant.
“Did you know the last three presidents, and contenders, have all addressed me?” said Moore, whose career has included being effectively removed from the state Supreme Court twice — an outright ouster the first time, and then, nearly 13 years later, a suspension until the end of the new term he won after his removal.
Now, after defeating Luther Strange, the incumbent who had President Donald Trump’s vocal backing, in the Republican Senate primary on Tuesday, Moore is most likely going to Washington.
That prospect has stunned and alarmed many people beyond Alabama, including some of the nation’s top Republicans. Here in his home state, though, few people seem surprised. Moore’s resurgence is widely seen as the latest act in a decadeslong career that has endured mostly because the 70-yearold former judge does not seem to change on much of anything.
“He walks the walk, OK?” said David Mowery, a consultant in Montgomery, the state capital, who helped run a Democratic campaign against Moore in 2012, less than a decade after Moore defied a federal judge’s order to remove a 2.6-ton Ten Commandments monument from the state Supreme Court building.
“He doesn’t just say he’s going to do this,” Mowery said. “He gets thrown out of office over it. And then he gets re-elected.”
In order to fill the Senate seat that Attorney General Jeff Sessions held for 20 years, Moore must pass one more test: a special election in December against the Democratic candidate, Doug Jones, a former federal prosecutor.
Although Trump said on Friday that Moore “has a very good chance of not winning” in December, strategists in both parties expect the state’s voters to choose Moore, who was one of the public figures who stirred doubts about the birthplace of Barack Obama.
If he is elected to the Senate, Moore will have gotten there as a rare retail politician with a penchant for reciting Blackstone’s Commentaries on common law. At the same time, and to greater political benefit, the former professional kickboxer exhibits traits that many Alabamians see in themselves and seek in their elected officials: He is outwardly pious and prone to political pugilism, self-assured and satisfied with standing alone.
“Roy Moore is Huey Long with religion,” said Jim Zeigler, a Republican who is the state auditor. “Huey Long would tell it like it is. He ran against the establishment, he defeated the establishment, he would not compromise with the establishment. Roy Moore does all those things, but he has a biblical worldview.”
Moore is “a one-issue man, and all of the other things fall to the side,” said Joel Sogol, a lawyer from Tuscaloosa who has tangled with Moore. “Either you accept those issues from his position or you don’t, and there’s a lot folks here who accept them.”
Moore’s notoriety stems almost entirely from years of pitched legal battles over Ten Commandments displays on public property and over the authority of the federal courts to recognize samesex marriages. Cast aside even by some in his own party as a bigot and a hatemonger, Moore has turned high-decibel clashes with his critics — he blamed “atheists, homosexuals and transgender individuals” for one conflagration — into opportunities.
In Alabama politics, Sogol said: “He’s an outsider who has a flag to hold on to. His flag is Christianity, the Bible. There are a lot of people in this area who think that is the No. 1 thing in the world.”