Imagine the Alabama Senate Race. Nope, Crazier.
In what seems now to be incongruous timing, they're having a right nice primary election down in Alabama on Tuesday. (We can assume that the rise of the extreme political right will not be an issue in the contest, unless a couple of the candidates fight for its endorsement.) Basically, it's to decide if the incumbent senator, Big Luther Strange, should be elected for a full term, and it is said by many that Big Luther-who remains the only senator whom I actually saw play basketball in college-is in a bit of trouble. His opponents are Congressman Mo Brooks, a Tea Party/Freedom Caucus type, and Judge Roy Moore, aka The Law West of the Moon. So we may summarize the Republican primary as being contested by the Strange, the addled, and the downright weird.
(The Democrats are having a primary, too. One of the candidates is named Robert Kennedy, Jr. This will not help ol' No Relation with those Alabama voters over the age of 50. He is also a Democrat, which will not help with a great number of Alabama voters of any age.)
There's a whole lot of Trumpin' going on here. The president* surprised a few folks by endorsing, and then going as all in on as he ever has, Big Luther Strange. This has put Mo Brooks in kind of a spot. (We will leave Moore aside for the moment, as he is the sole occupant of his own universe, and is running therein.) Last year, when it looked like the president* was going to sink the entire Republican Party into the sea, Brooks really went to town on him, as The Hill remembers.
"I think what you are going to see 12 to 18 months from now is that a lot of people who have supported Donald Trump, they are going to regret having done so," Brooks told MSNBC in February 2016, one day before the pivotal Super Tuesday primaries…"I don't support people who support adultery and I don't trust people who are serial adulterers, as Donald Trump has been and bragged about in writing, because I don't think that is an honorable thing or trait in a person."
Once Trump's nomination was secured, however, Brooks jumped aboard, albeit rather tepidly. Now, though, he's sympathizing with the president* who, Brooks says, is being kept from bringing the days of signs and wonders he'd promised during the campaign because he's been captured by the evil Washington swamp monsters. He also used the audio of the gunman's shooting up the congressional softball practice in a radio spot. This was thought déclassé, even by Tea Party standards, and Brooks took it down.
What hamstrings Big Luther is the way he became the temporary incumbent. In November of 2016, Robert Bentley, then the governor of Alabama, was all tangled up in a sex scandal that had mushroomed, as such things will, into a general political catastrophe. The state's attorney general at the time was Big Luther Strange, who put together a team to plumb the depths of the scandal. Then, the president* elevated the incumbent senator, Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, to be the Attorney General of the United States. Bentley then appointed Big Luther, the man who was investigating him, to replace Sessions in the Senate. In Alabama, it is literally possible for someone to fall off a turnip truck, but nobody was prepared to fall off this one. The circumstances of his incumbency have dogged Big Luther ever since, as AL.com explains.
"It's a simple answer," Strange told AL.com in an interview at American Village on Memorial Day. "The team that I assembled, the best public corruption team in the United States, the best record in the United States, investigated the governor and followed it through to resolution, which was his leaving office. I couldn't be prouder of that team, and the work that they did. I just don't make deals. I think it's very evident, the way this turned out, that the right thing happened." Strange rejects any suggestion that he took the appointment from Bentley on the expectation of curbing an investigation of the governor, who was under threat of impeachment. "No," Strange said firmly. "I wouldn't have entertained it. Absolutely not. I was already running for the office, the only person who was a declared candidate, had a campaign running and raising money. I was going to run no matter what."
Alabama is a run-off state so, if none of the Republicans clears 50 percent, the winner and the runner-up will face each other in another Republican "primary" late this fall. I mention this because all the polling shows that Big Luther and Mo Brooks are pretty much running against each other to be the guy who runs against Judge Roy Moore, whom they are trying to keep from picking up the 50 percent that would send him, for all intents and purposes, to the United State Senate. While all the national punditry seems to be centered around this race as a kind of metric to measure the president*'s political clout, there's a more immediate problem for the country. Judge Roy Moore is a full-blown theocratic nut.
Moore used to be the chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court. He got removed from that gig primarily for abusing his authority by going bananas over the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling on same-sex marriage. Previously, Moore had attained national fame as a circuit court judge by refusing to obey a federal court order to have a massive stone sculpture of the Ten Commandments removed from the state supreme court. (A Florida megachurch had filmed the installation and peddled videotapes of it. Camel, needle's eye.) This got him removed as the chief justice of the state supreme court…for the first time.
He's campaigning as himself. He's probably going to win. From AL.com:
"It may seem like a good thing for a court to give people rights, but there's no end to it," he said. "I'll bring up an example, for younger people." He cited a 1965 Supreme Court ruling that overturned a Connecticut law barring married couples from buying contraceptives. "The next couple of years after that, they went to unmarried couples. Then they went to children. Then they went to Roe v. Wade, they went to sodomy, and it's a continual etching, 'til now we're talking about kids being taken to doctors to alter their body parts, by parents who believe they're a different gender," he said. "We're in a crazy society."
Yes, he believes that allowing unmarried humans to obtain contraception was the beginning of the slow slide to perdition.
"They should impeach judges that go off and make weird rulings about things," he said, arguing that Congress had power to reshape the nation's court system. "That's all they have to do." "I am running for the Senate of the United States," Moore said. "Why? Well, I think maybe I can add something to the discussions in Washington, D.C. Maybe I can bring a little bit of my military background ... I think I know a little bit about judges, and the Constitution." "If I'm elected to the United States Senate, I'll go up there and try to help them understand why we have separation of powers, check and balances, the 10th amendment, the principle of federalism," he said. "Why we the people really do control the government."
Lord, no.
Moore got his strongest applause of the night when he said he was against funding Planned Parenthood. But the remark came as he tried to make a bigger point: That putting a defunding measure inside a healthcare plan was the kind of political trickery that he hates, regardless of whether Democrats or Republicans are doing it. "It's not about funding Planned Parenthood and they know it. It's about socialized medicine," he said. "Why didn't they defund Planned Parenthood before when they passed the budget? They use things. They deceive people. What do they do behind closed doors?"
He thinks the TrumpCare plan was "socialized medicine."
Did I mention he's probably going to win?
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