It has been a while since I wrote about Alabama politics, but the primaries for the special election to replace Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III in the Senate are scheduled for August 15th, and the candidates are out on the trail. From what I’m reading, Roy Moore is the current frontrunner, which is more than mildly terrifying:
As former Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore runs for U.S. Senate, he doesn’t shrink from telling voters he has twice been ousted from the bench for defying federal courts over the Ten Commandments and same-sex marriage.
Instead, he wears those rejections as a badge of honor.
Moore tells Republican voters in the blood-red state that they are akin to battle scars for standing up for what he believes.
“I will not only say what is right, I will do what is right,” Moore said during a June forum in the east Alabama city of Oxford.
Now, Alabama’s Republican Party is currently in some disrepute. This is from April.
The strange, sad saga of Robert Bentley’s governorship of Alabama is over.
The Republican was booked in the Montgomery County jail Monday afternoon on a pair of misdemeanor campaign-finance charges. He pled guilty to both as part of a deal that sidesteps the four felony charges he might have faced. He later resigned, bringing to a close one of the odder sex scandals in recent memory, something like a soft-core porno by Robert Penn Warren.
I won’t revisit the sex scandal, but I will note that Bentley presented himself as a morally pure Christian right up until the point that he started plea negotiations. Before he lost his job, he had the privilege of appointing Luther Strange as the interim replacement for Jeff Sessions, but that was a barely disguised effort at obstructing justice.
The Alabama House Judiciary Committee began an impeachment inquiry, but the investigation was put on hold in November when Alabama Attorney General Luther Strange requested that they halt it while he looked into the matter, but he never confirmed he was investigating Bentley.
The delicate equilibrium fell apart in February, when U.S. Senator Jeff Sessions was confirmed as President Trump’s attorney general, creating a vacancy for one of the state’s two Senate seats. Bentley appointed Strange to fill the job. Some critics saw this as political manipulation on the governor’s part: He could deftly remove the man with possible control over his fate by giving him an exalted office.
If that was the goal, it didn’t work. Steven Marshall, whom Bentley appointed as the new attorney general, promptly confirmed the investigation that Strange had refused to confirm, with an announcement that Marshall would recuse himself.
Sen. Strange is running in the special election but he’s severely tarnished by the circumstances of his appointment. He can see that Roy Moore has some juice despite his nationally famous disregard for the law. So, when the Montgomery County Republican Executive Committee held a candidate forum last week, Strange knew he had to say something bold.
He delivered:
Strange, appointed by former Gov. Robert Bentley to fill the seat until the special election, said Alabama needs a strong supporter of the Trump administration in Washington.
“President Trump is the greatest thing that’s happened to this country,” Strange said. “I consider it a Biblical miracle that he’s there.”
Roy Moore skipped that forum, but in addition to Strange, the other Republican candidates were in attendance: “U.S. Rep. Mo Brooks of Huntsville, state Sen. Trip Pittman of Baldwin County, physician Randy Brinson of Montgomery, physician James Beretta of Pelham, businessman Dom Gentile of Hoover and business consultant Bryan Peeples of Birmingham.”
Apparently, Mr. Brinson took a leave as president of the Christian Coalition of Alabama in order to make this run for office. Predictably, he blames the corruption in Alabama politics on liberals and he demonstrates his Christian credentials by advocating a wall to keep out the brown-hued Catholics from below our Southern border.
“I’m running because I’m tired of the corruption in Alabama and Washington,” said Brinson, who took leave from his position as president of the Christian Coalition of Alabama to run for the Senate. “All our biblical values and convictions compel us to speak out against corruption, which I’ve done. I’m tired of our values and our faith being mocked by liberal elites. I’m tired of career politicians who say they’re conservative, and then vote like liberals.
“President Trump wasn’t supposed to win this election. He was an outsider, not a career politician. Well, neither am I. This is my first run for office and I’m proud to say I fully support President Trump’s agenda. I’m ready to go to Washington to fight for the president’s agenda. We need to build a wall, we need to fix our immigration process, we need to repeal and replace Obamacare before it totally collapses.”
At the forum, it appears that Rep. Mo Brooks mostly focused on his long record of public service in which he has never had to endure an ethics investigation. In other words, you can trust him not to be a hypocritical disappointment like Gov. Bentley or former Alabama Speaker Mike Hubbard.
Brooks saved his pyrotechnics for the airwaves.
In a new Senate campaign ad, Brooks, a Congressman from Huntsville, said he would filibuster any spending bills if the Senate doesn’t fund Trump’s plan to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border.
“If I have to filibuster on the Senate floor, I’ll even read the King James Bible until the wall is funded,” Brooks said in the ad. “We’re going to build that wall, or you’ll know the name of every Republican who surrenders to the Democrats to break my filibuster. I give you my word, and I don’t give my word lightly.”
It has to be the King James version because everyone knows that Jesus sounded just like William Shakespeare.
In Washington DC, Trump’s border wall is already forgotten. But down in Alabama it’s all part of some biblical miracle. We need these men in the Senate like we need a drill applied to our skulls. But, despite the Alabama GOP’s recent record of egregious face-planting, one of these men will almost assuredly be a U.S. Senator before the year is out.
Alabama doesn’t have jungle primaries like some other southern states, but it does have runoff elections if no candidate reaches fifty percent of the vote. The primaries are scheduled for August 15th and runoff elections, if needed, are scheduled for September 26th. The general election will take place on December 12th.
The Democrats have eight candidates running but it doesn’t appear right now like any of them are being taken seriously. I thought that Jeff Sessions was the most obnoxious member of the Senate, but he’ll probably look tame in retrospect after we get used to his successor.
So what you’re saying here is anyone of these guys would be either equally as bad, or just a slight degree worse than the man who was too racist for the federal bench in the 80’s.
you don’t agree?
Wholeheartedly.
The Democrats have eight candidates running but it doesn’t appear right now like any of them are being taken seriously.
Has the Alabama Democratic Party repaired their internal divisions yet? Does the Alabama Democratic Party, or the DNC for that matter, care about obtaining any power at all in Southern states?
My daughter lives in Alabama. It is about tribalism and litmus-tested by the religious right churches.
And sports tribalism adds to the mix. The colors of the University of Alabama after all are red and white.
Plus the good folks of Alabama now bask in their national normality. Why Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania now agree. And transplants from those states arrive “gone native”.
The DNC… isn’t the problem in Alabama. You people need to stop thinking beyond this narrow box. The voters in these states don’t like what the party represents. They prefer Republicans. They used to prefer Democrats. There’s a reason for this.
It’s more than just racism. The Democrats didn’t even field candidates for half the statewide offices last time. You can’t win if you don’t play. It’s a different state but you remember Alvin Greene, right? Those are the kinds of things I’m talking about. Ceding the field, basically.
it’s not that easy to get people to run if they know they’re going to lose 70-30
It’s definitely not just racism. It;s also cultural divisions and tribalism, Simply blaming the DNC and state party misses the point. The Republicans have plenty of terrible state parties but as long as the voters prefer them it doesn’t matter.
Your problem in Alabama is that 90% of whites vote for the Republican, every time.
Note this:
Moore: US Military Academy; University of Alabama Law
Brooks: Duke University; University of Alabama Law
This returns to the education issue you raised in a previous post.
Brooks beat the last Blue Dog Democrat from Huntsville. And Huntsville has a lot of engineers who work at the Redstone Arsenal. Not all education is equal.
Don’t know about reading but KJV bibles have 82% of the market. That market includes a significant percentage of “presentation” bibles.
It will take something majorly disruptive to dislodge the GOP from Alabama. The business class there holds on to their people the same way Dixiecrats did from 1875 on. With the same economic consequences.
So you’re saying the only way to change it is to move away, up to Chicago or something north.
I don’t think any exit migration by people who know better will change the state.
The white elites are perfectly content to use faux religion and faux patriotism to keep the boot on anyone they don’t deem worthy.
Most people simply can’t afford, or don’t have the energy to, up and leave. So the state remains a shithole as you put it.
It gets changed from the inside when there is an opposition party to the Republicans. That is going to take a lot of work by a lot of people to get 50% of voters in an election to throw the bums out.
A change in the media serving local audiences will correlate with change on the ground. Getting the media back to local ownership likely (and ironically) could facilitate a return to sanity. I don’t know if locally-owned media is a viable business model anymore, however.
Change will be correlated with disruption as well, whether as cause or effect.
For the moment, there are a whole lot of people hunkered down who actually might make a difference. When courage occurs is always a mysterious phenomenon in authoritarians states. But it sometimes does occur.
Media is likely all owned by Sinclair, so no help there. When folks talk about a fifty state strategy I wonder what that means for states like Alabama and how much energy and money one should spend on it.
You lost me at ‘Alabama’ – it’s an ethical and moral shithole. Everything after that is redundant.
I pity the folks who can’t leave.
I mean these people couldn’t remove Jim Crow education from their state constitution in the 21st Century. Think about that.
I think even Mississippi has eliminated Jim Crow from their state constitution. Because they’ve caved to the PC crowd.
Looking into it a while back, NIT generally has the better translation of the Old Testament, while KJV has the better of the New. So Jesus did kind of sound like Shakespeare if you look at it a certain way.
So “verily” is a direct translation?
Trying to look it at it that way will land you in a neck brace.