Roy Moore (shown), twice suspended as Alabama’s chief justice, appears to be leading all Republican candidates in the GOP primary race for the Alabama U.S. Senate seat Jeff Sessions left to become President Trump’s attorney general.
Politico.com reported that, according to internal polling by one of his opponents, Moore leads all candidates with 31 percent of the projected votes, followed by former Alabama Attorney General Luther Strange (23 percent), who currently fills the Senate seat after being selected earlier this year by then-Gov. Robert Bentley as Sessions’ replacement. Trailing close behind Strange is Alabama U.S. Congressman Mo Brooks with 21 percent.
While the Republican Party has come out in support of Strange, his connection to Bentley — who was forced to resign in the midst of personal scandal and ethics controversies — has hurt his candidacy.
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Following Bentley’s resignation, his replacement, Gov. Kay Ivey, called a special September 26 election for the Senate seat rather than allow Strange to finish out his term. Before his resignation, Bentley had been heavily criticized for selecting Strange to the Senate seat, because as attorney general Strange was also investigating Bentley on corruption charges.
As for Moore, despite being suspended twice from Alabama’s Supreme Court, he remains a popular figure in state politics, largely because of his tenacious support for Judeo-Christian and conservative values.
Moore was first suspended as Alabama’s chief justice in 2003 for refusing to obey a federal court order to remove a Ten Commandments monument from the state’s supreme court building. In 2016, he was again suspended for refusing to follow the U.S. Supreme Court’s infamous decision effectively legalizing same-sex “marriage,” insisting that the ruling could not trump the Alabama high court’s earlier injunction preserving the state’s official definition of marriage as only between a man and a woman.
The 70-year-old Moore said he thinks his lead in the Senate race comes as a result of his consistent track record over the years. “It’s not just what I say,” Moore told World Net Daily. “It’s what I have done. I have stood for the principles of this state and the people of this state. I’ve stood against the federal government in a legal manner.”
In announcing his candidacy in April, Moore said that he would continue to “stand for the rights and liberties of the people. My position has always been God first, family, then country.”
Moore, a West Point graduate and Vietnam veteran, said that he shares “the vision of President Donald Trump to make America great again. But before we can make America great again, we’ve got to make America good again.” Key to that goal, he explained, is keeping the federal government within the bounds of the U.S. Constitution. “We’ve got to understand that getting back to the Constitution, getting back to its restraints, [is] what we need in this country to make it great again.”
Moore said his solidly conservative values, along with his background defending constitutional principles, make him the best candidate to fill the Senate position. “I think I can take the values of this state and my particular qualifications to the Senate to help us get this country back to what it should be,” Moore told WND. “I have had a lot of study in the Constitution of the United States. I understand its meaning, and I understand how far away we’ve drifted from that document. Underlying all of this is virtue and morality, which comes from God.”
Many political observers predict that, barring some drastic change in public sentiment, Moore is expected to ride his comfortable lead to a victory in the August 15 Republican primary ahead of the September 26 special election for the Senate seat.
Photo of Roy Moore: AP Images
