Tag Archives: Alabama Supreme Court

national news

Sessions to run for U.S. Senate … what will Trump do?

Wow! A fabulous political melodrama might play out way down yonder in Alabama.

Jeff Sessions wants his old U.S. Senate seat back and plans to announce his candidacy for the Republican Party nomination. Oh, but get a load of this: He gave up his Senate after Donald Trump nominated him to be attorney general; the Senate confirmed him narrowly.

Then he pi**ed off the president royally by recusing himself from the Russia probe. He couldn’t in good conscience investigate himself, given that he worked on Trump’s presidential campaign, which found itself caught up in allegations that it colluded with Russians who attacked our electoral system in 2016. So he followed DOJ policy by recusing himself.

His act of conscience enraged Trump.

So, the previous 2020 Republican favorite for the Alabama seat happens to be a former state Supreme Court chief justice. Roy Moore had been kicked off his bench seat twice on allegations that he violated constitutional principles. Then he got ensnared in allegations that he dated underage girls and had sex with them. He ran the Senate from Alabama anyway. He got nominated in 2017 by the GOP. Trump had endorsed the incumbent appointed to succeed Sessions in the Senate, then backed Moore when the former judge won the party primary.

Then Moore lost to Democrat Doug Jones in the fall special election. Trump campaigned for Moore, but was unable to push Moore across the finish line to victory.

Here we are, in 2020. Jones is running for re-election. Moore is running in the GOP primary. Now, reportedly, so is Sessions.

What will Trump do? Does he back Moore again, even though his earlier endorsement proved futile; plus, we have the notion that Moore is unfit for elected office at any level, given the seemingly credible allegations of misbehavior?

Or does he back Sessions, who at least has prior U.S. Senate experience? I find the former senator/AG to be objectionable anyway, but he is a damn sight better for the job than Roy Moore. Remember, too, the many nasty things he said about Sessions when the then-AG backed out of the Russia investigation.

Meanwhile, we have Sen. Jones ready to cruise to his own party’s nomination. What might he do? How might he play all this out?

I am aware that only the good folks in Alabama will have a say in who they elect to the U.S. Senate. However, these men and women enact laws that affect all Americans. Therefore, what is Alabama’s business becomes our business, too, way over here in far-off Texas.

If I had a vote in Alabama, I would stick with the incumbent, Sen. Doug Jones.

national news

Here comes the judge one more time … ugh!

Roy Moore isn’t your run-of-the-mill goofy politician.

He once served on the Alabama Supreme Court. The state judicial ethics commission removed from his chief justice chair because he violated the constitutional prohibition against promoting religion.

Then he got caught up in a series of accusations by women who alleged that he had sex with them when they were, um, underage girls. 

After being kicked off the bench, Moore sought a seat in the U.S. Senate. Donald Trump endorsed Moore’s GOP primary foe, the incumbent senator who had been appointed to the seat vacated when Jeff Sessions was named attorney general, but Moore won anyway. Trump then decided to back Moore, who then lost to Democratic U.S. Sen. Doug Jones.

Now the former judge is back in the hunt for the seat he lost. Here’s the rub: National Republicans want no part of Roy Moore. They are going to work overtime to defeat him in next year’s Alabama Republican primary.

My favorite comment on Moore’s candidacy, which he announced today, comes from GOP Sen. Martha McSally of Arizona, who said: “Give me a break. This place has enough creepy old men.”

Bingo, Sen. McSally.

Republicans reportedly after actively lobbying Sessions — whose seat Moore sought and then lost to Sen. Jones — to run again.

And that brings up a whole other bit of political comic relief. Donald Trump hired Sessions to be attorney general, then became enraged at the AG when he recused himself from investigating the “Russia thing” because of Sessions’ role in the 2016 presidential campaign and the transition after Trump got elected.

Who, then, does the president endorse if the GOP primary becomes a contest between a disgraced former judge and an accused sexual predator and the former senator who then got fired as AG by the very same president of the United States?

This ought to be fun to watch.

legal news, national news

Alabama's Roy Moore: judicial activist

Judicial activism is alive and well on one state’s bench, and it’s not a state where one would expect to find such a thing.

It’s in Alabama, where the chief justice of that state’s Supreme Court, has decided that the Highest Court in the Land — the United States Supreme Court — declined to overturn a lower federal court ruling that overturned the state’s ban on people marrying others of the same gender.

The high court, then, in effect endorsed the lower court ruling. The state’s ban on same-sex marriage is overturned, along with bans in 38 other states — including Texas.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2015/02/10/alabama-supreme-court-gay-marriage-editorials-debates/23200975/

As USA Today notes in an editorial, same-sex marriage has become as divisive an issue as the civil rights battles were in the 1950s and ’60s. Most Americans support same-sex marriage now, although in the Deep South, opponents of it remain in the majority.

Still, the entire nation is governed by a single Constitution and the federal courts are empowered to interpret that document in the manner they deem appropriate.

Federal judges have been striking down the bans generally on the grounds that they violate the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, the one that guarantees “equal protection” for all citizens under the law.

Justice Moore, though, doesn’t see it that way, even though he swore an oath to protect and defend the U.S. Constitution.

Don’t conservatives oppose judicial activism? Don’t they rail continually at judges who put their own bias above the law?

Alabama’s top state judge is on the wrong side of this issue. Period.