Friday, March 1, 2019

Roy Moore—the man who gave us Doug Jones—wants to try again.


I really hope Alabama primary voters have learned their lesson. Doug Jones occupies a US Senate seat because a very small minority of the Alabama electorate thought it would be just swell to have a twice-removed-from-office knuckledragger sit in the Jeff Sessions seat.

Please, Alabama. Don’t do this again.


Roy Moore, a conservative lightning rod who cost the Republican Party a Senate seat in deep-red Alabama, is signaling fresh interest in mounting another campaign in 2020, sparking alarm on the Right that Democratic Sen. Doug Jones could be gifted another unlikely victory.

Moore, 72, a former state judge, made the rounds at last Friday’s Alabama Republican Party dinner gala. A few days later, a new political action committee run by Moore’s son, Caleb Moore, issued an email fundraising appeal.

Republican insiders, including conservative allies of President Trump, fret that Moore — derailed by sexual assault allegations in a 2017 special election that should have been an easy layup — might divide the party in the primary and advance to a rematch with Jones.


There are two people who could lose to Doug Jones in the 2020 General Election. Me, and Roy Moore.

Since I’m not running, that leaves Moore.

Anybody but Roy Moore could beat Jones. Jones’ pathetic posturing as an independent thinker has fooled no one. His vote against Justice Brett Kavanaugh last year showed him to be a lockstep Democrat vote on anything of substance coming to a floor in the US Senate. A vote for Doug Jones is a vote for Dick Schumer’s radical, leftwing progressive agenda.

But a vote for Roy Moore in the Senate Primary next March is a vote for a man who was twice removed from the Alabama Supreme Court. He was remove both times for cause, meaning that after due process of law he was found to have violated his oaths of office and had engaged of conduct unbecoming of a Supreme Court Justice.

Not just once—which could be reasonably explained as a misinterpretation of statute or precedence. But twice—and both times by members of his own judicial and philosophical schools of thought. People of his own kind thought him unfit for office. It's like a bunch of alcoholics expelling a member of their own group of drunks for drinking too much.

A vote for Roy Moore is also a vote for a man who was credibly accused of sexual assault by three different women. None of these women knew each other from Adam’s Housecat, and all three of them independently described being all but forcibly raped by Moore. Two of them were minors, claiming to be 14 and 16 years old at the time of their encounter with Moore.

One accuser can be reasonably explained as a politically motivated smear. Two would be enough for concern. Three would be enough for any reasonable voter to conclude that someone else is worthy of their mark on the ballot. 

A vote for Roy Moore next March all but guarantees that Doug Jones is reelected next November.




Please, Alabama. Don’t do this again.