More Roy last thing Alabama needs
To say it hasn’t been a good year for the public image of state officials in Alabama would be an understatement of almost comic proportions. But when the top-ranking people in all three branches of state government either have been or soon might be booted from office, there’s not a lot of humor to be mined from such political dysfunction.
(OK, Gov. Robert Bentley has been good for some pretty funny jokes. There’s just no getting around it.)
There’s (former) House Speaker Mike Hubbard of Auburn, whose sleazy record of using his office for political and personal moneygrubbing cost him not just his seat but his freedom. Convicted on multiple felony counts, Hubbard is headed for prison.
The aforementioned Gov. Bentley’s tawdry and more than a little creepy shenanigans with a high-paid female aide seem, at this point, more embarrassing than grimly scandalous, but an impeachment process is nonetheless under way.
Then there’s Roy Moore.
Moore is the Alabama Supreme Court chief justice. Again. He’s the same one expelled from office 13 years ago for defying a federal court order to remove a Ten Commandments sculpture from a state judicial building.
Alabama voters later put him back in office. Now he might be, and absolutely should be, sent back home. Again.
Moore faces judicial ethics charges for an administrative order in January that the state’s probate judges were to ignore the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges, and refuse to issue marriage licenses for same-sex couples. Moore’s order put those judges in such an impossible position that a few took the safest route and simply stopped issuing marriage licenses altogether.
Moore is seeking to have the charges dismissed. The Alabama Judicial Inquiry Commission issued a motion Friday that said not only should the ethics case not be dismissed, but Moore should be relieved of his post. Again.
"This court [Alabama Court of the Judiciary] can conclude this matter now,” the JIC argues, “… remove the Chief Justice from judicial office, and reaffirm Alabama's fidelity to the rule of law."
Moore is trying to have it both ways, using what the JIC has called “systematic gamesmanship” to rationalize his January order by saying he never specifically told subordinate judges to defy federal courts. Meanwhile, his own legal team from Liberty Counsel is giving the lie to that semantic wiggle with what the JIC calls “an aggressive public relations campaign about ‘standing up to the federal judiciary.’”
Oops.
Alabama has been through this routine with Moore once already, and once should have been enough. If Moore is allowed to remain on the bench, the next opportunity he has to grandstand against the federal courts — with the whole state at the mercy of his personal agenda — he’ll do it. Again.
Like every other American, Roy Moore doesn’t have to like higher court rulings. It is, however, his job to uphold them. It’s a job at which he has failed miserably, twice. He needs to be fired. Again.
This story was originally published July 18, 2016 at 5:50 PM with the headline "More Roy last thing Alabama needs."