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GOP’s Alabama headache returns: Roy Moore running for U.S. Senate
Former chief justice ignores Donald Trump’s plea not to seek a rematch of 2017 loss
♦By Rich Shumate, ChickenFriedPolitics.com editor
MONTGOMERY (CFP) — Former Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore will try again in 2020 to get elected to the U.S. Senate, three years after his campaign for the same office imploded amid sexual misconduct allegations — and despite a Twitter plea from President Donald Trump to stay out of the race.
“Can I win? Yes, I can win. Not only can I, they know I can. That’s why there’s such opposition,” Moore said at his June 20 announcement, referring to Republican leaders who will now face the headache of dealing with Moore in the GOP primary as they try to reclaim the seat from Democratic U.S. Senator Doug Jones.
Roy Moore announces Senate run in Montgomery (WKRG via YouTube)
“Why does the mere mention of my name cause people just to get up in arms in Washington, D.C.?” Moore said. “Is it because I believe in God and marriage and in morality in our country, that I believe in the right of a baby in the womb to have a life? Are these things embarrassing to you?”
Moore’s candidacy is being opposed by the National Republican Senatorial Committee, the campaign arm of GOP senators, as well as Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Alabama’s Republican U.S. Senator, Richard Shelby.
But it is the opposition of Trump — hugely popular in the Yellowhammer State — that may be the most formidable Republican obstacle in Moore’s path.
In a May 29 tweet, as speculation swirled that Moore might run, Trump said, “If Alabama does not elect a Republican to the Senate in 2020, many of the incredible gains that we have made during my Presidency may be lost, including our Pro-Life victories. Roy Moore cannot win, and the consequences will be devastating.”
Asked about the president’s opposition during his campaign announcement, Moore reiterated his support for Trump’s agenda and said he believed the president was being pressured to come out against him.
“I think President Trump has every right to voice his opinion. I think he’s being pushed by the NRSC,” Moore said.
Moore, 72, once again denied allegations made by five women that he pursued them sexually when they were teenagers in the 1970s — allegations that proved devastating to his 2017 campaign against Jones.
“I’ve taken a lie-detector test. I’ve take a polygraph test. I’ve done everything I could do,” he said.
Moore also said Jones’s win in 2017 — the first by a Democrat in an Alabama Senate race in 25 years — was “fraudulent” because he was the victim of a “false flag operation using Russian tactics.”
In late 2018, several news organizations reported that a group financed by a Democratic operative used Twitter and Facebook to spread disinformation against Moore, who lost to Jones by just 1 percent of the vote.
Jones, who has said he was not aware of what the group was doing, repudiated what he termed “deceptive tactics” and called for a federal investigation.
In his 2020 announcement, Moore said he suspected “Republican collusion” in the Democratic disinformation campaign, although he didn’t offer specifics.
Moore will be running in the Republican primary against a field that already includes U.S. Rep. Bradley Byrne of Mobile, former Auburn University football coach Tommy Tuberville, Secretary of State John Merrill from Tuscaloosa, and State Rep. Arnold Mooney from suburban Birmingham.
The two top vote getters in the March 2020 primary will advance to a runoff.
The challenge for the NRSC and Senate Republican leaders will be finding a way to work against Moore while remaining neutral among the other candidates. In 2017, their open support of Luther Strange backfired when Moore turned his ties with the Washington establishment into a potent campaign issue.
Moore first gained national notoriety as a local judge in 1995 after battling the ACLU over his practice of opening court sessions with a prayer and hanging the Ten Commandments in his courtroom.
He parlayed that prominence into election as Alabama’s chief justice in 2000 but was forced out in 2003 after he had a display of the Ten Commandments installed in the rotunda of the state judicial building and then defied a federal judge’s order to remove it.
Moore was once again elected chief justice in 2012, but in 2016, he was suspended by a judicial disciplinary panel for the rest of his term for ethics violations after telling local officials that they didn’t have to comply with the U.S. Supreme Court decision legalizing same-sex marriage.
After losing an appeal of his suspension, Moore resigned from the Supreme Court to run for the Senate vacancy created when Jeff Sessions resigned to become Trump’s attorney general.
In 2017, Moore was able to use his base of support from his tenure as chief justice to get into the runoff, where he defeated Strange, who had been appointed to the seat temporarily by disgraced former Governor Robert Bentley.
Trump had backed Strange in the runoff but quickly got on board with Moore once he won. But after the sexual misconduct allegations surfaced, McConnell, Shelby and other Republican Senate leaders abandoned their wounded nominee, even announcing that they would expel him from the Senate if he won.
Jones, who now faces the formidable challenge of trying to hang on to his Senate seat in deep red Alabama, is considered to be the most vulnerable Democratic incumbent in the Senate in 2020.
Jones greeted Moore’s announcement with a tweet: “So it looks like my opponent will either be extremist Roy Moore or an extremist handpicked by Mitch McConnell to be part of his legislative graveyard team. Let’s get to work so we can get things done!”
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Donald Trump kicks off 2020 re-election with mass rally in Orlando
Trump touts economic growth, hits Democrats for socialism, calls Russia investigation “great illegal witch hunt”
♦By Rich Shumate, ChickenFriedPolitics.com editor
ORLANDO (CFP) — To shouts of “Four More Years” and “Build The Wall” from an exuberant capacity crowd, President Donald Trump formally kicked off his 2020 re-election campaign Tuesday night with a stem-winding speech in the key swing state of Florida.
“We did it once, and we’re going to do it again,” Trump told the crowd at the Amway Center in Orlando, many of whom had waited hours in the summer sun and braved thunderstorms for the chance to get inside. “And this time, we’re going to finish the job.”
President Donald Trump addresses his campaign kickoff rally in Orlando on June 18 (YouTube)
“I have news for Democrats who want to take us back to the bitter failure and betrayals of the past. We are not going back.”
The president also unveiled the new tagline for his 2020 campaign: “Keep America Great,” building on 2016’s theme of “Make America Great Again.”
During his hour-long speech, Trump touted the nation’s robust economy, lower unemployment, tax cuts and appointment of conservative judges as evidence of his administration’s accomplishments.
But he also spent the first part of his speech relitigating the Russia investigation, which he called a “great illegal witch hunt” designed to overturn the results of 2016 election.
“No president should ever have to go through this again. It’s so bad for our country,” he said. “No collusion, no obstruction. And they spent $40 million on this witch hunt.”
The president largely avoided mentioning his potential 2020 Democratic opponents by name in his speech, except for a single reference each to “Sleepy Joe” Biden and “Crazy Bernie” Sanders.
However, in a likely preview of next year”s campaign, he offered biting criticism of the Democratic Party, which he said had embraced socialism and was “more radical, more dangerous and more unhinged than at any point in the history of our country.”
“America will never be a socialist country. Ever,” he said. “Republicans don’t believe in socialism. We believe in freedom, and so do you.”
Trump also blamed Democrats for what he termed “illegal mass migration” and accused them of “moral cowardice” for being unwilling to fix an immigration system that he branded as a “disgrace.”
The president also leaned in on his hard-line trade policy that has drawn criticism even from some Republican members of Congress, insisting tariffs have revived the American steel industry and let China know that “the days of stealing American jobs … are over.”
Fans of the president began lining up outside the Amway Center, which seats 20,000 people, some 40 hours before the speech began.
Trump told the crowd that 120,000 people had requested tickets for the rally, which marked an unusually early campaign kickoff for an incumbent president.
The president carried Florida in 2016 on his way to winning the Electoral College, and the Sunshine State will again be a state he’ll need to secure a second term.
Orlando sits in the I-4 corridor, a swath of Central Florida that often plays decisive roles in statewide elections.
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Insight: Are the politics of Obamacare changing in the South?
Cracks are starting to show in the wall of Southern opposition to Medicaid expansion
♦By Rich Shumate, ChickenFriedPolitics.com editor
After Obamacare made its way through Congress in 2009, triggering the Tea Party rebellion, Republican-controlled Southern statehouses became a redoubt of opposition to what critics saw as meddlesome socialist overreach.
ChickenFriedPolitics editor Rich Shumate
When, three years later, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the Obama administration couldn’t force states to enact a key Obamacare provision — expanding Medicaid to cover more low-income residents — most Southern states took advantage of the decision and didn’t.
Today, nine of the 14 states that haven’t expanded Medicaid are in the South, leaving more than 2.3 million low-income Southerners who would qualify for Medicaid without health care coverage, according to researchers at the Kaiser Family Foundation.
But there are some signs that the blanket opposition to expanding Medicaid in the South may be retreating, albeit slightly and slowly.
Louisiana and Virginia expanded Medicaid after electing Democratic governors in 2017. In Arkansas and Kentucky, where expansion passed under Democratic governors, it has endured despite their replacement by more skeptical Republicans.
In Florida and Oklahoma, petition drives are underway to put expansion on the ballot in 2020, doing an end-run around recalcitrant GOP leaders. And in Mississippi, a Democrat is trying to use expansion as a wedge issue to end a 16-year Republican lock on the governor’s office.
In states with expanded Medicaid, low-income people making up to 138 percent of the federal poverty level — about $17,000 for an individual — can get coverage. In states without expansion, the income limit for a family of three is just under $9,000; single people are excluded entirely.
Most of the singles and families who are not eligible for traditional Medicaid don’t make enough money to get the tax credits they need to buy insurance on the Obamacare insurance exchanges. According to estimates from Kaiser, 92 percent of all Americans who fall into this coverage gap live in Southern states that haven’t expanded Medicaid, including nearly 800,000 people in Texas, 450,000 in Florida, 275,000 in Georgia, and 225,000 in North Carolina.
The federal government pays 90 percent of the cost of Medicaid expansion; states must pick up the rest. Republican leaders who oppose the idea have balked at making a financial commitment to such an open-ended entitlement, which Congress could change at any time.
But that argument didn’t hold in Virginia after Democrats campaigning on expansion nearly took control of the legislature in 2017. When expansion came up for a vote, 18 House Republicans who survived that blue wave joined Democrats to pass it.
Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards, who issued an executive order on his first day in office to expand Medicaid, is now running for re-election touting that decision; voters will give their verdict in October.
In Mississippi, Attorney General Jim Hood is also making expanded Medicaid the centerpiece of his gubernatorial campaign this year, arguing that his state, with the nation’s highest poverty rate, is cutting off its nose to spite its face by refusing to extend coverage to people who would benefit from it.
In Arkansas and Kentucky, where Democratic governors managed to push through expansion in 2014, the Republicans who replaced them have left the programs essentially intact, although they have fiddled at the edges by imposing premiums and work requirements on recipients. (Federal judges have blocked those changes.)
Die-hard Obamacare opponents have not been able to scuttle the program in either state — even in Arkansas, where the program has to be reauthorized annually by a three-fourths majority in both houses of the legislature.
In Florida and Oklahoma, supporters of expansion — including groups representing doctors, nurses and hospitals — are trying to put constitutional amendments expanding Medicaid coverage on the ballot in 2020.
Those ballot measures will be a key test of whether the public mood is more sympathetic to the idea of expansion than are the states’ conservative leaders, who have argued that the program is unaffordable and discourages people from seeking employment to secure health care.
However, the strategy of pursuing ballot initiatives is of limited use in the South because among states that haven’t expanded Medicaid, only Florida, Oklahoma and Mississippi allow the public to put measures on the ballot via petition. Texas, Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee, North Carolina, and South Carolina do not.
In Florida, the ballot measure will also need to get approval from 60 percent of the voters to pass.
The question to be answered this year and next is whether the fiscal and philosophical arguments against expansion will hold against the argument that low-income Southerners — rural and urban, black and white — deserve health care coverage and will benefit from it, in spite of its association with Obamacare.
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Southern House Democrats in targeted seats vote to turn up pressure on Trump
House Judiciary Committee can now sue to force compliance with requests for documents, testimony
♦By Rich Shumate, ChickenFriedPolitics.com editor
WASHINGTON (CFP) — In the first major test of how Southern Democrats in vulnerable seats will navigate through ongoing House investigations of President Donald Trump, all of them stuck to the party line in supporting new powers that could escalate those inquiries.
By a vote of 229-191 on June 11, the House authorized the Judiciary Committee to go into federal court and demand that the Justice Department comply with requests for documents and witness testimony.
From top left clockwise: Cunningham, McBath, Allred, Weston
All 10 Southern House Democrats who flipped seats in 2018 and are at the top of the GOP hit list in 2020 agreed to give the committee the power to sue to force compliance, although none of them yet support moving toward impeaching the president.
That list includes Reps. Joe Cunningham of South Carolina; Lucy McBath of Georgia; Kendra Horn of Oklahoma; Elaine Luria, Jennifer Wexton and Abigail Spanberger of Virginia; Colin Allred and Lizzie Fletcher of Texas; and Debbie Mucarsel-Powell and Donna Shalala of Florida.
Not a single Southern Republican supported the resolution, including 11 GOP members who are on the Democrats’ target list for 2020.
The resolution is aimed squarely at Attorney General William Barr, who has refused to comply with some document requests, and former White House counsel Don McGahn, who has refused to testify at a committee hearing under instructions fro the White House.
The resolution ratchets up the pressure on the Trump administration, as an increasing number of House Democrats are calling for an impeachment inquiry.
While none of the Southern Democrats in competitive seats have so far come out in favor of an impeachment inquiry, 14 members in safe seats have done so.
That list includes Steve Cohen of Tennessee; Val Demings of Florida; Veronica Escobar, Sheila Jackson Lee, Joaquin Castro, Lloyd Doggett, Al Green, and Filemon Vela of Texas; Cedric Richmond of Louisiana; Alma Adams and G.K. Butterfield of North Carolina; Don Beyer of Virginia; Bennie Thompson of Mississippi; and John Yarmuth of Kentucky.
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Poll showing Biden with a lead over Trump in Texas is not what it seems
Media reports of Quinnipiac poll overstate possibility that Trump is in trouble in the Lone Star State
♦By Rich Shumate, ChickenFriedPolitics.com editor
AUSTIN (CFP) — Media organizations have been trumpeting results of a new poll that purports to show President Donald Trump trailing former Vice President Joe Biden in Texas — a somewhat shocking result, given that a Democrat hasn’t carried the Lone Star State since 1976 and hasn’t been close since 1996.
But a closer look at the numbers of the Quinnipiac Poll show that, from a purely statistical perspective, those reports may be misleading.
The poll, released June 5, found Biden leading Trump by a margin of 48-44 percent among registered voters in Texas, with a margin of error of plus or minus 3.4 percent.
What that margin of error means is that Biden’s actual support among registered voters in Texas could be as high as 51.4 percent or as low as 44.6 percent; Trump’s actual support could be as high as 47.4 percent or as low as 40.6 percent.
Because those two intervals overlap, it is statistically possible that Trump is actually ahead, as the high end of his support is above the low end of Biden’s support. So although it is probable that Biden has a lead, because the range of his support is higher, the poll does not absolutely establish a lead for Biden.
In order to establish with statistical certainty that Biden is leading Trump, his lead would need to be at least 6.8 percent, or double the margin of error.
The poll’s results for hypothetical match-ups of Trump with other Democratic 2020 contenders are even more muddled because neither candidate has a lead larger than the margin of error, which means that no one can even be said to even probably be ahead.
The poll results do, however, indicate that at this early stage of the race, the battle for Texas is closer that what might be expected and Biden appears to be performing more strongly against Trump than other 2020 competitors, including two Texans, former U.S. Rep. Beto O’Rourke and former San Antonio Mayor Julián Castro.
In 2016, Trump carried Texas by more than 800,000 votes, a margin of 9 points.
The Quinnipiac poll did turn up one result well beyond the margin of error — 60 percent of Texas don’t want to see Trump impeached, while only 34 percent do.
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