‘10 Commandments’ judge, once ousted, poised for comeback in Alabama

Reporting from Atlanta —  Try this one out as a sort of 11th commandment of Southern politics:

Thou Shalt Not Dismiss an Alabama Politician Who Earned National Notoriety for Sticking a Humongous Statue of the Ten Commandments in a Government Building.

That’s right, y’all. Judge Roy Moore is back!

Moore, as you may recall, is the former chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court who was famously (or infamously) removed from his post in 2003 after ignoring a federal court order to get rid of his pet project, a 5,300-pound stone Ten Commandments memorial, from a state courthouse.

In voting Tuesday, Moore appeared to be engineering a stunning political second act, defeating the current chief justice and a former state attorney general in a Republican primary for his old job as head of the state’s Supremes.

Moore, 65, will face a Democrat in a general election in November. Note to Dems: Good luck with that. Montgomery Advertiser reporter Sebastian Kitchen notes that every current member of the Alabama high court is a Republican. So are all the state appeals court judges.

So it looks like Moore -- to paraphrase from the apocryphal Book of Gene Autry -- is back in the saddle, and quite literally so: Dude rode a horse to his polling place Tuesday, reminding voters he’s an Etowah County farmer at heart, not some pantywaist Yalie elitist who spends his downtime pondering the impact of Jacques Derrida’s deconstructive practice on American legal theory, or whatever.

The comeback is all the more remarkable for the fact that Moore was trounced twice, in 2006 and 2010, when he ran for governor. In the Birmingham News, pollster and political scientist Natalie Davis noted that a crimson tide of evangelicals flooded the polls to help Rick Santorum win Alabama in the GOP presidential primary.

By definition, those are Roy’s kind of people.

“Is it a vindication? Yes. Is it a restoration? Definitely,” Moore said at a news conference, according to the News. “The people put me there the first time. The people did not remove me.”

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