Moore Abandons Presidential Bid, Announces Campaign To Return To Supreme Court

After his presidential campaign never gained traction, former Alabama Supreme Court chief justice Roy Moore announced that he will seek his old job that he lost after he was removed for snubbing a court order to move his Ten Commandment monuments out of the courthouse rotunda. Moore ran for governor in 2006 and 2010, both times failing to secure the Republican nomination. He then set out to campaign for president by touring Iowa, telling The Iowa Republican, “I legitimately feel like I can win this race.” When not campaigning for office, Moore used his Foundation for Moral Law to push an extremist agenda, including personhood laws and the removal of three Iowa justices who backed marriage equality, calling gay rights a “moral meltdown.”

The Montgomery Advertiser reports that Moore will try to seek his old post. Ironically, his campaign adviser described Moore as a judge who “will rule on law and uphold the state and federal constitutions”:

Roy Moore, standing in front of the State Judicial Building where he last stood eight years ago as chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court before being removed from office, announced Tuesday that he is running for another term as chief justice.

Moore was removed from office in 2003 for refusing to follow a federal judge’s order to move a more than two-ton monument that included the Ten Commandments from the State Judicial Building. “There is no question I know this job, and I believe the people of Alabama know exactly what I stand for,” Moore said.

When asked how he thought people might perceive him running for chief justice after he was removed from that same position, Moore said, “I hope they realize what I was removed for was wrong.”

“I have always acknowledged God and will continue to do so,” he said. Moore finished fourth in the 2010 Republican primary for governor.

Moore has served for the last eight years as president of the Foundation for Moral Law, which has its headquarters in downtown Montgomery. He said the foundation has written hundreds of briefs for cases pending in state and federal courts regarding issues such as religious rights and the right to bear arms.

In a Tuesday email, Zachery Michael, who said he worked for Moore’s 2010 gubernatorial campaign and his presidential exploratory committee from 2009 to 2011 as a strategist and adviser, said he was endorsing Malone because “it is time to elect a judge that will rule on law and uphold the state and federal constitutions.”

“Controversy and fame is not in Judge Malone’s heart, however: service, justice, and a strong devotion to law is his passion,” Michael wrote.