The World Around You

If I had lived in Alabama a little longer I would have seen this coming,

Former Gov. Fob James is coming to the defense of Chief Justice Roy Moore, six years after he said he would use state troopers and the National Guard to defend Moore’s display of the Ten Commandments.

Moore’s attorneys filed papers Thursday in which James supported a second bid by Moore to have Attorney General Bill Pryor barred from prosecuting the judge on judicial ethics charges.

Moore is accused of violating judicial standards by defying a federal court order to remove his Ten Commandments monument from the rotunda of the state judicial building. Pryor’s office will prosecute.

But James said Pryor, a James appointee who has since won election on his own, in the past advocated the idea of defying court decisions — a position James said he considered a plus in appointing Pryor.

“Had he expressed his present view, I would not have found him qualified to be attorney general of Alabama,” James said in a sworn statement.

James called Pryor’s current positions “utterly contrary to the political and legal convictions he expressed to me.”

I’m beginning to think I could throw out just about any prediction about next steps for Roy’s team and I’d have an excellent chance of being correct. His arguments are absurd, why he thinks getting Fob James involved strengthens his case is beyond me. It just shows the lack of even the weakest grasp of the law by any member of his team.

I feel sorry for whoever has to type up these petitions while keeping a straight face.

Well, the latest tactic from the Moore camp is to try to have the judges dismissed for supposed bias,

Lawyers for suspended Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore asked Wednesday that five of the nine members of the state Court of the Judiciary be disqualified from hearing his trial on ethics charges.

Moore’s lawyers filed a motion seeking to disqualify Sue McInnish of Montgomery and Sam Jones of Mobile, the two lay members of the court, as well as circuit judges Scott Vowell of Birmingham and Robert Kendall of Mobile and lawyer Robert North of Birmingham on grounds of possible bias against Moore.

McInnish and Jones were appointed by former Gov. Don Siegelman to three-year terms that expired earlier this year. But Attorney General Bill Pryor, who is prosecuting Moore, said McInnish and Jones have six-year terms and can continue to sit as judges.

“This opinion self-serves the prosecution by attempting to define who may qualifiedly sit in a case in which the attorney general is the prosecuting authority,” Moore’s lawyers said.

They also complained about what they called “imperial trappings” of non-elected lawyers and lay-persons wearing robes.

Pryor later said he was “appalled” by that comparison. He said voters approved the constitutional amendment that added lay-persons to the court “as a protection against possible judicial tyranny.”

Attorney General Pryor certainly has a flair for irony. Isn’t Roy the one who says he’s trying to “stop judicial tyranny”? I assume these tactics will continue right up until the day of the trial. November 12th cannot get here fast enough.