In Alabama, former state Supreme Court Justice Roy Moore won Tuesday’s Senate runoff race to fill Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ seat. The race divided the Republican Party—and the White House, with former White House senior adviser Steve Bannon backing Moore, and President Trump traveling to Alabama to campaign for his opponent, Senator Luther Strange.
On Tuesday, Trump deleted his earlier tweets supporting Strange. Judge Moore was twice ousted as Alabama’s chief justice—first in 2003 for refusing to remove a monument of the Ten Commandments in the rotunda of the Alabama Judicial Building. After being re-elected, he was again ousted in 2016, for ordering his judges to defy the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling legalizing marriage equality. Moore is also well known for his racist and Islamophobic positions. He was a proponent of Trump’s racist and discredited “birther theory” about President Obama. He also opposed Minnesota Representative Keith Ellison’s election to Congress because Ellison is Muslim. Just last week, Moore used racist language to describe polarization in the U.S., saying, “Now we have blacks and whites fighting, reds and yellows fighting.”
Meanwhile, on Capitol Hill, Foreign Relations Committee Chair Republican Senator Bob Corker of Tennessee has announced he will not run for re-election in 2018.