It's gotten so morbidly funny because Moore absolutely refuses to drop out, Republicans are trying to rig the election to keep their 52-48 majority in 2018, and they want to get placeholder GOP Sen. Luther Strange to resign ASAP, which would somehow trigger a brand new special election process and allow Alabama GOP Gov. Kay Ivey to appoint someone else.
Can you guess who that might be?
Republican leaders are exploring a dramatic remedy to salvage the Alabama Senate seat as fresh polling shows Roy Moore's prospects fading fast.
With less than four weeks until the special election and no sign that the party’s besieged nominee will exit the race, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and his top advisers are discussing the legal feasibility of asking appointed Sen. Luther Strange to resign from his seat in order to trigger a new special election.
McConnell aides express caution, saying they're uncertain whether such a move, one of several options being discussed, is even possible. Yet the talks underscore the despair among top Republicans over relinquishing a seat in deep-red Alabama, further diminishing their slim Senate majority.
New GOP polling obtained by POLITICO suggests that Moore is cratering. A survey conducted by the National Republican Senatorial Committee after allegations emerged that Moore had engaged in sexual misconduct with teenagers showed him trailing Democratic candidate Doug Jones by 12 points. Other recent polling has the race closer.
McConnell’s team had been high on the idea of asking Jeff Sessions, who held the Alabama seat for two decades prior to becoming Attorney General, to run as a write-in candidate. But the committee polled the prospect of Sessions waging a write-in bid and the outcome was unfavorable, said three people familiar with the results. Party officials worry that a write-in candidacy would serve only to split the Republican vote and seal a Jones victory.
Plus, Sessions isn't interested, according to several people who've spoken about it with him. He has received overtures from Republican lawmakers, including Richard Shelby, Alabama’s longtime Republican senator, who spoke with Sessions this week.
I believe that Sessions might not want to do this, but I damn sure bet that Sessions will do it if Trump tells him to resign. Of course in this scenario, Alabama would need another interim senator between whenever Strange resigned and whenever Ivey decides to hold the special election, and I'm guessing Sessions would be convinced to do it.
My theory then goes that Trump would need an interim Attorney General, and Trump would just play Saturday Night Massacre and keep firing people until he found somebody who would get rid of Mueller.
Of course, the combination of staking out Roy Moore in the desert and firing Robert Mueller would be that Constitutional Crisis™ moment that we've been expecting for some time now, with the results being who knows what. It's going to be a political supervolcano going off under the country and I think things would get demonstrably worse around these parts very quickly.
Personally, I keep forgetting that the DoJ official that Nixon found to be his bag man to shitcan special prosecutor Archie Cox was the now infamous Robert Bork. I wonder who Trump will find to pull the trigger should this go down.
And before you say "Trump won't do that" consider that we're at the point where the GOP is so completely morally bankrupt and fundamentally opposed to open democracy that they party leaders are now openly having a serious talk of voiding an election just to get rid of a guy whom they can't convince to step aside.
So yes, I absolutely think the GOP is 100% capable of doing this. Whether Trump will or not I don't know, but it would be the best way to get rid of both Mueller and Sessions. Both have slighted Trump in the past, and we all know how much Trump loves to gain vengeance.
If we're at this point in the game, where Strange is being pressured to resign now, then the rest of this is absolutely possible. If it happens things are going to move extremely quickly.
Stay tuned.
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