10 Commandments Battle Surges On
Former Alabama Chief Justice to appeal his case
The former Alabama Chief Justice who was ousted for defying a federal judge’s order to remove the now defunct 10 Commandments monument from the state courthouse announced that he would appeal his removal by Wednesday, Dec. 10.
The nine members of Alabama’s Court of the Judiciary unanimously voted to expel Judge Roy Moore during a Nov. 13 court case for his unwillingness to comply with U.S. District Judge Myron Thompson’s order to remove the monument he placed in the courthouse rotunda two years ago. Despite his refusal, the two-ton granite monument was broken and cleared out of the building.
Despite his expulsion, Moore continued to plead his case, arguing that the Alabama state Constitution requires an acknowledgment of God.
"The rule of law is not Judge Thompson's order, but what the law says," he exclaimed. "There are too many people in our country who don't recognize that the rule of law is not whatever a judge says. If that were true, judges in Hitler's Germany would have been correct ordering people to die."
Insisting that he is acting on principle, he said his case has been "more about restoring the acknowledgement of God than the Ten Commandments monument.”
In addition, on Nov. 17, Moore proposed a federal legislation to reassert the power of the Congress to limit the jurisdiction of federal courts. Moore hinted toward this proposal immediately after he was removed, calling it a move that “could alter the course of this country.”
"It entails a restriction of the jurisdiction of the courts under Article III, according to the Constitution, from matters with which they're not supposed to be involved anyway," he explained.
"In other words," he continued, "when courts have usurped jurisdiction of the Constitution, of the meaning of the First Amendment, when they've intruded powers where they don't have a right to be, then the Congress has a right, under the Constitution to restrict the appellate jurisdiction of the United States Supreme Court and the federal district courts, which Congress has created."
The legislation will address that issue he said, along with the "right of the states to be free to acknowledge God."
