As Luther Strange continues to fail to gain any traction on the campaign trail in his home state of Alabama in the final weeks before the GOP primary runoff, he picked up about the worst endorsement one can get in the Yellowhammer State on Wednesday.
The globalist, open borders U.S. Chamber of Commerce threw its weight behind Strange’s flailing campaign with less than three weeks to go until the Sept. 26 runoff, as the GOP frontrunner conservative former Alabama Supreme Court chief justice Roy Moore maintains and extends his commanding lead.
“In the big-money Republican primary for senator from Alabama, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is endorsing incumbent Sen. Luther Strange over Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore, cementing what has already become a high-profile race pitting Republican leadership against an insurgent social conservative,” Axios’ Mike Allen and Jonathan Swan reported on Wednesday.
Almost immediately, Judge Roy Moore mocked his opponent for the endorsement of an organization that supports open borders immigration and amnesty for all of the illegal aliens in America.
And Politico’s Daniel Strauss was framing it as an epic battle between globalists and nationalists inside the GOP.
What is particularly interesting is that Strange—for all his bluster and rhetoric that he is supportive of the president—is refusing to back up the president’s support of the RAISE Act from Sens. Tom Cotton (R-AR) and David Perdue (R-GA). The RAISE Act would reduce immigration levels to the United States by about half per year, refocusing U.S. policy for the first time in decades on the effects on American workers rather than foreigners and special business and corporate interests like the Chamber of Commerce represents.
Repeated inquiries to Strange and his campaign from Breitbart News asking for an interview on this matter have been ignored, as Strange continues to dodge pro-Trump conservatives throughout the media and political world.
Moore, on the other hand, publicly backed the president and the RAISE Act this week. Moore has also been channeling now former U.S. Sen Jeff Sessions (R-AL), the man who President Trump selected as his Attorney General, on the campaign trail. This special election between Moore and Strange is for Sessions’ seat. Sessions represented Alabama in the U.S. Senate for two decades, and emerged as one of the fiercest fighters on immigration and trade policy just like President Trump.
Strange has now publicly backed efforts to legislatively grant amnesty to illegal aliens who had their illegally granted executive amnesty status revoked from the unconstitutional Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program.
Strange’s call here is a virtue signal to his buddies across the Washington, D.C., lobbying universe–Strange was a lobbyist for years in D.C.–that he supports amnesty for DACA recipients through legislation on Capitol Hill, legislation that would devastate the middle class American workers who voted for President Trump in November 2016.
This Sept. 26 GOP primary runoff is the second round of voting in the Alabama special election for the U.S. Senate seat Sessions once held, and the winner will likely go on to defeat the Democratic candidate in the special general election later this year.
President Trump endorsed Strange in the first round, which was held on Aug. 15. In that round, many more candidates were running and Moore finished well ahead of Strange—but Trump’s endorsement was largely meant to cut Rep. Mo Brooks (R-AL) off at the pass because of things Brooks had said about the president during the presidential primary in 2016. “The president had not formed an opinion about Roy Moore, according to sources, and the purpose of the Strange endorsement was to block Brooks. Trump has been much quieter since the race moved into the runoff phase,” Allen and Swan wrote on Wednesday.
Since Moore smoked Strange—and Strange held down Brooks—in the first round, however, the president has remained on the sidelines staying out of the second round of voting. Strange’s campaign is in such bad shape that some Strange campaign staff have privately expressed to people throughout the GOP that they expect to lose the election badly on Sept. 26, and they have begun looking for new consulting work soon after the runoff.
Strange is desperate for Trump to bail him out, as he suffers in the polls with multiple polls showing Moore with a well-more-than-double-digit lead with just under three weeks to go. But since the Chamber of Commerce endorsement—in addition to Strange’s hiring of anti-Trump Karl Rove acolytes—are insults to President Trump and his worldview, Strange is as of now per multiple White House sources very unlikely to get any backing from Trump from here on out.
Allen and Swan wrote, too, that “anti-establishment forces backing Moore will inevitably use the Chamber’s support to attack Strange, whom they’re already branding as a D.C. insider / ex-lobbyist.”
Strange has gotten so desperate as of late that he flip-flopped this week against the filibuster rule in the U.S. Senate, issuing a statement and holding a press conference in Birmingham reversing his position where he previously supported it. Strange had earlier this year defended the 60-vote threshold for Senate legislation passage in a letter to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, and he defended it repeatedly on the campaign trail in Alabama. But, after his ardent opposition to President Trump backfired, he flip-flopped agains the deal.
Sources close to Strange, however, tell Breitbart News his new position against the filibuster is only temporary as a gambit to attempt to trick President Trump into campaigning for him, and that he intends to flip-flop back in favor of the filibuster after the election. McConnell and his cronies at the Senate Leadership Fund have been spending millions on Strange’s campaign, and they expect nothing less than Strange to support the filibuster again if he wins the election, these sources close to Strange say.