President Barack Obama is correct when he says federal law trumps state law, Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore told Fox News, but Moore says the president is forgetting one thing: judge's rulings are not law.
Moore appeared on
"Fox News Sunday" to discuss his order to Alabama probate judges not to issued marriage licenses to same-sex couples in the wake of a ruling by U.S. District Court Judge Callie Granade that the state's same-sex marriage ban is unconstitutional.
Granade has power only over the case she was ruling on, Moore has long argued, pointing to Rule 65 of Federal Rules of Procedure, which Moore noted "states very clearly" that no person is bound by a lower court ruling if that person is not before the court.
Granade noted Moore's argument in her later ruling, requiring Mobile County's probate court to abide by her original ruling and issue the licenses.
"She now has one judge under authority, but not the other remaining probate courts of Alabama," Moore told Fox News.
Still, 50 of Alabama's 67 probate judges are set to begin issuing licenses next week. Moore said that will have them breaking Alabama's Constitution, which defines marriage as between a man and a woman.
Moore denied that he is defying the 11 Circuit Court of Appeals or the United States Supreme Court in the issues since he said nobody has yet ruled on the case's merits.
"If they had ruled on the merits we wouldn't be needing to go to the United States Supreme Court in April with a decision on this issue," he said.
The 11th Circuit did not rule on the merits, he said, and the U.S. Supreme Court ruled only on injunctive relief, which Moore said applies only to Alabama's attorney general.
He called the ruling a "federal intrusion of state sovereignty" and said no one but him is standing up to them.
"Twenty-one states have bowed down to federal court orders when they didn't have to," he said.
"What a judge says is not law," Moore added.
If the U.S. Supreme Court rules in favor of same-sex marriage, Moore says he would recuse himself if a related case comes before his court. He believes the ruling would go against the U.S. Constitution, as did Dredd Scott, which denied a black man the right to escape slavery, and Plessy v. Ferguson, which enshrined "separate but equal" as the law of the land.
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