Congratulations to state Sen. Colton Moore, the most successful graduate yet of the Marjorie Taylor Greene school of public affairs, where attention and eyeballs are more important than the facts underlying a situation.
Moore is the now-Internet-famous Republican from Trenton who tried to push, shove and otherwise wheel his way into the state House chamber Thursday ahead of Gov. Brian Kemp’s State of the State address Thursday. “I’ll never back down! I’ll never give up! They’ll have to put a bullet in my head to ever stop me!” he yelled.
After a round of jostling with the House doorkeeper, a tumble to the ground and a half-dozen Georgia State troopers warning him that he had “taken the situation too far,” Moore was arrested and sent to the Rice Street jail for willful obstruction of law enforcement officers.
There, he promptly claimed to be an “America First” victim of the justice system, just like Donald Trump, and got his very own mug shot like the one Trump made famous after he was booked and fingerprinted at the Rice Street jail too.
“I don’t believe that they’re after me; I believe they’re after what I stand for,” he told reporters, with a line that could have been lifted straight from a Trump rally.
Before the story goes any further, understand what this was — a publicity stunt from a sophomore senator who has been banned from the House floor and the Senate GOP caucus by his own Republican colleagues for his earlier combative behavior.
If attention was Moore’s goal Thursday afternoon, boy did he get it. After local reporters captured the events on their camera phones, footage of the scrap at the Capitol immediately went viral on social media. Within hours, even London’s Daily Mail was writing about the “chaos as the Georgia senator is knocked to the floor.”
Moore is now claiming that he and his constituents are being denied their “constitutional right” to be at the governor’s State of the State address, never mind that he could watch the same speech from the hallway on video monitors 10 feet away.
What Moore has not mentioned in his complaints of being abused are the events that led up to his fellow Republicans’ extraordinary steps to keep him out of the House chamber, and their own Senate caucus, in the first place.
First, the Senate, where in the summer of 2023 Moore pushed for a special session of the General Assembly to remove Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis from office for prosecuting Trump on election interference charges. Moore declared it “the fight of our lifetime” and paid for robocalls, texts and emails to target fellow Republican senators to pressure them to join his effort. When they refused, the North Georgia truck driver and auctioneer went on Steve Bannon’s podcast to turn the screws.
“Do you want a civil war? I don’t want a civil war. I don’t want to have to draw my rifle,” Moore said. “I want to make this problem go away with my legislative means of doing so.”
He kept up the pressure, even as senators received threats against them and their young families. With every post on social media about the matter, including the day he was expelled from his caucus, Moore used the publicity to raise money for his reelection campaign. “HELP ME FIGHT BACK!” he wrote, with a link to his campaign account.
Relations between Moore and his colleagues got worse in 2024. Already banished by Senate Republicans, he used a speech during a resolution meant to honor the late House Speaker David Ralston to instead accuse Ralston of corruption — as Ralston’s wife and children watched on.
Lt. Gov. Burt Jones cut him off, while Senate Majority Leader Steeve Gooch called Moore’s speech “probably the meanest thing I’ve seen anybody do in this chamber in the 14 years I’ve served.” Across the Capitol, House members were so offended they applauded when Burns announced Moore would not be allowed into “any property of the Georgia House.”
That brings us to Thursday.
After refusing earlier in the week to apologize to Ralston’s family, which Burns said would have allowed him to return to the House, Moore showed up for the governor’s speech knowing he would be turned away. Told in front of cameras that he could not go into the House chamber, we all saw what happened next.
Moore is not the first lawmaker to be arrested for trying to enter a space in the Capitol. But others who came before him, including Atlanta Democrats state Rep. Park Cannon and then-state Sen. Nikema Williams, were arrested during protests for actual issues.
Cannon was arrested after she tried to enter the governor’s office as he signed an election law she said would lead to voter suppression. And Williams was arrested while standing in the rotunda with her constituents to call for every vote to be counted after the 2018 election.
Moore, by contrast, was arrested after going where he knew he would find a fight.
Although some are saying Moore had the right to be in the chamber, every legislative body has rules members agree to for the good of the people they’re serving. The senator’s behavior showed that Burns’ decision to ban him kept the sideshow outside where it belonged.
In an appropriately dramatic update Thursday night on social media, Moore spoke from a hospital bed in Midtown, still wearing the shirt and pants he had on at the Capitol, to report his hand was “a bit swollen and purple.”
“They took my liberty and freedom away because I was fighting for your liberty and freedom.”
Below that on Moore’s social media post was his Fulton County mug shot, posted alongside the identical image of Trump when he was arrested in Atlanta.
Expect the press tour and fundraising links next. This is how it works.
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