This article is a fascinating and frightening description of the battle within the GOP for control.

On one side is the establishment: McConnell and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. On the other is Steve Bannon and his merry band of anarchists.

The flash point right now is the election of a new senator in Alabama to replace Jeff Sessions.

It is Luther Strange vs. Roy Moore.

Both are running against the government in Washington, even though their fellow Republicans control the Executive and Legislative branches.

In a sign of fights to come, the two Republican candidates are now competing to demonstrate their disgust with Washington politics. Strange, who was appointed this year to take the seat of Attorney General Jeff Sessions, begins one of his most recent television ads looking at the camera and announcing that he is “mad at Washington politicians.”

Moore describes his campaign as an effort to hurt McConnell, drain the swamp and bring more radical policies to the Senate, including a possible effort to impeach sitting U.S. Supreme Court justices for affirming the constitutionality of same-sex marriages.

Although Trump has endorsed Strange, Bannon is backing Moore — and using the conservative website he runs, Breitbart News, to hammer the incumbent as a “swamp monster.”

Allies of McConnell have been blanketing the Alabama airwaves to shrink Moore’s polling lead. After spending nearly $4 million on ads before the first primary vote in August, the Senate Leadership Fund plans to blitz the state with another $4 million before the Sept. 26 runoff. So far this year, the super PAC has raised more than $11 million, including a $1 million infusion from hedge fund manager Paul Singer last month, federal filings show.

This appears to be the first round in an internecine battle over control of the GOP.

On one side is the Trump team; on the other are the Bannon zealots, funded by the Mercer billionaires. Bannon and friends apparently aim to destroy the United States in their quest for total liberation from any government at all.

A pitched battle for control of the Swamp.

Roy Moore is an extremist who is far to the right of any other extremist in the nation, and he is leading in the polls.

From Wikipedia:

Roy Stewart Moore (born February 11, 1947) is an American lawyer, politician, and former judge. Moore is running for the United States Senate seat vacated by Jeff Sessions upon Sessions’s confirmation as Attorney General of the United States.

Moore was elected to the position of Chief Justice of the Alabama Supreme Court in 2001, but removed from his position in November 2003 by the Alabama Court of the Judiciary for refusing to remove a monument of the Ten Commandments commissioned by him from the Alabama Judicial Building, despite orders to do so by a federal court. Moore sought the Republican nomination for the governorship of Alabama in 2006, but lost to incumbent Bob Riley in the June primary by a nearly 2-to-1 margin. He sought the Republican nomination for the office again in 2010,[1] but placed fourth in the Republican primary.

Moore was again elected Chief Justice in 2013, but was suspended in May 2016, for directing probate judges to continue to enforce the state’s ban on same-sex marriage despite the fact that it had been overturned. Following an unsuccessful appeal, Moore resigned in April 2017, and announced that he would be running for the United States Senate seat which was vacated by Jeff Sessions, upon his confirmation as Attorney General of the United States.[2][3]

In the years preceding his first election to the state Supreme Court, Moore successfully resisted attempts to have a display of the Ten Commandments removed from the courtroom. The controversy around Moore generated national attention. Moore’s supporters regard his stand as a defense of “judicial rights” and the Constitution of Alabama. Moore contended that federal judges who ruled against his actions consider “obedience of a court order superior to all other concerns, even the suppression of belief in the sovereignty of God.”[4]