ATLANTA – Judges across Georgia should be prepared to hold off resuming in-person court proceedings if the recent surge of COVID-19 cases makes returning to courtrooms unsafe, Georgia Chief Justice Harold Melton said Wednesday.
Melton’s announcement came as he signed his ninth order extending the statewide judicial emergency he first declared back in mid-March, when the coronavirus pandemic began to take hold in Georgia.
Wednesday’s order is similar to monthly orders Melton has issued since September authorizing judges to resume grand jury proceedings and jury trials, as long as the courts followed strict public health guidelines safeguarding all those entering the courthouse.
However, the order also acknowledged recent public health reports that the spread of COVID-19 is worsening significantly in many parts of the state.
“While this order does not impose a blanket shutdown of non-essential in-person proceedings, courts should remain vigilant of changing COVID-19 conditions and be prepared to suspend jury trials as necessary and to reconsider grand jury proceedings as well,” the order states.
The order goes on to warn that courts deciding to hold in-person proceedings should only do so if they can maintain safety.
“We recognize there is such a thing as Zoom fatigue,” Melton said. “But we urge people not to get weary just yet. Now is not the time to relax, especially as we anticipate the arrival of vaccinations in the next few months.”
The order urges judges who decide to conduct in-person proceedings to manage their calendars in a way that minimizes wait times and avoids having groups of people congregating in the courtroom or other common areas of the courthouse. It also suggests that district attorneys prioritize for indictment criminal cases of defendants who have been detained.
Previous orders had placed a stay on the legal requirement that detained defendants have a grand jury hearing within 90 days or be granted a bond.
“We will be lifting that stay at some point and prosecutors should be prioritizing the cases they need to present to grand juries to reduce backlogs,” Melton said.
Wednesday’s order extends the judicial emergency for another 30 days through Jan. 8.
U.S. Sens. Kelly Loeffler (left) and David Perdue (right), both Republicans from Georgia, are campaigning to hold their seats in runoff elections on Jan. 5, 2021. (Photos by Beau Evans)
Georgia’s two U.S. senators and more than a dozen Republican state lawmakers are backing a lawsuit brought by the state of Texas on Tuesday seeking to overturn the certified results of Georgia’s presidential election.
U.S. Sens. David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler, both Republicans, said in a joint statement late Tuesday that they support the Texas lawsuit despite opposition from Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr’s office, which called the suit “constitutionally, legally and factually wrong.”
The Texas challenge comes as Georgia lawmakers prepare for another hearing on Thursday to air claims of fraud in Georgia’s election system that have fallen flat so far in several federal lawsuits brought by allies of President Donald Trump, who has refused to concede defeat in last month’s general election.
The suit also comes as Republicans pin their hopes on Perdue and Loeffler to prevail in the Jan. 5 runoff elections, which will decide the balance of power in the Senate and would give President-elect Joe Biden’s administration free rein over policymaking if both Democratic candidates win.
Filed before the U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday, the suit by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton seeks to block Electoral College members in four states – Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania – where Biden won the popular vote. It asks the court to let those states’ Republican-controlled legislatures pick the electors, likely overturning more than 20 million votes and handing victory to Trump.
Loeffler and Perdue hailed the Texas suit as well as other Trump-supporting legal challenges involving fraud claims that federal judges have shot down in recent weeks and election officials from both political parties in multiple states including Georgia have dismissed as baseless.
“This isn’t hard and it isn’t partisan,” said the joint statement from Loeffler and Perdue. “It’s American. No one should ever have to question the integrity of our elections system and the credibility of its outcomes.”
Their comments echoed praise for the Texas suit that came earlier Tuesday from 16 Georgia Senate members including Senate Majority Whip Steve Gooch, R-Dahlonegah, who jointly called it a “very important case.”
The Texas suit argues Georgia logged several thousand votes favoring Biden that should have gone for Trump due to “statistical improbability,” citing certain figures for mail-in ballot rejection rates that Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger’s office has disputed as inaccurate.
Perdue and Loeffler last month called for Raffensperger’s resignation over the fraud claims, prompting backlash from state election-system manager Gabriel Sterling who said the move helped open a “floodgate of crap” from conspiracy theorists. Raffensperger and Sterling, both Republicans, have said they’ll still vote for Perdue and Loeffler despite the controversy.
Many state senators who praised the lawsuit held a hearing last week that allowed hours of unchecked fraud claims from witnesses and experts brought by Trump’s personal attorney and former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani. The House is expected to follow suit with Thursday’s scheduled hearing.
Democratic state lawmakers have condemned the hearings as open forums for conspiracy theories and empty allegations that aim to placate staunch Trump voters who have decided the presidential election was “rigged” rather than actually probe legitimate fraud claims.
State Sen. Elena Parent, D-Atlanta, who said she’s received death threats following her attendance at last week’s hearing, mocked Loeffler and Perdue for backing the out-of-state lawsuit, saying they “are welcome to be the senators from the great state of Texas.”
“As elected officials, our job is to encourage the public’s faith in the democratic process,” Parent said. “Continuing to engage with baseless allegations of fraud is irresponsible and immoral.”
Loeffler, an Atlanta businesswoman appointed to retired U.S. Sen. Johnny Isakson’s seat earlier this year, is facing Rev. Raphael Warnock, the senior pastor of Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church in one of next month’s runoffs. Perdue, a Sea Island businessman, has drawn investigative journalist Jon Ossoff in the other.
Early voting for the Senate runoff elections starts Dec. 14.
ATLANTA – Georgia tax collections rose in November for the second consecutive month, the state Department of Revenue reported Tuesday.
The state brought in nearly $1.96 billion last month, an increase of $150.9 million – or 8.3% – over November of last year. That represented a much healthier bounce than the 1.8% increase in revenues in October.
Individual income taxes were up 14.3%, driven largely by a 13.7% increase in individual withholding payments.
Gross sales tax payments rose by 6% last month compared to November of last year. However, net sales taxes declined by 1.3%.
Corporate income tax collections shot up in November by 284%, resulting primarily from an even larger 419% increase in payments. Tax refunds fell by 31%.
With Georgia drivers back on the roads despite the persistence of the coronavirus pandemic, the state took in 1.6% more in motor fuel tax revenues last month than last year’s November total.
The stronger numbers in November helped boost state tax receipts for the fiscal year thus far by $551.1 million, an increase of 5.7% over the first five months of fiscal 2020.
ATLANTA – The state of Texas filed a lawsuit Tuesday against Georgia and three other battleground states in last month’s presidential election.
The suit, filed in the U.S. Supreme Court, charges the states of Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin with “significant and unconstitutional irregularities” in conducting the Nov. 3 election.
It asks the justices to delay next week’s scheduled Electoral College vote expected to finalize President-elect Joe Biden’s victory over President Donald Trump and instead allow the legislatures of each of the four states to appoint the electors. All four states’ legislatures are controlled by Republicans.
“These flaws cumulatively preclude knowing who legitimately won the 2020 election and threaten to cloud all future elections,” the suit states.
The Texas lawsuit, spearheaded by the state’s Republican attorney general, Ken Paxton, is the latest of dozens of lawsuits filed by Trump allies since the election, many aimed at the unprecedented flood of absentee ballots cast by voters wary of exposure to COVID-19.
Georgia Deputy Secretary of State Jordan Fuchs dismissed the lawsuit as “false and irresponsible.”
“Texas alleges that there are 80,000 forged signatures on absentee ballots in Georgia, but they don’t bring forward a single person who this happened to,” he said. “That’s because it didn’t happen.”
The lawsuit was filed on the “safe harbor” deadline for states to certify their slates of electors before the Electoral College meets in all 50 states next Monday.
It also comes on the heels of a series of legislative hearings in Georgia and the other battleground states Biden carried by narrow margins last month.
A Georgia Senate subcommittee heard hours of testimony last week from witnesses assembled by Trump lawyer and former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani alleging incidents of voter fraud in Georgia.
Another day of hearings is scheduled to take place Thursday before the state House of Representatives’ Governmental Affairs Committee.
Four Republican state senators have asked Gov. Brian Kemp to call a special session of the General Assembly to consider overturning the results of the election in Georgia by appointing a slate of GOP electors to vote at the Electoral College meeting Dec. 14.
Kemp called such talk “simply unlawful and unconstitutional” Tuesday during a news conference called to discuss Georgia’s plans for distributing the new COVID-19 vaccine.
“For us to call a special session because of evidence that was presented in a Senate hearing does not address the way that evidence should be used to alter an election in Georgia,” the governor said.
“If that evidence is so overwhelming, there are options … to take those into a court of law, to present those to a judge and have the judge rule on those matters. This is not an issue that’s set up in the General Assembly for lawmakers or myself per the constitution and laws in the state to deal with.”
Gov. Brian Kemp (left) and Georgia Public Health Commissioner Dr. Kathleen Toomey (right) embarked on a statewide tour to promote mask use on July 1, 2020. (Gov. Kemp official Twitter account)
Georgia could have “several hundred thousand doses” of COVID-19 vaccines in the next week or so for distribution to health-care workers and elderly care facilities, according to the state’s top public-health official.
Those doses will roll out immediately once approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration this month but will not be enough to cover all of Georgia’s hospital workers and nursing-home staff and residents, said Dr. Kathleen Toomey, commissioner of the state Department of Public Health.
More rounds of the vaccine will arrive depending on how fast pharmaceutical companies Pfizer and Moderna produce it, as well as how the federal government’s Operation Warp Speed distribution program plans to divvy out doses, Toomey said at a news conference Tuesday.
“We’ll be able to get this throughout the state,” Toomey said. “I’m very confident of that.”
Officials in several state agencies have been working for months on plans to transport the vaccine throughout Georgia, decide who should have first dibs in the early wave of limited doses and coordinate with local pharmacies and health-care providers that will administer the shots.
Once hospitals and nursing homes get the vaccine, workers in key sectors like first responders and energy companies, plus older Georgians with health issues, will be next in line for doses. The general public should have access by summer, Toomey said.
Given the long wait for widespread immunization, Gov. Brian Kemp said it’s essential people in Georgia do not stop social distancing and wearing masks even as the vaccine begins to arrive in limited batches.
“Our first shipments will not be anywhere close enough for anyone in our state to stop following the same public-health guidance that we’ve had in place for many months,” Kemp said. “We cannot give up now. We all must do our part so that the sacrifices that everyone has made will not be done in vain.”
Tuesday’s vaccine update came as Georgia continues to see increasing numbers of positive COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations during the winter holiday season, as more people head indoors for colder weather and face temptation to gather without masks for Thanksgiving and Christmas.
Nearly 500,000 people in Georgia have tested positive for COVID-19 so far and more than 9,000 Georgians have died of the virus.
Kemp signaled he is still reluctant to impose tougher measures like smaller crowd-size restrictions or business shutdowns for the time being, saying that Georgia is “faring much better” than many other states with more severe outbreaks.
“I would urge Georgians that if there’s an activity that involves being around a lot of people that you don’t have to do, don’t do that,” Kemp said. “I feel like we’re in a good spot … but it’s going to be our citizens that flatten the curve.”
Once the vaccine arrives, Toomey said county health departments working with local providers will pick the first recipients. Distribution will happen statewide, even to isolated rural areas, she said. Everyone except children will eventually have access to the vaccine free of charge.
Besides those logistics, the biggest challenge facing Georgia will be for state officials and health experts to cut through public skepticism over the vaccine’s safety and make sure enough people are immunized to halt COVID-19’s spread.
Toomey assured the vaccine will be safe and highly effective based on data from clinical trials Pfizer and Moderna released last month.
“I can say with great enthusiasm: I can’t wait to get vaccinated,” Toomey said. “I’m so looking forward to that opportunity, and I hope we can convey that same desire to people throughout Georgia.”
“We feel very confident that these vaccines will work, are safe and are important to ensure the safety of all Georgians at this time.”
