ATLANTA – Legislative leaders are promising to tackle two issues that dominated the news in Georgia and across the nation when the 2021 General Assembly session kicks off on Monday.
Weeks of protests and legal challenges sparked by President-elect Joe Biden’s razor-thin victory over President Donald Trump in Georgia and other battleground states have prompted a call for changes to voting laws in Georgia, including restrictions on mail-in voting.
Street demonstrations across America following the death of George Floyd, a Black man, after a police officer kneeled on his neck for nearly nine minutes in Minneapolis, and the shooting death of another Black man, Ahmaud Arbery, by white vigilantes in Georgia provided momentum for state lawmakers to pass a hate-crimes bill last June and pledge to follow up with more criminal-justice reforms this year.
The General Assembly also will fulfill the annual legal requirement of passing a balanced state budget, buoyed by healthier-than-expected state revenues but hampered by demands from state agencies to restore at least some of the spending cuts the legislature imposed last year.
And lawmakers will renew what has become an annual debate over whether to legalize gambling in Georgia in various forms, from online sports betting and pari-mutuel betting on horse racing to casinos.
Proposals to change Georgia’s election laws will take center stage under the Gold Dome as lawmakers from both parties grapple with changing voter patterns that saw the 2020 presidential election and both of the state’s U.S. Senate seats flip in Democrats’ favor.
Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger is calling for tightening state voter ID laws for mail-in ballots and eliminating no-excuse absentee voting, which since 2005 has allowed Georgians to request absentee ballots for any reason, not just because they live out of state or are physically impaired.
The June 9 primaries, Nov. 3 general election and Jan. 5 Senate runoffs each saw more than one million absentee ballots cast, shattering previous mail-in voting records.
Raffensperger traced slow turnaround times that sparked suspicions over Georgia’s election integrity to the flood of absentee ballots.
“It makes no sense when we have three weeks of in-person early voting available,” Raffensperger told state lawmakers last month. “It opens the door to potential illegal voting.”
House Speaker David Ralston said another priority will be getting rid of the “jungle primary” law in Georgia, which set the stage for the huge field of 21 candidates in November’s special election for the Senate seat held by Republican Kelly Loeffler.
It opened the door for former U.S. Rep. Doug Collins, R-Gainesville, to split the GOP vote with Loeffler, forcing last week’s runoff that resulted in Loeffler’s loss to Democrat Raphael Warnock.
“I don’t know who could be in favor of a jungle primary anymore,” said Ralston, R-Blue Ridge.
Ralston said he also expects the General Assembly to consider repealing Georgia’s citizen’s arrest law, which has been invoked by the defendants in the Arbery case, as a follow-up to last year’s hate crimes measure.
Rep. Carl Gilliard, D-Garden City, pre-filed a bill last month to do just that. He said the citizen’s arrest law dates back to the 19th century and is out of date.
“The average person can pick up a phone, dial 911 and have the professionals handle it,” Gilliard said.
Gilliard said the Arbery case and last summer’s Black Lives Matter protests will put momentum behind repealing the citizen’s arrest law.
“This has been a year where people all over the world sounded an alarm,” he said. “We’ve got to listen to the voice and the will of the people.”
Legislative budget writers enter the 2021 General Assembly session more optimistic than might have been expected in the midst of a pandemic-driven economic slowdown that has forced thousands of businesses to close and put several million Georgians on unemployment. State tax revenues have been coming in at a healthy pace in recent months.
With Democrats taking over the White House and both houses of Congress, the state can expect more federal aid than would have been likely otherwise, said Danny Kanso, tax and budget policy analyst for the Georgia Budget and Policy Institute. Congressional Republicans dug in their heels last fall against putting more COVID-19 relief toward state and local government affected by the pandemic.
“The odds of getting significant aid to state and local governments is increasing substantially,” Kanso said.
But Georgia Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Blake Tillery noted the 2021 session is starting with the state in a financial hole, since the General Assembly was forced to cut agency spending by $2.2 billion last year.
“We’re doing better than we thought we would, but I don’t think we’ll be in a position to add that $2.2 billion back,” said Tillery, R-Vidalia.
Ralston said legislative Republicans have yet to fulfill a commitment to voters to follow through with the second installment of a state income tax cut and a 2% teacher pay raise.
“People need their money,” he said. “They need to keep more of their money.”
Gov. Brian Kemp said raising teacher pay remains a priority but will be a tough sell during this session because of the economic impacts of COVID-19.
“We still want to do the pay raise,” he said. “It’s just exactly when we can get to that, I think it’s a little early to commit as to when. … If we have revenues, we’ve got to make sure that we restore funding to our schools.”
While lawmakers face no legal obligation to address the legalized gambling issue every year as they do with the budget, it has become a perennial subject of debate under the Gold Dome.
Nothing has come close to passing, however, due to the difficulty of amassing the two-thirds majorities in each legislative chamber necessary to approve a constitutional amendment. Another obstacle has been opposition from religious conservatives.
A proposal to legalize online sports betting has the best chance of passing this year for two reasons. Supporters say it will not require a constitutional change because it can be accomplished by adding it to the current state law governing the Georgia Lottery program.
Sports betting also is being backed by a coalition of Atlanta’s four pro sports teams: the Braves, Falcons, Hawks and Atlanta United.
Billy Linville, spokesman for the Georgia Professional Sports Alliance, said the industry has been hit hard by the coronavirus pandemic and needs the boost sports betting would give to fan interest.
“Our professional sports teams in Georgia generate billions of dollars for our state and thousands of jobs,” he said. “[The teams] have to enhance their engagement with fans or they’ll go elsewhere.”
Backers of casinos and pari-mutuel betting on horse racing also will back pushing those measures. But since they would require a constitutional amendment putting them on the statewide ballot for Georgia voters to decide, they face longer odds.
ATLANTA – The Georgia Department of Labor started paying out unemployment benefits last week through the new federal COVID-19 relief legislation even as a group of unemployed Georgians sued the agency to speed up checks.
The labor department paid out state and federal unemployment benefits last week to almost 300,000 jobless Georgians, including nearly 167,000 who received checks through the new Continued Assistance Act Congress passed late last month.
“We were able to pay most Georgians without interruption, even with the new guidelines put forth by the new legislation,” Georgia Commissioner of Labor Mark Butler said. “We will be implementing even more changes to pay those individuals who have already exhausted benefits and will also implement some of the new programs that were passed in legislation as quickly as possible.
“Some of the elements of the new bill are going to require extensive new programming due to how complex the rules were written in the legislation.”
Meanwhile, the lawsuit, filed by a half dozen unemployed Georgians represented by several legal aid agencies, seeks a court order requiring the labor department process unemployment applications in a timely manner, make eligibility determinations, pay unemployment benefits to eligible applicants, and schedule administrative appeal hearings on eligibility determinations.
Butler has acknowledge a backlog of 40,000 to 50,000 applications, according to the plaintiffs.
First-time unemployment claims in Georgia rose last week by 12,498 to 31,458.
The labor department has paid out more than $16.8 billion in state and federal unemployment benefits to more than 4.2 million Georgians since mid-March, when the coronavirus pandemic first hit Georgia, more than the last nine years combined.
During the week ending Jan. 2, the job sector accounting for the most initial unemployment claims in Georgia was manufacturing with 7,739 claims. The accommodation and food services sector, which had accounted for the most claims for months, was second last week with 6,507 claims, followed by administrative and support services with 3,622.
More than 161,000 jobs are listed online at EmployGeorgia.com for Georgians to access. The labor department offers online resources for finding a job, building a resume, and assisting with other reemployment needs.
Georgia House Speaker David Ralston previewed his priorities for the 2021 legislative session at the State Capitol on Jan. 7, 2021. (Photo by Beau Evans)
Georgia’s most powerful state lawmaker threw cold water Thursday on calls by some top Republican officials to eliminate no-excuse absentee voting after the 2020 election cycle.
House Speaker David Ralston, R-Blue Ridge, indicated he may not support any legislative moves to require Georgians to give specific reasons for requesting mail-in ballots, following a recent push by Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to end the practice.
“Somebody’s got to make a real strong case to convince me otherwise,” Ralston said at a news conference at the state Capitol.
Ralston added he plans to create a new committee focused on election access and oversight as state Republican leaders push to tighten Georgia’s voter ID laws. He also said he would support legislation to change the state’s free-for-all “jungle” primary format for special elections.
Election fraud claims by President Donald Trump and his allies are expected to take a back seat going forward after committees in both General Assembly chambers held hearings on the subject in recent weeks and extremists angered by Trump’s election loss stormed the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday.
“People are concerned [about fraud claims] and I think we have to address those concerns,” Ralston said Thursday. “But people need to know the truth. And I don’t think they have been getting the truth all the time.”
State law has allowed Georgia voters since 2005 to vote by mail for any reason, not just due to living out of state or other specific reasons. Raffensperger has pressed lawmakers to change the law after local election officials were overwhelmed counting absentee ballots in elections this year amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
Proposals to change Georgia’s election laws look to take center stage in the General Assembly’s 2021 legislative session that kicks off next week. State lawmakers are grappling with changing voter patterns that saw the 2020 presidential election and both U.S. Senate seats flip in Democrats’ favor.
The June 9 primaries, Nov. 3 general election and Jan. 5 Senate runoffs each saw more than one million absentee ballots cast, shattering previous mail-in voting records. Raffensperger traced slow turnaround times that sparked suspicions over Georgia’s election integrity to the flood of absentee ballots.
“Until COVID-19, absentee ballot voters were mostly those who needed to cast absentee ballots,” Raffensperger said. “For the sake of our resource-stretched and overwhelmed elections officials, we need to reform our absentee ballot system.”
The Georgia Senate Republican Caucus also has called for eliminating no-excuse absentee voting “to secure our electoral process” as part of a legislative wish list this year that includes requiring a mail-in signature audit and banning absentee ballot drop boxes.
Georgia Democratic leaders have pledged to oppose efforts to overhaul absentee voting, which helped Democratic voters drive up turnout enough to secure wins for President-elect Joe Biden in November and Democratic Sen.-elects Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock this week.
“No-excuse absentee voting has been used safely and effectively by both parties since 2005,” the Georgia Senate Democratic Caucus wrote on Twitter. “Ending the practice in order to try and turn back the tide of Democratic participation in Georgia is voter suppression.”
Ralston also doubled down Thursday on his recent call for law changes that would let the General Assembly choose Georgia’s secretary of state instead of voters. He also hinted he might support creating a new election official in the state and removing election responsibilities from Raffensperger’s office, if such a proposal is brought during the session.
The 2021 legislative session starts on Monday and is expected to run through March.
U.S. Sen. Kelly Loeffler (R-Ga.) speaks at a campaign stop with Georgia First Lady Marty Kemp (center) and state Rep. Jodi Lott (right) at the Penley Art Gallery in Buckhead on Aug. 18, 2020. (Photo by Beau Evans)
ATLANTA – Most of Georgia’s Republican members of Congress stuck with earlier pledges in the wee hours of Thursday morning and opposed certifying President-elect Joe Biden’s Electoral College victory over President Donald Trump.
But a key exception was GOP Sen. Kelly Loeffler, who changed her mind on objecting to the Electoral College results after Trump supporters stormed the Capitol Wednesday afternoon in a melee that resulted in four deaths and more than a dozen injured police officers.
“The violence, lawlessness, and siege of the halls of Congress are abhorrent and stand as a direct attack on the very institution my objection was intended to protect: the sanctity of the American democratic process,” Loeffler declared on the Senate floor Wednesday night.
“Too many Americans are frustrated at what they see as an unfair system. Nevertheless, there is no excuse for the events that took place in these chambers today, and I pray America never suffers such a dark day again.”
Loeffler’s change of heart one day after she lost a bid to retain her Senate seat by a narrow margin to Democrat Raphael Warnock prompted her to withdraw an objection she had previously planned to raise on Biden’s narrow victory over Trump in Georgia. As a result, Congress did not take up an objection raised by Rep. Jody Hice, R-Greensboro. The process requires objections from at least one House member and at least one senator to put a state’s presidential vote on the floor.
Loeffler joined Georgia’s six House Democrats and Republican Reps. Austin Scott of Tifton and Drew Ferguson of West Point in supporting the certification of Biden’s victory.
Hice was joined by Republican Reps. Rick Allen of Evans, Buddy Carter of Savannah, Andrew Clyde of Athens, Barry Loudermilk of Cassville and Marjorie Taylor Greene in opposition.
Scott had made his intentions known earlier in the week when he signed onto a letter with 11 other conservative House Republicans to Speaker Nancy Pelosi and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy supporting upholding the Electoral College results.
“The elections held in at least six battleground states raise profound questions, and it is a legal, constitutional, and moral imperative that they be answered,” the letter stated. “But only the states have authority to appoint electors, in accordance with state law.
“Congress has only a narrow role in the presidential election process. Its job is to count the electors submitted by the states, not to determine which electors the states should have sent.”
Newly elected Rep. Nikema Williams, D-Atlanta, said Congress did the right thing in certifying the results of the Nov. 3 presidential election.
“Congress upheld the will of America’s voters and the sanctity of the democratic process enshrined in the Constitution,” Williams said in a statement after the final vote. “As legislators of the People’s House, it is our duty to certify the appointment of electoral votes legally cast for president and vice president of the United States, not suppress them.
“Any attempt to invalidate the selection of electors or silence the voice of voters is a slap in the face of our democracy, and simply un-American.”
Gov. Brian Kemp (right) joined Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan (center) and Georgia House Speaker David Ralston (left) to condemn riots by Trump supporters at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. (Photo by Beau Evans)
Gov. Brian Kemp readied the Georgia National Guard Wednesday in response to riots at the U.S. Capitol by President Donald Trump’s supporters protesting the Electoral College vote.
Kemp, who faced intense pressure from Trump and his allies to overturn President-elect Joe Biden’s victory in Georgia, called Wednesday’s storming of the Capitol “un-American” and “a disgrace.”
“It is unimaginable that we have people in our state and in our country that have been threatening police officers, breaking into government buildings,” Kemp told reporters inside the Georgia Capitol in Atlanta. “This is not the Georgia way and it is not the way of our country.”
A huge crowd of Trump supporters swarmed the U.S. Capitol as House and Senate lawmakers convened Wednesday to certify President-elect Joe Biden’s Electoral College win. Trump had egged on his supporters to protest the vote and hailed several Republican lawmakers who planned to protest the certification before chaos broke out, including several congressional lawmakers from Georgia.
Kemp has faced the president’s rage in recent weeks for not stepping in to toss out the Nov. 3 general election results, which showed Biden won Georgia by 11,779 votes. On Wednesday, the governor slammed Trump loyalists who have pressured him to order a special legislative session aimed at overturning the election.
“Those of you who have called for a special session: You now know what that would look like,” Kemp said.
Kemp said he is extending an executive order allowing him to mobilize the National Guard that was put in place during protests over the summer against racial injustice and police brutality.
The governor was joined Wednesday by Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan and Georgia House Speaker David Ralston, R-Blue Ridge, who both condemned the riots in Washington, D.C., and urged Trump to disperse the protesters.
“Today is an incredibly sobering reminder of how delicate our democracy truly is,” said Duncan, who for several weeks has called on Trump to drop his fraud claims. “It is also a reminder how dangerous it is for people in power act as if they are more important than that democracy.”
“This is a very sad day,” Ralston said. “The shocking images we have seen from our nation’s capital today are indefensible, un-American and, frankly, heartbreaking.”
The Georgia Senate Republican Caucus also condemned the Trump protesters, saying of Wednesday’s events that “there is no place for such action in this country.”
Some Republican Congress members from Georgia objected to the riots after being forced to lock down in the Capitol rotunda as protesters shattered windows and broke into lawmakers’ offices – though many including U.S Reps. Rick Allen, Barry Loudermilk, Buddy Carter and Marjorie Taylor Greene had earlier pledged to object to the Electoral College certification.
House Democrats from Georgia were unanimous in denouncing the riots, with newly seated U.S. Rep. Carolyn Bourdeaux going so far as to urge her colleagues to impeach Trump a second time.
U.S. Sen. Kelly Loeffler, who lost to Democrat Rev. Raphael Warnock in Tuesday’s runoff election, also condemned the Capitol riots after promising to join House and Senate Republicans objecting to the certification. U.S. Sen. David Perdue was still silent late Wednesday after losing to Democrat Jon Ossoff.
The events in Washington came as Ossoff and Warnock were both set to secure wins in their runoff races for U.S. Senate, giving Democrats control of Congress and the White House for at least the first two years of the incoming Biden administration.
Warnock invoked Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., whose pulpit he presides over at Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church, in calling for the country to focus on healing in the wake of Wednesday’s riots.
“Let us each try to be a light to see our country out of this dark moment,” Warnock said.
