ATLANTA – The filing of first-time unemployment claims in Georgia was nearly flat last week, the state Department of Labor reported Thursday.
Jobless Georgians filed 24,789 initial claims last week, up just 89 from the week before.
Meanwhile, state Commissioner of Labor Mark Butler reiterated a plea he made last week for claimants who have reached the end of their benefit year to file a new claim to continue receiving payments. With the coronavirus pandemic now more than a year old, some long-term unemployed Georgians are reaching that point.
“We are now seeing claimants who have received payments for more than 52 weeks who are reapplying for UI [Unemployment Insurance] benefits,” Butler said. “We will continue to issue payments while also working to transition claimants into the almost 222,000 jobs available on Employ Georgia.”
Since COVID-19 struck Georgia in March of last year, the labor department has paid out more than $19.9 billion on more than 4.5 million claims filed, more than during the last nine years combined before the pandemic.
Last week, the job sector accounting for the most first-time unemployment claims in Georgia was accommodation and food services with 6,535 claims. The administrative and support services sector was a distant second with 2,720 claims, followed closely by manufacturing with 2,706.
ATLANTA – Legislation creating a state commission with the power to investigate complaints against prosecutors and remove those guilty of misconduct cleared the Georgia House of Representatives Thursday.
The measure, which passed 101-66, stems from last year’s shooting death of Ahmaud Arbery, a Black man, near Brunswick. Three white men have been charged with murder.
While the killing too place in February, District Attorney Jackie Johnson didn’t recuse herself from the case until June, disclosing that she knew one of the suspects. She drew heavy criticism for the delay, and lost her bid for reelection last November.
While judges in Georgia must answer to the state Judicial Qualifying Commission, no such oversight exists for prosecutors, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Efstration told his colleagues Thursday.
“Elected prosecutors across the state by and large are doing hard work,” said Efstration, R-Dacula. “But when there are circumstances where prosecutors are not doing that, there needs to be accountability.”
But many House Democrats opposed the bill as unnecessary and questioned majority Republicans’ motives for bringing the legislation.
Rep. Erica Thomas, D-Austell, said elected prosecutors already are subject to oversight by county elected officials, the state attorney general, the Georgia Bar Association and local voters when they seek reelection.
Thomas charged Republicans with seeking to establish an oversight commission to ensure they have a check on the eight newly elected Democratic prosecutors across Georgia.
“Political oversight! That’s where this is headed,” added Rep. Stacey Evans, D-Atlanta.
But Rep. James Burchett, R-Waycross, said the current oversight of elected prosecutors Democrats cited is inadequate. He said the state bar only has the authority to disbar prosecutors, not remove them, while elections are not an immediate solution to a prosecutor guilty of misconduct.
“We’ve seen specific and concrete examples of the need,” Burchett said. “The solution makes sense.”
Thursday’s vote marked the second time the House has passed the bill this year. After it failed to make it through the Senate before the Crossover Day deadline, House leaders attached it another bill banning local elected officials suspended following a felony indictment from being paid while their case is adjudicated.
It now moves over to the state Senate for consideration during the final two days of the 2021 legislative session.
Thousands gathered outside the State Capitol to protest police brutality and racial injustice as lawmakers met for the 2020 legislative session on June 19, 2020. (Photo by Beau Evans)
A move to put tight limits on the ability of local governments in Georgia to reduce police budgets in the wake of nationwide protests last summer passed in the state Senate on Thursday.
The bill, sponsored by Rep. Houston Gaines, R-Athens, has sparked heated debate in the General Assembly amid efforts by Republican leaders to bolster support for law enforcement and a bid by Democratic lawmakers to push changes to Georgia’s criminal justice system.
House Bill 286 would forbid cities and counties from cutting the budgets of most police agencies in the state by more than 5% over a five-year period, excluding times of economic trouble that demand budget cuts across the board from local governments.
The bill follows last summer’s protests against police brutality and racial injustice that rocked cities across the U.S., including Atlanta, and spurred calls from criminal-justice advocates to trim public spending on police in order to fund other areas such as education, social services and mental health.
Those protests also sparked reaction from Republican leaders to double down on support for law enforcement, particularly to oppose what conservatives called “defund police” efforts that became a main issue in the 2020 election cycle.
Sen. Randy Robertson, R-Cataula, who carried Gaines’ bill in the Senate, said Thursday the chamber should not “sit idly by” after the city councils in Atlanta and Athens nearly passed budget cuts for their police officers recently.
“I think everyone sees the things going on around the country,” Robertson said from the Senate floor. “What this does is prevent the citizens from being caught up in the politics.”
The bill passed 36-15 vote in the Senate, with some Democratic senators voting in favor, and now heads back to the state House of Representatives for final passage. It cleared the House last month 101-69 nearly along party lines.
Critics called the funding restrictions a power grab by the state over local governments that would stall efforts to fund other areas like mental health, housing and education as ways to boost more community-oriented policing and keep people from landing in jail.
However, several Democrats including Sen. Freddie Powell Sims, D-Dawson, joined Republicans in backing the budget-cut restrictions on grounds local police need more funding for training in de-escalation tactics and mental-health response, not less.
“We need and we support public safety officers that are well trained to respect and manage difficult situations as best they can,” Sims said.
Robertson, a retired major with the Muscogee County Sheriff’s Office, has sponsored a separate measure in the Senate that would make it a felony to damage property or injure someone during a protest and hold city and county governments liable for not quelling rowdy demonstrations.
He has also sponsored another measure that would create a new driver’s education course on how to interact with police officers during traffic stops in Georgia.
Those measures come as lawmakers close in on passing a bill to repeal Georgia’s citizen’s arrest law following the high-profile killing of Ahmaud Arbery near Brunswick last year.
Sen. Max Burns presents his omnibus Georgia election bill shortly before final passage in the state Senate on March 25, 2021. (Photo by Beau Evans)
ATLANTA – Sweeping legislation to overhaul voting by mail, advance voting and state oversight of Georgia elections passed out of the General Assembly Thursday and was promptly signed by Gov. Brian Kemp after months of intense debate at the state Capitol.
The 95-page bill contains dozens of proposals pitched by Republicans that would require stricter voter ID rules for mail-in ballots, ban people from handing out food and drink to voters waiting in line outside polling places and halt absentee ballot applications from being accepted within 11 days of an election.
It cleared the state House of Representatives by a 100-75 vote along party lines Thursday before gaining final passage a few hours later in the state Senate, also by a party-line vote. Kemp signed the bill into law about an hour after its passage in the Senate.
The bill, sponsored by state Sen. Max Burns, R-Sylvania, absorbed proposals from several other election-focused measures on its way to passing out of the state legislature, swelling to nearly 100 pages from an original 2-page bill last week in a process that drew concerns over transparency.
Beyond absentee and early voting changes, Burns’ bill would also allow state officials to take over county election boards for poor performance, which Democratic leaders and voting-rights advocates argue could give Republicans a back door to influence local election operations in many counties.
The bill also dropped a prior effort by Republican state lawmakers to shrink early voting on Sundays in Georgia. It instead would require two Saturdays of early voting and give counties the option to hold poll hours on two Sundays.
Among the bill’s most contentious changes to survive final passage is a requirement that registered Georgia voters provide the number on their driver’s license or state ID card to request and cast absentee ballots. If they do not have those ID forms, voters instead would have to send in a copy of their passport, employee ID card, utility bill or bank statement.
“Our goal is to ensure election integrity and to restore or confirm confidence in the election process,” Burns said from the Senate floor shortly before the bill’s passage.
Georgia Democratic leaders have long condemned the changes pushed by Republicans, characterizing them targeted at minority and low-income voters to curb election turnout in communities where Democrats tend to draw strong support.
“Make no mistake: This is democracy in reverse,” said Minority Leader Gloria Butler, D-Stone Mountain. “We are witnessing right now a massive and unabashed assault on voting rights unlike anything we’ve seen since the Jim Crow era.”
Election bills that have sparked intense debate in the General Assembly come after former President Donald Trump and his allies sowed doubts over Georgia’s election system, calling it fraught with fraud despite the repeated rejection of Trump’s claims by state officials and federal courts in recent months.
Speaking from the House floor Thursday, Rep. Barry Fleming, R-Harlem, who has spearheaded the push for election changes in the House, framed the bill as an expansion of voter access and tighter oversight of local election officials as he presented the bill before the vote.
“The bill greatly expands accessibility of voters in Georgia and greatly improves the process of administration of elections, while at the same time providing more accountability to ensure the integrity that the vote is properly preserved,” said Fleming, who chairs the House Special Committee on Election Integrity.
State Rep. Barry Fleming, R-Harlem, has led efforts to bring broad changes to Georgia’s election system during the 2021 legislative session. (Photo by Beau Evans)
A different bill by Fleming is also awaiting consideration on the Senate floor. His 45-page bill was revised earlier this week to allow counties to buy their own voting machines amid distrust over new machines manufactured by Dominion Voting Systems that were first used in Georgia during last year’s elections.
Senate Majority Leader Mike Dugan, R-Carrollton, who has overseen revisions to Fleming’s bill in the Senate, earlier this week slammed opponents for characterizing the elections bills as instruments of voter suppression, which Republicans have denied.
Democrats in the General Assembly have devoted much of this year’s legislative session to condemning moves by Fleming, Burns and top Republicans in both chambers to overhaul voting by mail and limit access to the polls, calling their measures attempts at voter suppression reminiscent of the Jim Crow era of racial segregation.
Opposition from Democrats along with by some Republican leaders including Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan and House Speaker David Ralston, R-Blue Ridge, prompted bill drafters to scrap a controversial proposal that would have repealed no-excuse absentee voting.
Still, Democratic lawmakers view the bill overall as harmful to Georgians’ voting rights, particularly for minority communities that helped boost mail-in voting to record numbers in the 2020 election cycle amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
“You are changing the rules, cutting the polling hours and making more requirements to vote,” said Rep. Erica Thomas, D-Austell. “That’s not right, that’s not fair and that’s not just. … Too many people fought, bled and died for our right to vote.”
Rep. Calvin Smyre is joined by Georgia House Democratic lawmakers to condemn Republican-led election bills in the General Assembly on March 23, 2021. (Photo by Beau Evans)
Republican leaders such as Dugan have bristled at that characterization, dismissing accusations that their bills aim to dampen Black and minority voters from casting ballots in Georgia.
“I think it’s demeaning to all those people who came before who actually had to work their tails off to get those repealed,” Dugan said earlier this week. “The hyperbole is unfortunate.”
Democratic leaders have also sought to paint the Republican-led election bills as an effort to halt momentum following the 2020 elections that saw Democrats carry Georgia in the presidential race and flip both of the state’s U.S. Senate seats for the first time in decades.
Rep. Calvin Smyre, D-Columbus, the legislature’s longest-serving member, said earlier this week Democrats will continue to oppose the bills even with some concessions such as ditching the repeal on no-excuse absentee voting and more weekend poll hours.
“As state legislators, our aim is to ensure that all voters, particularly voters of color, have full, meaningful and non-burdensome access to the one fundamental right, and that is the preservation of all other rights, and that is the right to vote,” Smyre said.
Lawmakers have a week more to wrap up fine-tuning of the election bills on the one hand or fighting them on them other. The last day of the General Assembly session is next Wednesday, March 31.
This story has been revised to reflect that the House and Senate have both passed Sen. Burns’ election bill.
Paid parental leave for state employees and teachers has been a priority of Georgia House Speaker David Ralston for the last two years. (Photo by Beau Evans)
ATLANTA – About 246,000 state employees and teachers in Georgia would be able to take up to three weeks of paid parental leave under legislation the state Senate passed unanimously Thursday.
The bill, which the Georgia House of Representatives approved overwhelmingly last month, would apply to parents following the birth of a child of their own, an adopted child or a foster-care placement.
Full-time employees would become eligible for paid parental leave after six months on the job.
The House passed the same bill last year, a priority of House Speaker David Ralston, shortly before the General Assembly was forced to take a three-month break because of the coronavirus pandemic.
When lawmakers returned to the Gold Dome in June, the Senate essentially gutted the measure and substituted a different bill reducing legislators’ salaries in an attempt to cut costs because of the pandemic. When the House refused to go along with the change, the bill died.
Because of changes the Senate Industry and Labor Committee made to the bill, it must return to the House before it can gain final passage.
