ATLANTA – U.S. Sen. Raphael Warnock, D-Ga., has drawn the most well-known Republican challenger to date to his looming reelection bid next year.
Georgia Commissioner of Agriculture Gary Black entered the 2022 Senate race Friday with a speech at the state Republican convention on Jekyll Island.
“Warnock and [President Joe] Biden promised to ‘fundamentally change America,’ ” Black told the delegates. “They’re five months into it and job growth and opportunity are down, inflation, debt and gas prices are up, [and] the Middle East is back at war.”
After heading the Georgia Agribusiness Council, Black was elected agriculture commissioner in 2010. He was reelected in 2014 and 2018, receiving more votes than any of the candidates for governor or Senate.
During his tenure, Black has made “Georgia Grown” one of the most successful marketing efforts of its kind in the nation.
He helped lead efforts in 2018 to bring state and federal aid to South Georgia farmers hit hard by Hurricane Michael and worked with the Trump administration to steer money raised by tariffs on China to expand marketing efforts in Taiwan.
Other than Black, Warnock hasn’t drawn any Republican challengers with name recognition. Two who have entered the contest are Latham Saddler, an Atlanta banking executive, and Kelvin King, a small business owner and Air Force veteran from Atlanta.
However, one of the most powerful politicians in Georgia, Republican state House Speaker David Ralston, is considering a run for the Senate.
Other Republicans weighing a challenge to Warnock include U.S. Reps. Buddy Carter of Savannah and Drew Ferguson of West Point. Trump has urged University of Georgia football great Herschel Walker to give it a go.
Former Sen. Kelly Loeffler, and former Rep. Doug Collins, who clashed in a Senate race last year eventually won by Warnock, have decided not to run in 2022.
ATLANTA – Candidates for state offices next year will have a lot more cash at their disposal thanks to a law that promises to fundamentally alter the nature of campaigning in Georgia.
The new law, which takes effect July 1, authorizes the creation of “leadership committees” that can raise and spend unlimited contributions on behalf of top statewide and legislative candidates. Recipients also will be able to accept committee donations at any time of the year, including while the General Assembly is in session.
The Republican-controlled legislature passed the measure this year virtually along party lines, with Democrats warning that allowing unlimited campaign contributions will increase the influence of special interests in Georgia politics at a time when public trust in government already is low.
“These leadership committees take away all the restrictions that have been put in place over the years to control big money,” said state Sen. Jen Jordan, D-Atlanta.
Senate Bill 221 will create eight leadership committees to be chaired by Georgia’s governor, lieutenant governor, the general-election nominees opposing those two statewide incumbents and the heads of the majority and minority caucuses of the state House of Representatives and Senate.
There will be no cap on contributions to the committees, which for individual candidates range from $14,000 to $22,200 for statewide posts and $5,600 to $8,600 for legislative seats, depending on whether a candidate is forced into primary and/or general-election runoffs.
However, donations to the new committees will be subject to the same disclosure requirements that apply to statewide and legislative campaigns under current law, said Edward Lindsey, a partner in the Atlanta office of international law firm Dentons LLP and a former House majority whip.
“There’s not any dark money here,” Lindsey said.
The leadership committees also will not be subject to the law prohibiting statewide officeholders and legislators from soliciting or accepting campaign contributions during General Assembly sessions.
Lindsey said that change will help officeholders better compete against primary challengers under the accelerated schedule adopted in recent years, which shifted party primaries from July to May. Legislative sessions typically don’t end until late March or early April.
“Officeholders were at a distinct disadvantage … when they were in a position of having to run in primaries,” Lindsey said.
But Jordan said it’s primary challengers – not incumbent officeholders – who will be put at a disadvantage by the new law.
While Senate Bill 221 lets Georgia’s two top statewide incumbents and their general-election opponents form leadership committees, anyone who wants to mount a primary challenge against one of those incumbents remains subject to the current law’s cap on donations and the time limit on contributions.
“If you’re a Republican challenging [Gov. Brian] Kemp in a primary, he can raise money during the [legislative] session,” Jordan said.
Going further, Jordan suggested incumbent protection may have been what Republican leaders had in mind in crafting the bill.
“Since the GOP is very fractured, there’s more likelihood of a primary challenge,” she said. “That’s a real problem for them. This is how they think they can solve it.”
Lindsey dismissed that line of argument. He said leadership committees are not obligated to support incumbents in a primary.
“There’s nothing to keep leadership committees from backing any candidate,” he said.
Beyond how the new law will affect primary campaigns, opponents are raising the broader issue of what unlimited contributions will mean to the role of money in politics.
“It would allow big corporations and out-of-state big money donors to buy our elections,” Aunna Dennis, executive director of Common Cause Georgia, testified before a House Judiciary Committee hearing on the bill back in March.
“In last year’s elections, private donors spent $24 million on Georgia House races and $12.5 million on Georgia Senate races – and that was with existing donation limits. This bill would allow unlimited donations, so who knows how much money special interests will be willing to ‘invest’ in our elections.”
Jordan said unlimited contributions will put pressure on lobbyists under the Gold Dome to pony up larger donations.
“This is the worst thing ever for them because it increases how much they have to pay up to get in the game,” she said.
Lindsey said the leadership-committee approach to political giving reflects the way the process actually works.
“Politics is a team sport,” he said. “In order to get things done, it takes a team effort. This legislation promotes that philosophy.”
The Biden administration is sending a key component of Gov. Brian Kemp’s health-insurance reform plan back to the drawing board.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is directing the state to revisit the data supporting a waiver Georgia is seeking from the Affordable Care Act that would substitute a private-sector alternative to the federal government’s healthcare.gov insurance exchange.
The waiver won approval from then-President Donald Trump’s HHS last November. But in a letter to Kemp dated Thursday, Chiquita Brooks-LaSure, administrator of HHS’ Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), pointed to changes in both policy and federal law that have altered the landscape.
Among other things, the American Rescue Plan Congress passed in March will strengthen the Affordable Care Act by expanding access to health insurance coverage and lowering the costs of health care, she wrote.
The letter set a deadline of July 3 for Georgia to submit an updated waiver plan reflecting the various changes the Biden administration and Congress have made.
In announcing last October his plan to scrap healthcare.gov in Georgia, Kemp criticized the government-run website as cumbersome and responsible for a 22% enrollment decrease since 2016.
“For me, healthcare.gov is a four-letter word,” the governor said at the time. “The enrollment process has been nothing short of disappointing.”
But Brooks-LaSure wrote that Georgia’s waiver application pointed to a significant need for health coverage in the state despite the enrollment drop. Specifically, she cited an unsubsidized enrollment rate decrease of 72% between 2016 and 2019 and Georgia’s 13.4% uninsured rate, one of the nation’s highest.
Brooks-LaSure expressed a lack of confidence that Georgia’s private-sector approach would get better results than the federal exchange.
“Georgia neither quantified the size of the expected investment by the private sector nor indicated any specific commitments by the private sector to engage in outreach and marketing,” she wrote. “It is unclear if the private market’s outreach efforts in Georgia … would be comparable to [the federal exchange’s] investments.”
Laura Harker, health policy analyst for the Georgia Budget and Policy Institute, praised the CMS letter.
“The state’s proposal for taking away the most popular option for selecting a health care plan – healthcare.gov – could exacerbate our state’s already high rates of uninsured Georgians and inadequate health-care infrastructure,” she said. “This letter from CMS is a step in the right direction to ensure no one loses access to care.”
When asked for comment Friday, Kemp spokesman Cody Hall wrote in an email that the governor’s office is still reviewing the letter.
The waiver from using healthcare.gov is one of two the state has been seeking from the feds. The other waiver, which seeks a more limited expansion of Medicaid than provided for in the Affordable Care Act, was also approved by the Trump administration but was put back on hold after Biden took office.
ATLANTA – State Sen. Bruce Thompson launched a campaign for Georgia commissioner of labor Friday with an attack on the leadership of incumbent Commissioner Mark Butler.
“The Department of Labor has been completely mismanaged and has failed the citizens of Georgia,” said Thompson, R-Cartersville, who will challenge Butler for the Republican nomination next spring.
“It’s time for fresh ideas, new leadership, and a solution-oriented approach to cut through the bureaucratic red tape, empower small businesses in our state and get hardworking Georgians the benefits they deserve.”
Thompson is just the latest Republican politician to challenge a sitting GOP statewide officeholder in what has become a sharply divided Georgia Republican Party.
Thus far, Gov. Brian Kemp has drawn two Republican primary opponents: former state Rep. Vernon Jones and Appling County educator Kandiss Taylor.
U.S. Rep. Jody Hice, R-Greensboro, and former Alpharetta Mayor David Belle Isle are running in next year’s GOP primary against incumbent Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger.
Kemp and Raffensperger have drawn criticism from loyalists of former President Donald Trump inside the Georgia GOP for refusing to overturn last November’s election results that saw Democrat Joe Biden carry the Peach State by just 11,779 votes.
Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan, a third Republican to defend last year’s presidential outcome in Georgia as valid, is not seeking re-election.
Thompson was elected to the Georgia Senate in 2012 in a district that includes Bartow and Cherokee counties and parts of Cobb County.
He is chairman of the Senate’s Economic Development and Tourism Committee and formerly chaired the Science and Technology Committee and the Veterans, Military and Homeland Security Committee.
Thompson has started several businesses, starting with a company he founded in South Florida at age 22 to provide tenant improvements to shopping centers.
In Georgia, he started two automatic swimming pool cover businesses that grew to become the largest in the Southeast before being acquired in 2018.
Thompson also has been active in the insurance business.
The native of Montana attended college on a wrestling scholarship before serving four years in the U.S. Army as a tank commander.
Butler’s labor department has come under fire during the coronavirus pandemic, which caused unemployment claims filed with the agency to skyrocket, piling up a backlog of unprocessed claims.
With state lawmakers being deluged by constituent complaints, the General Assembly responded this year by passing legislation creating the position of “chief labor officer” to work with the commissioner.
However, Kemp vetoed the bill, arguing it would have created an unclear chain of command within the labor department without specifying how to resolve disputes that might have arisen between the commissioner – an elected official – and the chief labor officer.
Two Democrats also have entered the 2022 race for labor commissioner: state Sen. Lester Jackson of Savannah and Georgia Rep. William Boddie of East Point.
ATLANTA – The Georgia Department of Labor is continuing to score higher than comparable states in timely delivery of unemployment benefits despite a barrage of complaints from recipients of long delays.
The Peach State ranks second in the nation among the 10 most populous states for processing claims in fewer than 21 days.
“We are focused on paying eligible claimants accurately and on time,” state Commissioner of Labor Mark Butler said Thursday. “We have continued to rank in the top states in the nation every month for benefit timeliness, furthering our commitment to provide support for Georgians bridging the gap between employment.”
The state experienced a slight uptick in first-time unemployment claims last week. Jobless Georgians filed 24,622 initial claims last week, up 69 from the week before.
Since the coronavirus pandemic struck Georgia in March of last year, the labor department has processed more than 4.8 million unemployment claims, more than during the last 10 years combined before the pandemic. The agency has paid out more than $22 billion in state and federal jobless benefits.
That unprecedented workload has prompted complaints of backlogs in processing claims and distributing benefits, resulting in demonstrations outside the labor department’s downtown Atlanta office.
On Thursday, the commissioner urged claimants to register with the department’s Employ Georgia website before requirements for weekly work searches kick in late this month.
Video tutorials on how to register and utilize the website are available at https://employgeorgia.com.
More than 226,000 jobs are listed on Employ Georgia. Through the site, claimants can access not only job listings but job search assistance, career counseling, skills testing, job fair information and job training services.
The site features special accommodations for people with disabilities and veterans transitioning back into the workforce.
