by Ty Tagami | Feb 28, 2025 | Capitol Beat News Service
The Republican chairman of a special committee of the Georgia Senate that has been investigating Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis has introduced legislation that would expand the committee’s scope to include former Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams.
“I think we ought to get to the bottom of these allegations,” Sen. Bill Cowsert, R-Athens, said Friday, explaining why he had introduced Senate Resolution 292 the day before.
Cowsert was referring to a settlement agreement in January between the Georgia Ethics Commission and groups founded by Abrams.
The New Georgia Project and a separate fundraising arm, the New Georgia Action Fund, agreed to pay $300,000 for failing to disclose $4.2 million in contributions and $3.2 million in spending during the 2018 election cycle on behalf of Abrams’ unsuccessful bid for governor.
It was the largest fine ever assessed by the Ethics Commission.
Cowsert’s Special Committee on Investigations was created last year in the wake of Republican anger over Willis’ criminal case against President Donald Trump and others who helped his effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election.
Willis has refused the Cowsert committee’s summons to testify, fighting it in court.
If the Senate passes SR 292, the committee will have the authority to expand its inquiry to the Abrams-related groups and determine if “existing state laws, including those establishing processes related to campaign finance and the operation of nonprofit organizations, are inadequate.”
Cowsert said he plans to call Abrams to testify after the legislative session ends on April 4.
His committee has no punitive powers, but Cowsert said prosecutors would likely be watching its work.
“We need to learn what’s going on out there, what’s permitted, and see if those guardrails are sufficient or not,” he said.
Democrats say it’s just a political stunt.
Senate Minority Leader Harold Jones II, D-Augusta, slammed his fellow Republicans, saying they took no action in the Trump case, which briefly ensnared the Senate’s top Republican.
In 2022, a Fulton County judge disqualified Willis from prosecuting Lt Gov. Burt Jones, then a state senator, because she had hosted a fundraiser for his Democratic opponent in the lieutenant governor’s race. The case was subsequently moved to a special prosecutor, who cleared Jones of wrongdoing last fall.
The GOP senators’ proposed investigation of Abrams is just “mud and dirt,” Harold Jones said. It’s a distraction from “real issues,” such as the housing crisis, he said.
by Ty Tagami | Feb 28, 2025 | Capitol Beat News Service
Parents who have fostered a child at any point during the prior decade would find it easier to obtain one of Georgia’s new $6,500 annual subsidies for private schooling under legislation adopted by state Senate Republicans in a party-line vote Friday.
Senate Bill 152 would eliminate income and other limitations for households that have fostered children and want access to the Georgia Promise Scholarship Act for their own children. The Act became law last year and will begin enrolling families for the next school year starting Saturday, giving them an annual subsidy commonly known as a voucher.
The Act limits participation to families who live in the attendance zone of a public school that the state has deemed to be performing among the bottom quarter of schools statewide. Except for rising kindergartners, children must also have attended their underperforming public school for a year to be eligible. And they move to the back of the line if their household income exceeds 400% of the federal poverty line, meaning a family of four must have earned $124,800 or less last year to be among those eligible if the money allocated by the state is running out.
SB 152 would exempt foster families from those limitations: they would not have to live in the zone of an underperforming public school, and there would be no income threshold for participation.
However, the exemptions would apply only to the children of parents who fostered a child at any point in the prior decade. Foster children are not addressed by SB 152.
Democrats ardently opposed adoption of the voucher program last year, saying it would benefit the wealthy who can cover the difference in cost between the $6,500 voucher and full tuition, which often exceeds $10,000 a year. Since the funding will come from the same revenue that pays for public schools, the Democrats had also argued that vouchers would cause budget shortfalls. They called the exclusion of foster children in this bill a major shortcoming and questioned why Dolezal and his fellow Republicans didn’t include them.
“The children of the parents can go to the private school,” said Sen. RaShaun Kemp, D-Atlanta. “But we’re telling the foster children ‘no,’ you have to go to the school that I have found to be ineffective for my own kids.”
The bill’s chief sponsor, Sen. Greg Dolezal, R-Cumming, said there are complicated restrictions in existing law that would have to be worked out so that foster children could participate. He said he would work on new legislation to include them after this legislative session.
Dolezal also pushed back on Democrats who saw potential for abuse of the program. Theoretically, if a parent fostered a child for one day, their children would be entitled to enroll for a scholarship with an SB 152 exemption at any time in the next decade. Once enrolled, they, like any enrolled child, could stay in the program until earning a diploma even if it were to take more than a decade and no new foster children entered their household during that time.
Dolezal dismissed that possibility, saying it maligned the intent of foster parents.
“I think we could imagine edge cases in which that would be the case, but I know that the 2,300 families who are currently fostering in the state of Georgia are not doing it for their daily stipend,” he said. “They are doing it for love of the children.”
SB 152 passed 32-22. It now heads to the Georgia House of Representatives, where Speaker Jon Burns, R-Newington, was a strong advocate for the legislation that created the voucher program last year.
by Dave Williams | Feb 28, 2025 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA – Supporters of legalizing gambling in Georgia don’t have long to push their cause across the finish line in the 2025 General Assembly session.
The first piece of sports betting legislation to hit the state House of Representatives this year was introduced Friday with less than a week remaining before Crossover Day – the deadline for legislation to pass either the Georgia House or Senate to remain alive for the year.
Meanwhile, a Senate committee voted down a broader measure on Thursday aimed at bringing both sports betting and casinos to the Peach State.
Rejecting bids to legalize gambling in Georgia has become standard operating procedure in the General Assembly. While 39 states have sports betting in some form, efforts to get sports betting legalized in Georgia have fizzled for years.
A long-running legal dispute over whether a constitutional amendment is required to bring sports betting here has hampered legislative efforts in recent years. Lawmakers also have disagreed over how much to tax betting proceeds and whether to spend that money on Georgia’s lottery-funded HOPE Scholarships and pre-kindergarten programs, health care, economic development, or initiatives to reduce poverty in low-income areas.
A key talking point for supporters of sports betting is that it’s so pervasive around the country – including the neighboring states of Tennessee, North Carolina, and Florida – that Georgians are going elsewhere to place bets, depriving the state treasury of a lucrative revenue source.
“Tens of thousands of people are leaving Georgia every month to gamble,” Sen. Carden Summers, R-Cordele, who is sponsoring a constitutional amendment in the Senate aimed at legalizing both sports betting and casinos, told members of the Senate Regulated Industries Committee Thursday.
State Rep. Marcus Wiedower, R-Watkinsville, introduce constitutional amendment into the House Friday that would be limited to online sports betting. House Resolution 450 has picked up bipartisan support, with 47 Republican House members and 10 Democrats signing on as cosponsors.
“We’ve never seen this level of support before in the House for this resolution,” Wiedower said. “It gives me great confidence of its success as we head into the final month of (the) session.”
Wiedower sponsored legislation two years ago that would have legalized sports betting by statute rather than a constitutional amendment. But he said he’s going with a constitutional amendment this year.
“To avoid the legal argument, the only route to go is the constitutional amendment,” he said.
Summers said the advantage of seeking a constitutional amendment is that it would give Georgia voters a chance to decide the issue in a statewide referendum. He cited a straw poll among Republican primary voters last May that found more than 80% in favor of scheduling a statewide vote on whether to allow “gaming” in Georgia.
“This amendment does not force anyone to gamble,” Summers said. “It simply allows Georgia voters to have their say.”
Summers put a different twist on his proposal not featured in previous versions of legalized gambling: It calls for dividing the first $2 billion of the proceeds evenly among Georgia’s 159 counties. That way, the benefits from casinos wouldn’t just go to the communities where they’re located.
“This is real money that would help with infrastructure, economic development and essential services, especially in rural Georgia where they’re needed most,” he said. “Dispersing these funds evenly is the only fair way to do this.”
Wiedower’s House resolution calls for dedicating most of the proceeds to Georgia’s pre-kindergarten program.
Portions of the proceeds from gambling in both Summers’ and Wiedower’s measures would go toward programs to help problem gamblers avoid become addicted.
Problem gamblers are among the consequences of legalizing sports betting and/or casinos representatives of religious groups have cited over the years in opposing gambling legislation.
Mike Griffin, public affairs representative for the Georgia Baptist Mission Board, said the “social costs” of legalized gambling outweigh the tax revenue the state would raise from bettors.
“Casinos increase human trafficking, drug trafficking, and other crimes,” added Paul Smith, executive director of the Christian public policy organization Citizen Impact.
Both Summers and Wiedower are pushing standalone constitutional amendments without the addition of separate “enabling” bills, usually longer pieces of legislation that spell out how either sports betting or casinos would operate in Georgia. They reason there’s no point in working to develop such detailed measures if voters defeat legalized gambling at the polls.
by Dave Williams | Feb 27, 2025 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA – The justices on the Georgia Supreme Court have unanimously elected Presiding Justice Nels S.D. Peterson to be the state’s next chief justice.
Peterson will assume his new role after March 31, when the resignation of current Chief Justice Michael Boggs takes effect.
Boggs announced earlier this week that he was leaving the bench to resume private practice in his hometown of Waycross.
Peterson was appointed to the state Supreme Court in 2016 by then-Gov. Nathan Deal and was elected to full six-year terms in 2018 and last year.
He previously served in a variety of other roles in state government, including as a judge on the Georgia Court of Appeals, general counsel for the University System of Georgia, Georgia’s first solicitor general in the Attorney General’s Office, and executive counsel to the governor.
The chief justice in Georgia serves one four-year term, acting as the spokesperson both for the court and the entire state judiciary as well as presiding over the court’s oral arguments.
With Peterson moving up to the top role on the high court, the justices also unanimously elected Justice Sarah Hawkins Warren as the next presiding justice.
by Ty Tagami | Feb 27, 2025 | Capitol Beat News Service
The Georgia House of Representatives on Thursday adopted its own version of legislation that would limit transgender student competition in school sports, making the final passage of a law on the topic more likely after a similar bill passed the Senate earlier this month.
House Bill 267 was approved 102-54, with a couple of Democrats crossing party lines to vote with Republicans for passage. It would open schools and colleges to lawsuits for allowing transgender athletes born male to compete against girls and women.
The measure, like Senate Bill 1, which the Senate adopted in a near party-line vote the first week of February, would also prohibit transgender students born male from using locker rooms designated for females.
House Republicans called HB 276 a “common sense” measure that protects girls from more powerful transgender athletes and reinforces a binary division of the sexes.
Democrats excoriated Republicans for a “weird” obsession with a group of people who comprise a tiny fraction of the population, attributing their motive to “hate” and to pandering to conservative Christian voters.
The legislation addresses more than sports: it would replace the word “gender” with the word “sex” throughout most of Georgia’s law books.
Democrats asserted this would “erase” transgender people, removing legal protections.
“It is a calculated, dangerous, deeply discriminatory piece of legislation that goes far beyond the realm of athletics,” said Rep. Karla Drenner, D-Avondale Estates. “Let’s call this the Erasure of Transgender Georgians Act.”
Drenner called the concerns raised about transgender athletes in sport a “manufactured crisis by the most extreme factions of the Republican Party.”
Republicans said they had addressed concerns about hate crimes against transgender people with an amendment that kept the term “gender” in that part of the law.
GOP lawmakers responded to the accusation of playing politics by saying transgender athletes are a real threat to girls and women.
Rep. Ginny Ehrhart, R-Powder Springs, reacted in kind to the allegation that her party was obsessed with a non-issue by saying it was “weird” that collegiate swimming champion Riley Gaines was defeated by a transgender athlete at an NCAA competition at Georgia Tech in 2022.
HB 267 is named the Riley Gaines Act because of that much-publicized incident.
“We’re just trying to keep biological males from slide tackling our daughters on the soccer field,” Ehrhart said.
Rep. Chris Erwin, R-Homer, a former school superintendent and the chairman of the House Education Committee, called it a “measured, reasonable and necessary response to growing concerns.”
Gaines testified for HB 267 at a hearing in Erwin’s committee last week. She said via Zoom that she’d learned from other women about transgender athletes dominating their competitions, too, but she didn’t go into detail.
Democrats on Thursday countered that if transgender athletes were a significant problem for female sports, Republicans wouldn’t have had to name their bill after an out-of-state athlete.
Gaines swam for the University of Kentucky.
