ATLANTA — Georgia representatives are moving forward with a bill, inspired by conservative activist Charlie Kirk, that would protect political activities by students in public schools.
If it passes, Georgia would become the first state to pass a law safeguarding students’ free speech rights regardless of their political or social viewpoints, said Sen. Ben Watson, R-Savannah.
The proposal passed the House Judiciary Committee on Monday and could soon reach a final vote in the full House. The state Senate already approved the legislation, Senate Bill 552.
“Public school students in Georgia must be permitted to engage in political activities and expression before, during, and after the school day in the same manner and to the same extent that students may engage in non-political activities and expression,” Watson said.
Rep. Anne Allen Westbrook, D-Savannah, said the bill claims to be neutral at the same time as it honors Kirk, a media personality who co-founded the conservative student organization Turning Point USA. Kirk was assassinated while speaking during a campus debate last year.
The bill is named the “True Patriotism and Universal Student Access Act,” giving it the same acronym as Turning Point USA.
“I can see the emails coming in about this bill as an homage to a particular point of view,” Westbrook said. “Charlie Kirk had a particular point of view, making disparaging comments about Black women, for example, and LGBTQ folks.”
Watson said the bill wouldn’t discriminate, even protecting a hypothetical Satanic political action committee as well as protests, such as students who recently organized against U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE. The bill allows schools to maintain order and discipline on campus.
The bill would make it illegal for public schools to deny equal access to school facilities for student meetings based on political or ideological content. These groups would be treated the same as other clubs, but neither would be permitted to interfere with instructional time during the school day.
The legislation also would ensure the ability of students to wear clothes and jewelry that display political messages to the same extent they can wear other items that display messages under school dress codes.
ATLANTA — Something unusual happened to an anti-fentanyl bill in the Georgia Senate on Monday.
Republicans and Democrats listened to each other, amended the bill to target fentanyl traffickers instead of addicts, and then voted unanimously to pass it.
In a highly partisan environment, that kind of democratic process is rare. More often, the Republican majority doesn’t entertain Democrats’ frequent criticisms.
This time was different.
“If you’ll just listen a little bit and be willing to hear the other side’s opinion, whether that other side is in your party or not, it doesn’t matter,” Lt. Gov. Burt Jones, a Republican candidate for governor, said to senators moments before the vote. “But if you’ll just listen and talk through things, some of these things can get worked out without having to posture so much.”
The Senate voted 53-0 to pass the amended House Bill 535, sending it back to the House for consideration in the closing days of this year’s legislative session.
If approved, the legislation would impose minimum sentences of 2 ½ years in prison for possession of more than 4 grams of fentanyl and up to 35 years imprisonment for possession of larger amounts. The proposal would revise a law passed last year that imposed mandatory sentences for fentanyl trafficking.
Before the bill was amended on the Senate floor, it would have required heightened prison sentences for possession of at least 4 grams of any other drugs — such as cocaine, Adderall, Xanax, or marijuana — that were laced with smaller amounts of fentanyl.
Democrats who opposed the original bill said it would target drug possession by users who had no intention of selling fentanyl.
Fentanyl overdoses are the leading cause of death for Americans ages 18-44, usually in combination with other drugs, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The prospects for amending the bill didn’t seem promising when Sen. Josh McLaurin, D-Sandy Springs, a candidate for lieutenant governor and a persistent critic of Republicans, sought to remove the bill’s language punishing possession of over 4 grams of any drug that contains trace amounts of fentanyl.
“Throwing people in prison for decades and putting them on probation for decades isn’t doing anything to make us safer. It’s just giving us political talking points so we can all say we’re tough on crime,” McLaurin said. “That’s a hard realization to swallow for a lot of people in this building.”
Republicans responded that they didn’t want to punish addicts, but were seeking stronger laws against fentanyl distributors.
After over an hour of debate, the Senate reached a compromise when Sen. Bill Cowsert, R-Athens, offered his own amendment. He proposed requiring the mandatory minimum sentences only when the amount of fentanyl is over 4 grams, either alone or in combination with other drugs.
Both the Republican majority and Democratic minority approved that change. The bill distinguishes distributors from users by allowing judges to impose shorter sentences on defendants who aren’t leaders of the criminal conduct, didn’t use a weapon during the crime, or didn’t have a prior felony conviction.
Cowsert, a candidate for attorney general, said elected officials need to be open-minded.
“We get called flip-floppers or whatever if you change your mind,” Cowsert said. “But what we’re pointing out here is that we’re not trying to criminalize somebody that inadvertently buys a Xanax or an Adderall or marijuana that has trace amounts of fentanyl in it that can be deadly.”
Georgia lawmakers have nearly passed legislation that could lead to hefty fines against businesses, colleges and nonprofits when they accept contributions or donations funneled from countries deemed to be foreign adversaries.
The debate fell along party lines before Senate Bill 177 passed the House 98-65 Monday with only two Democrats in favor.
It returns to the Senate for agreement on a few changes.
“All this does is require transparency,” said Joseph Gullett, R-Dallas, who presented the bill on the House floor.
The measure requires recipients of support by agents from hostile nations to register with the state ethics commission.
Among the House amendments was language identifying those hostile nations. The Senate version targeted North Korea, Iran, China and Russia.
The House changed that to whichever countries were designated by the U.S. commerce secretary.
Rep. James Burchett, R-Waycross, the majority whip, said the current countries on that list are those four, plus Cuba and “and the Venezuelan politician Nicolas Maduro.”
Violations could lead to a $10,000 fine, or as much as $200,000 for “willful” or repeat violations.
The only Republican to raise concerns was Rep. Mike Cameron, R-Rossville, who went on to vote for the bill.
He said a company in his district asked questions because it is owned by a former subsidiary of General Electric that was sold to a Chinese conglomerate. He said another major company asked about constitutional issues.
Democrats said they agreed that the countries on Burchett’s list were a risk. But they also offered critiques that have become common with similar legislation in other states.
They said SB 177 could violate constitutional protections for speech, it could conflict with federal law containing similar requirements, and it would add bureaucracy, perhaps discouraging companies from locating in Georgia.
“It creates heavy compliance costs,” said Rep. Long Tran, D-Dunwoody.
Rep. Jasmine Clark, D-Lilburn, noted that House members were issued laptops by the Chinese company Lenovo, and she wondered if Amazon shoppers could be implicated.
Others said exemptions in the registration requirement seemed political.
SB 177 exempts TikTok per a September executive order by President Donald Trump. It also exempts trade associations and advocacy organizations founded before Jan. 2, 1950, leading one Democrat to note that the National Rifle Association, founded in the 19th century, would not have to comply.
Rep. Gabriel Sanchez, D-Smyrna, said the legislation was a distraction.
“If you want to talk about foreign influence, how about the fact that Israel, along with the military industrial complex, just dragged us into an unnecessary war that no one wants and no one voted for,” he said.
Several states have adopted legislation like SB 177 and at least a half dozen more are considering it this year, according to the International Center for Not-For-Profit-Law headquartered in Washington, D.C.
The group noted that such legislation had been rejected or allowed to die in more than a dozen states.
Some of the concerns raised in the past include lack of foreign policy expertise at the state level, and a patchwork of schemes among the states that could undermine U.S. foreign policy and complicate compliance for organizations.
“It is still unclear how states will enforce these types of laws,” the organization said in an analysis last summer, “but for now they create a regulatory minefield for nonprofits and others.”
SB 177 now returns to the Senate for agreement to the House changes. Should the Senate agree, the bill would head to the desk of Gov. Brian Kemp for his signature. He vetoed a similar Senate bill in 2024 involving foreign adversary political contributions, noting they were already prohibited under federal law.
ATLANTA — Georgia taxpayers are getting some of their money back.
With a unanimous vote Monday, the state Senate gave final approval to a bill that will distribute tax rebates worth $250 to individuals and $500 to married couples.
Gov. Brian Kemp proposed the rebates, guaranteeing that he’ll sign them into law.
Giving money back to Georgians is part of a bipartisan focus on affordability. The General Assembly’s Republican majority emphasized tax savings, including rebates and pending bills that would reduce income tax rates and curb property tax increases.
“It’s the taxpayers’ money. Give it back to them,” said state Sen. Bo Hatchett, R-Cornelia. “Gov. Kemp’s policies have been working, and they work on both sides of the aisle.”
The Senate voted 53-0 to approve House Bill 1000 after it passed the House 172-0 earlier this month.
The rebates will cost nearly $1.1 billion, funded by the state government’s $14 billion surplus.
Democrats have mostly opposed deep, long-term income tax cuts, but they supported this partial refund of income taxes paid in 2024 and 2025.
“It’s good, commonsense legislation,” said Senate Minority Leader Harold Jones, D-Augusta. “We were proud to vote for it.”
This will be the fourth time in the last five years that the state government has distributed tax rebates. Last year, the government began sending rebates in the summer months.
Rebates will be sent either by direct deposit or by check based on how Georgians paid their taxes this year.
Everyone who filed income tax returns for the 2024 and 2025 tax years and paid taxes in those years is eligible to receive a refund.
ATLANTA — Four words added to legislation that targets mugshot mills have free speech advocates worried the public could lose access to videos that hold police accountable for their conduct.
Legislation that started in Georgia’s Senate as a solution to the reputational harm caused when booking photographs circulate online after charges are dismissed has evolved into a much broader measure.
Senate Bill 482, supported by sheriffs across Georgia, pits personal privacy of the accused against the public’s right to examine government use of force.
Blake Feldman, senior policy counsel with the Southern Center for Human Rights, said it raises a red flag when “a law enforcement agency that wields incredible authority to stop and detain people and discharge firearms at people” seeks to withhold footage from body-worn cameras.
He and advocates for free speech and for newsgathering operations, including broadcasters and the newspaper industry, argued that the requirements would pose a barrier to such access.
The legislation started as a requirement for anyone who wants a mugshot to obtain it in person, with a notarized statement that they would comply with existing law intended to protect people in those images.
In 2013, Georgia made it illegal for websites that publish mugshots to make subjects who were not convicted pay to take their picture down.
But that law did not solve the problem, so the next year Rep. Brian Strickland, R-McDonough, pushed through a law requiring operators to promise in writing that they would abide by the takedown requirements.
That still didn’t fix the problem.
So, this year Strickland, now a state senator, introduced SB 482, intending to make it harder to get mugshots in the first place.
Along the way, he added the four words to his bill that have the free speech advocates concerned: “or law enforcement video.”
Sen. Brian Strickland, R-McDonough, on the Senate floor in the Georgia Capitol in Atlanta on Friday, March 6, 2026, the day his legislation to restrict access to mugshots and law enforcement videos passed to the state House. (Ashtin Barker/Capitol Beat)
Not only would news organizations have to drive across the state to get an official copy of a police video from a far-flung community, but they arguably could be forced to identify everyone in the video they are seeking, said Sarah Brewerton-Palmer, a lawyer with the Georgia First Amendment Foundation.
“In order to get this footage, you have to name everybody who’s in it,” she said. But there could be bystanders in a video of an altercation between police and a suspect, she said, “and before you see it, you don’t know who those people are.”
Brewerton-Palmer said bodycam videos of a shooting by police during a protest would effectively become exempt from the state open records act.
She and others are less concerned about the proposed restrictions on releasing mugshots because of the way their enduring presence online has upended the lives of innocent people.
At a Feb. 18 Senate committee hearing on Strickland’s bill, a representative from the Georgia Justice Project, which helps people reintegrate into their communities after tangling with the criminal justice system, said it remains a common issue among their clients.
It was at that hearing where videos entered the conversation.
(The Georgia Press Association was among the news organizations that raised concerns. Capitol Beat is a project of the association.)
Forsyth County Sheriff Ron Freeman, president of the Georgia Sheriffs’ Association, told senators on the committee that his colleagues across the state complain about bulk requests for mugshots and videos that are then exploited for profit.
Ashley Henson, the sheriff in Paulding County, said the accused who have their cases dismissed go on to get “destroyed” on social media. He said that when he tried to intervene to ask for removal of material, the publishing organization did not respond.
“Monetization of someone else’s misery is not right,” Henson said. “We are not here to give these YouTubers content.”
Strickland said in an interview that he was moved to action against mugshot mills by a teacher who noticed her students passing around her booking picture of her. The charges against her had been dropped, so she had contacted the publisher and paid to take it down, he said. But then the photo popped up on another site.
Strickland described it as a “whack-a-mole” problem.
Publishers were not honoring the takedown requests they had submitted in writing per the 2014 law. And even when they did, out-of-state or even international actors beyond the reach of Georgia law enforcement were republishing them.
“Once the image is there, it’s there forever,” he said.
So, now he is proposing to restrict supply by forcing those who want mugshots — and police videos — to request them in person. Requiring requesters to identify the subjects in those images would cut down on the number of bulk requests, which tend to be by profiteers, he said.
At that February committee hearing, he agreed with another senator who said the public could still obtain pictures and videos, they just had to “go through the legwork” to get them.
The committee passed SB 482 unanimously, sending it to the Senate floor, where it also passed unanimously on March 6, and now awaits hearings in the House.
The Senate floor vote occurred on “crossover” day, the deadline to move bills from the Senate to the House and vice versa. It is an exceptionally rushed time during any legislative session, when mountains of legislation are getting votes, giving lawmakers little time to read the language.
Democrats backed the measure without question, except for one raised about an unrelated part of the bill. That might have been due to the backing by Democrats. They had voted it out of committee, and two had co-signed it back when Strickland had introduced it — before he added those four words about videos.
Reached by phone, one of those two co-sponsors, Sen. Kenya Wicks, D-Fayette, said she was unaware of the new language.
“I don’t think I can comment because there are a lot of amendments to this bill,” said Wicks, who voted for SB 482 with the other Democrats when it reached the full Senate.
Strickland said he is willing to work with advocates to address their concerns, perhaps by changing his bill to require that those seeking a video must identify only the officer who took it or the time and location where it was shot.
But it is unclear whether a compromise can be reached, at least on the video language.
Brewerton-Palmer said she sympathized with Strickland’s concerns. The internet and, now artificial intelligence, have stripped away privacy, she said.
But the public’s right to know outweighs that harm, she said. “There needs to be a thumb on the scales in favor of access.”
Feldman said his organization supports the new restrictions that Strickland wants to impose for access to mugshots, but he said applying those same obstacles to the release of law enforcement videos would be an indirect way to erode the state open records law, something his organization opposes because of the erosion of transparency around police encounters with the public.
