Georgia children and their families are set to benefit from a boost in funding for daycare centers and scholarships for struggling parents to cover child-care costs amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
More than $92 million to help offset attendance losses has been sent to thousands of daycare centers by the Georgia Department of Child Care and Learning (DECAL), the agency announced this month.
Those funds came from $144 million DECAL received from the federal Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security (CARES) Act. The first funding round went to 3,789 licensed daycares followed by a second round to 3,677 daycares in December.
Officials noted daycares are experiencing financial strain as attendance is still way down due to many schools continuing to require students to take virtual classes more than nine months out from the pandemic’s onset.
“We know that family child-care learning homes and child-care learning centers in Georgia are struggling as a result of COVID-19,” DECAL Commissioner Amy Jacobs said earlier this month.
Additionally, a scholarship program helping low-income parents pay for child-care services if their children’s schools still only offer online classes was expanded to cover children and young adults with disabilities from ages 5 to 22, officials announced. The program initially only covered ages 5 to 12.
More than 4,000 daycare scholarships have been given out so far from the $17 million in federal aid for eligible families whose incomes do not exceed 85% of the state median annual income – roughly $44,000 for a single parent with one child or just under $65,000 for a family of four.
Gov. Brian Kemp allowed daycares and preschools to reopen in mid-May after lifting a monthlong shelter-in-place order for Georgians and as he began to ease restrictions on businesses.
“Throughout the pandemic, we have remained laser-focused on ensuring that parents can return to work safely with the knowledge that their children are well taken care of,” Kemp said in a statement. “This expansion of the [scholarships] to cover children and young adults with disabilities enables us to expand that opportunity to more families in our state.”
Clockwise: Jon Ossoff, U.S. Sen. David Perdue, Rev. Raphael Warnock and U.S. Sen. Kelly Loeffler are competing for Georgia’s two Senate seats in the runoff elections on Jan. 5, 2021. (Photos by Beau Evans)
A defining moment in American history. The most important election of a lifetime. A must-win.
These are some of the ways next month’s U.S. Senate runoff elections in Georgia have been described on the campaign trail by competitors from both political parties over the past nearly seven weeks.
This time, the stump-speech slogans are not hyperbole.
On Jan. 5, 2021, incumbent Republican Sens. David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler will face Democratic challengers Jon Ossoff and Rev. Raphael Warnock in contests to decide control of America’s federal government, following President-elect Joe Biden’s win in the Nov. 3 general election.
Victories by both Ossoff and Warnock would hand Democrats control of both chambers in Congress and the White House for at least the next two years, a scenario that has flooded Georgia with ad dollars and famous figures as Democrats push to seize power and Republicans look to stop them.
More than 1 million Georgians have already cast ballots in the early-voting period that started Dec. 14, nearing similar numbers seen in the general election’s record-breaking turnout. And the tight races’ fates may hinge on the tens of thousands of new voters who have registered in Georgia since Nov. 3.
The dueling campaigns have been high-octane and fierce, as the Republican incumbents paint their opponents as radical extremists bent on socialist policies, and the Democratic challengers accuse the wealthy senators of caring more for their pocketbooks than the American public’s welfare.
Ossoff, who owns an investigative journalism company, and Warnock, the senior pastor of Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church, have lobbed constant attacks at the Republican senators over stock swaps they made early this year that seemed geared to profit from the COVID-19 pandemic, sparking allegations of insider trading.
Democratic leaders have also hammered Perdue and Loeffler over news reports highlighting close ties with companies they regulate as members of several finance-focused Senate committees, most recently by lodging an ethics complaint over trades made by Loeffler’s husband, Intercontinental Exchange CEO Jeffrey Sprecher.
“[We’re] running against the Bonnie and Clyde of politics,” Ossoff said at a recent rally in Atlanta. “We have two United States senators more concerned with using their offices to enrich themselves than taking care of ‘we the people’ who pay their salaries.”
Perdue, a former corporate executive from Sea Island, and Loeffler, an Atlanta businesswoman before being appointed to the Senate late last year, have called the attacks on their records “lies” and say federal investigators have cleared them of any wrongdoing.
To punch back, Perdue and Loeffler have accused their opponents of being friendly with communist governments and wanting to strip funding from police agencies.
In particular, Loeffler has bashed Warnock for a past sermon in which he said bad-apple police officers have “a thug mentality,” seeking to link him with the “defund-the-police” movement. Perdue has sought to tie Ossoff to Chinese communists over a Hong Kong media company’s past purchase of two of his investigative documentaries.
“The moment of truth is right now,” Perdue said in Atlanta during a seven-city flyover tour. “We’re going to stand up to this onslaught that will perpetrate a socialist state here in Georgia.”
Ossoff and Warnock have rejected those criticisms as distractions, particularly the claim that they favor defunding police. Both have said they support law enforcement reforms like use-of-force restrictions but would not vote for reducing police funding if elected.
“We cannot allow anybody to divide us, to play the politics of distortion and distraction and division,” Warnock said after voting early in Atlanta. “Because one thing I’ve learned is people who have no vision, traffic in division.”
Pumping more emergency relief into businesses and households struggling to cope with the COVID-19 pandemic has also played a central role in the Senate runoffs, as each side accuses the other’s party of blocking legislation in a divided Congress.
Focusing their campaigns on health-care issues, Ossoff and Warnock have taken up the unpassed relief package as a rallying cry for Democratic voters to give Georgia’s current senators the boot for backing Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., who has led months of failed negotiations in the Republican-controlled Senate.
“We can’t afford paralysis in the midst of a crisis like this,” Ossoff said at a recent rally in Atlanta. “We can’t leave the future of our country in the hands of Mitch McConnell.”
Republican leaders have blamed House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., for holding up the relief deal after lawmakers passed a $2.2 trillion emergency package in late March. McConnell has pushed in recent weeks to bridge the gap with Pelosi and pass a nearly $1 trillion relief deal that would leave Georgia’s Republican senators less exposed to attacks for the runoffs, according to news reports.
Shortly after voting early in Atlanta, Loeffler said lawmakers were “at the doorstep of the deal” and she was prepared to fly up to Washington to vote on a bill.
“Georgians are counting on us to deliver relief and we’re going to make sure we get that done,” Loeffler said. “What’s at stake here is serving Georgians and making sure they have what they need and stop playing politics.”
With battle lines firmly drawn in the race, the fallout from President Donald Trump’s loss in the Nov. 3 election has thrown a wrench into Republicans’ strategies for energizing enough voters to outmatch last month’s huge Democratic turnout that handed Biden a win in Georgia by 11,779 votes.
While Republican leaders including McConnell have acknowledged Biden’s victory, Perdue and Loeffler still have refused to admit Trump lost as the president continues lobbing fraud claims that state election officials have disputed and courts have shot down.
“There’ll be a time for that if that becomes true,” Loeffler said when asked if Biden won. “But the president has a right to every legal recourse and we’re letting that play out right now.”
Perdue’s and Loeffler’s refusal to acknowledge Biden’s win comes as the president has driven a wedge into Georgia Republicans by attacking many of the state’s top party leaders including Gov. Brian Kemp, Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger.
The assault on Georgia’s elections has raised fears among Republican leaders that many voters loyal to Trump may skip the runoffs out of disillusionment in the state’s election system and scuttle the party’s chances to keep grip on the Senate.
“I cannot think of a single scenario where continuing to fan the flames of disinformation around election fraud helps us on our January 5th runoff,” Duncan, who was among the first GOP leaders in Georgia to call the election for Biden, said recently on CNN.
Democrats have seized on the rift as fuel to keep scorching Perdue and Loeffler as out of touch with average Georgians, particularly after the Republican senators backed a Texas lawsuit seeking to overturn Georgia’s election results that the U.S. Supreme Court tossed Dec. 11.
Biden, who recently visited Atlanta to rally for Ossoff and Warnock, likened the move to a betrayal of Georgians and urged his supporters to replace the incumbent senators with two newcomers who would back his administration’s agenda.
“I think Georgia’s going to shock the nation with the number of people who vote on January 5th,” Biden said. “Am I right, Georgia? Am I right?”
Georgia Public Health Commissioner Dr. Kathleen Toomey (right) receives the COVID-19 vaccine as Gov. Brian Kemp (left) watches on Dec. 17, 2020. (Kemp Twitter photo)
Georgia’s top health official was among the first in the state to receive the COVID-19 vaccine as initial doses rolled out in Atlanta and Savannah this week.
Dr. Kathleen Toomey, commissioner of the state Department of Public Health, was inoculated during a news conference Thursday with Gov. Brian Kemp to bolster confidence in the vaccine’s safety and effectiveness.
“This vaccine is safe, it’s effective, and it will be the tool to have so we can finally move back to what we think of as our Georgia lifestyle,” Toomey said. “But we need everyone’s help.”
Kemp said he’ll also get the vaccine after it has been administered to workers in hospitals and health departments, who are the first category of people to be inoculated as they continue battling a grueling spike in COVID-19 outbreaks this winter.
Officials like Kemp and Toomey are pushing to dispel doubts of whether the vaccine is safe following a speedy development timeline that has worried some portions of the population. Kemp said the vaccine is critical to ending the pandemic’s now nine-month reign in Georgia.
“The work done to develop the vaccine has been nothing short of a medical miracle,” he said. “This vaccine is safe, it is effective and it is now on the way to the people of this great state.”
The first COVID-19 vaccines now rolling out were developed with new technology that mimics the virus’ DNA to create immunity, not by injecting small amounts of virus as has traditionally been done with vaccines. That method helped developers produce the vaccine within months instead of years.
Recent test trials for the vaccines have shown they’re extremely effective in preventing sickness from the virus and only tend to cause headaches, arm pain around the injection and mild, temporary under-the-weather feelings as adverse reactions.
Georgia is slated to receive about 85,000 doses of the first vaccine by the pharmaceutical company Pfizer that was approved for emergency use last week by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
Another vaccine by pharmaceutical company Moderna is poised for emergency-use approval this week. Georgia officials expect to receive around 174,000 doses.
Those early shipments won’t be nearly enough for the millions of Georgians who each need to receive two doses spaced weeks apart. Public-health experts have estimated as much as 70% of the U.S. population needs to be inoculated to halt COVID-19’s spread.
Kemp urged Georgians to have patience with state officials tasked to distribute the vaccine in the coming months, first to health-care care workers and nursing homes where the virus has taken its deadliest toll, then to the general public by the summer of 2021.
“This is going to be a heavy logistical lift for the state,” Kemp said. “We have never undergone such a large vaccination campaign in our history.”
The governor also urged Georgians to keep wearing masks, social distancing and washing their hands this holiday season before the vaccine is more widely available, as positive cases and hospitalizations from COVID-19 near peak levels seen in July.
For now, Kemp added he does not plan another statewide shelter-in-place order or other strict distancing measures seen in the pandemic’s early days.
“We’ve done this before,” he said. “Our guidance has hardly changed in a very long time.”
Around 500,000 people in Georgia have tested positive for COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel strain of coronavirus that sparked a global pandemic this year. As of Thursday, the virus had killed 9,358 Georgians.
Voters wait in line to cast ballots at Chastain Park in Atlanta during the early-voting period for the U.S. Senate runoffs on Dec. 15, 2020. (Photo by Beau Evans)
A lawsuit seeking to restore nearly 200,000 Georgia voters with canceled registrations before the U.S. Senate runoff elections next month was shot down by a federal judge on Wednesday.
Forcing Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger’s office to overhaul the state’s voter rolls so close to the Jan. 5 runoffs would pose “significant risk of confusion” for carrying out the election, Judge Steve Jones of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia ruled.
The suit claimed more than 68,000 voters had their registrations canceled in 2019 despite still residing in Georgia, while another roughly 130,000 were removed from the rolls as part of a faulty process for verifying address changes.
Raffensperger’s office argued four groups suing to restore those voters to the rolls used inaccurate change-of-address data and did not give enough advance legal notice they planned to file suit.
Jones agreed, noting the groups could have filed suit much sooner than Dec. 2 and that their data showed “discrepancies” with records Raffensperger’s office uses to cancel dead or relocated Georgians. He urged state officials and the suing groups to work together on fixing the discrepancies.
Raffensperger hailed the judge’s ruling Wednesday and called the suing groups’ claims of improper voter purging based on “sloppy analysis.”
“This office abides by the law regardless of criticism and oversees fair and accurate elections open to all eligible voters – but only eligible Georgia voters,” Raffensperger said in a statement.
Attorneys for the suing groups pressed Raffensperger to set up a meeting soon to go over the change-of-address data discrepancies.
“The judge strongly encourages a meeting to resolve these issues,” said Gerald Griggs, an Atlanta attorney representing the suing groups. “We await [Raffensperger] to set the meeting.”
The suing groups framed their push for Raffensperger to restore registrations of “wrongfully removed” voters as a potential game changer for the Senate runoffs, which are expected to be close.
The runoffs pit Republican U.S. Sens. David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler against Democrats Jon Ossoff and Rev. Raphael Warnock. Wins by both Ossoff and Warnock would give Democrats control of the White House and both houses of Congress for at least the next two years.
The four suing groups include the Atlanta-based Black Voters Matter Fund, the Washington, D.C.-based Transformative Justice Coalition, the Chicago-based Rainbow PUSH Coalition and the Texas-based Southwest Voter Education Project.
Their lawsuit followed previous litigation brought by former Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams’ group Fair Fight Action last December, which prompted Raffensperger’s office to restore around 22,000 Georgia voters to inactive status rather than remove them from the rolls.
Raffensperger’s office has repeatedly dismissed claims of improper roll purges, noting state law requires officials to remove voters from registration lists if they have not voted in general elections or responded to warning notices for several years.
President-elect Joe Biden urges supporters in Atlanta on Dec. 15, 2020, to turn out the vote for Georgia’s two Democratic candidates in the upcoming U.S. Senate runoff elections. (Biden campaign video)
President-elect Joe Biden campaigned in Atlanta Tuesday for the state’s two Democratic candidates for U.S. Senate ahead of their runoff elections on Jan. 5.
Democrats Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock are locked in a fierce battle with incumbent Republican Sens. David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler, with control of Congress hanging in the balance.
Ossoff, who owns an investigative journalism company, and Warnock, the senior pastor of Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church, have been constantly portrayed by their Republican opponents as too extreme for conservative Georgians to tolerate.
Biden, who won the presidential election last month, stepped in to punch back at the attacks from Perdue and Loeffler, pointing out the two Republican senators “fully embraced” a Texas lawsuit seeking to overturn Georgia’s election results that the U.S. Supreme Court shot down last week.
“Maybe they thought they represented Texas,” Biden said at the Pullman-Pratt Yard on Tuesday. “Well, if you want to do the bidding of Texas, you should be running in Texas, not in Georgia.”
Perdue and Loeffler said in a joint statement they backed the lawsuit for transparency purposes to make sure President Donald Trump had “every legal recourse available” to probe the election’s integrity following his loss to Biden in Georgia by 11,779 votes.
Biden also pushed back on the images of Ossoff and Warnock as too radical for Georgia, noting he needs Peach State voters to put the two candidates in Congress to advance an agenda of unity after years of divisive politics under Trump.
“If you do, the doors of promise and progress are going to open in Washington,” Biden said. “We’re going to start to get done what we have to do, and more than anything, we’ll make the lives of every Georgian [and] the lives of every American better.”
That bipartisan message has not convinced national and local Republican leaders backing Perdue and Loeffler, who have made fears over a Democrat-controlled Congress and White House central to their runoff campaigns.
A Republican National Committee spokeswoman dismissed Biden’s speech as a smokescreen meant to obscure a “far-left, radical agenda” that Republicans say Ossoff and Warnock, if elected, would follow on orders from national Democratic leaders.
In particular, Republican leaders have sought to tie Ossoff and Warnock to calls from some national Democratic lawmakers and advocacy groups to reduce funding for local law-enforcement agencies – though both Democratic candidates in Georgia have stressed they do not support defunding police.
“It’s crazy talk to say you want to defund police,” Gwinnett County Sheriff Butch Conway said Tuesday. “I urge all Republicans, Independents and conservative Democrats to make sure we don’t have a government controlled by one party.”
Gwinnett County Sheriff Butch Conway (center) joined Cherokee County Sheriff Frank Reynolds (left) and Walton County Sheriff Joe Chapman (right) to denounce the “defund police” movement outside the State Capitol in Atlanta on Dec. 15, 2020. (Photo by Beau Evans)
Fending off the attacks, Ossoff and Warnock have largely stuck to platforms of expanding access to health care, increasing COVID-19 relief, raising the federal minimum wage and strengthening voting rights.
The importance of next month’s election for American government has been the main focal point since the four contenders advanced last month to the runoffs, particularly as Georgia flipped for a Democratic presidential candidate for the first time since 1992.
Wins for both Ossoff and Warnock would give Democrats control of Congress and the White House for at least the next two years. A loss by either would hand Republicans a check in the Senate on the Biden administration.
Biden drove that point home Tuesday in Atlanta, echoing politicians on both sides who have spent weeks traveling to Georgia to stir up voter excitement for their preferred pair of candidates.
“I need two senators from this state who want to get something done, not two senators who are going to get in the way,” Biden said. “Because, look, getting nothing done just hurts Georgia.”
Biden’s visit to Georgia came a day after Electoral College members from states across the country sent him enough votes to formally claim victory over Trump, whose loss in Georgia was certified after two statewide recounts overseen by Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger’s office.
Trump still has not conceded defeat even as his most prominent backers like Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Kentucky, have acknowledged Biden’s win since Monday after weeks of silence.
Instead, the president has stuck to a strategy of casting doubt on the election by making fraud claims, posing a risk that many Georgia voters loyal to Trump may skip the runoff out of disillusionment in the state’s election system and scuttle Republicans’ efforts to keep a grip on the Senate.
Republican leaders are counting on conservative voters to outmatch the huge Democratic turnout seen in the Nov. 3 general election, largely by casting Ossoff and Warnock as “socialist” candidates bent on increasing spending in government programs and carving up police budgets.
“The moment of truth is right now,” Perdue said at a Monday night rally in Atlanta. “We’re going to stand up to this onslaught that will perpetrate a socialist state here in Georgia.”
U.S. Sen. David Perdue urges supporters to turn out the vote at a rally alongside his wife, Bonnie, at the DeKalb-Peachtree Airport on Dec. 14, 2020. (Photo by Beau Evans)
Ossoff and Warnock have portrayed their opponents as out of touch with average Georgians by invoking controversial stock trades the wealthy Republican incumbents made early during the COVID-19 pandemic – though Loeffler and Perdue say federal investigators cleared them of any wrongdoing.
“[We’re] running against the Bonnie and Clyde of politics,” Ossoff said at a rally Monday afternoon in Atlanta. “We have two United States senators more concerned with using their offices to enrich themselves than taking care of ‘we the people’ who pay their salaries.”
The three-week early voting period for the Senate runoff elections started on Monday.
Jon Ossoff (left) and Rev. Raphael Warnock (right) stop for a campaign bus-tour rally at the site of the old Turner Field in Atlanta on Dec. 14, 2020. (Photo by Beau Evans)
