by Dave Williams | May 14, 2025 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA – Dozens of Kennesaw State University students demonstrated outside the University System of Georgia offices Wednesday, protesting a decision by the school to terminate its Black Studies degree program.
Opponents characterized the KSU decision as a blow to efforts to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in the schools. DEI programs have come under fire at the state and federal levels, with the Trump administration pressuring universities to do away with DEI policies and Georgia lawmakers seeking to ban DEI from the state’s schools and colleges.
On Wednesday, demonstrators carried signs with messages including “Black history is American history” and “Diversity Makes America Great.”
To the beat of two snare drums, they chanted slogans. “Who’s afraid of Black and Queer? KSU, they’ve made it clear,” declared one.
The university notified KSU in emails last month that Kennesaw State would be terminating the Black Studies program, along with Philosophy and Technical Communications degrees. The school blamed declining enrollment.
But Simran Mohanty, a junior sociology major at KSU and one of the demonstration’s organizers, said the school undercounted the number of students enrolled in Black Studies because it did not count double majors. She also criticized the process school administrators followed.
“A lot of these decisions were made behind closed doors without input,” she said.
The university system’s Board of Regents has the final say over decisions by member institutions to terminate degree programs. However, the agenda for Thursday’s monthly meeting of the board does not make any reference to KSU’s Black Studies program.
“The University System of Georgia continuously assesses program offerings and curriculum to respond to student and workforce demands,” according to a statement the university system released late Wednesday afternoon. “We require our institutions to examine the average number of degrees awarded in all academic programs and, over the last three years, have approved the termination of over 300 low-producing degree programs.”
The Trump administration has gone after DEI policies on several fronts, including transferring federal funds earmarked for DEI initiatives to law enforcement and threatening elite private universities – notably Harvard – with the loss of federal funding if they continue pursuing DEI.
In Georgia, the Republican-controlled state Senate passed legislation in March calling for withholding state funding from public schools with DEI programs as well as state-administered federal funding from colleges. But the bill died in the Georgia House of Representatives.
by Dave Williams | May 14, 2025 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA – U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi has appointed Theodore S. Hertzberg to serve as interim U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Georgia, Bondi’s office announced Wednesday.
Hertzberg previously worked as an assistant U.S. attorney for nearly 10 years, beginning with a stint at the Southern District of Georgia’s Savannah office. His duties there included prosecuting violent criminals, drug dealers, fraudsters, and money launderers while also serving as chief of the asset forfeiture section.
After moving to Atlanta in 2018, Hertzberg transferred to the Northern District of Georgia, where he prosecuted gang leaders, child sex predators, gun traffickers, armed felons, and other dangerous offenders.
Before entering the Justice Department, he practiced law in the New York office of Kramer Levin Naftalis & Frankel LLP, and served as a law clerk in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Alabama.
Hertzberg is a graduate of Amherst College and New York University School of Law.
He succeeds Richard Moultrie Jr., who took the job on an acting basis after then-U.S. Attorney Ryan Buchanan resigned in January at the beginning of President Donald Trump’s second term in the White House.
by Dave Williams | May 13, 2025 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA – Oral arguments in a federal courtroom Tuesday over whether a Texas-based conservative group’s mass voter challenges in Georgia almost five years ago amounted to an attempt to intimidate minority voters boiled down to intent.
A lawyer representing Fair Fight, a voting rights group founded by two-time Democratic gubernatorial nominee Stacey Abrams, told a three-judge panel of the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals the eligibility challenges of almost 365,000 voters – the largest in the state’s history – lodged by True the Vote was aimed at discouraging voters ahead of two runoff elections in January 2021 that vaulted Democrats Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock into the U.S. Senate.
“Georgia has a sordid history of intimidation, of mass challenges,” said Uzoma Nkwonta, a partner in the Elias Law Group, “History is repeating itself.”
Nkwonta argued that the sheer number of “frivolous” challenges mounted against Black voters who were “clearly qualified to vote in Georgia” constituted an attempt to intimidate. He also pointed to press releases True the Vote issued at the time calling attention to the mass challenges and threatening to release the names of those challenged as evidence of the group’s intent at intimidation in violation of the federal Voting Rights Act.
“They were never intended to be legitimate challenges,” Nkwonta said. “This was a stunt in order to intimidate voters.”
But Jake Evans, the lawyer representing True the Vote, said the challenges were not aimed at intimidation.
“If the intent were to intimidate voters … they could have robocalled voters directly,” he said. “No voter ever testified to speaking to True the Vote … or seeing a post of any sort.”
Evans urged the appellate judges to uphold the ruling of U.S. District Judge Steve Jones early last year. The lower court found after hearing from 18 witnesses during seven days of testimony that True the Vote’s actions did not constitute illegal voter intimidation.
But the judges were skeptical. U.S. District Judge Federico Moreno of Florida, one of the panel participants, noted that none of the challenges True the Vote filed were successful.
“Doesn’t that begin to tell you something about the motivation of the challenges?” Moreno asked Evans.
While Jones sided with True the Vote in his January 2024 ruling, he went on to criticize what he called the group’s “reckless” means of compiling the list of voters whose eligibility it questioned.
by Dave Williams | May 12, 2025 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA – Gov. Brian Kemp signed a package of bills Monday aimed at strengthening Georgia’s workforce.
House Bill 192, which the General Assembly passed this year with just two “no” votes, codifies into state law the Georgia MATCH program, a direct university and technical college admissions program created in 2023.
Under the program, every high school senior in Georgia receives a personalized letter from the governor listing the public universities, colleges and technical colleges he or she is academically eligible to attend. The letters go on to explain how students can claim a spot being held for them at the institution of their choice.
Enrollment in the University System of Georgia has increased by 6% since Georgia MATCH was launched, while technical college enrollment has grown by 9%, Kemp said Monday during a bill signing ceremony at the state Capitol.
The legislation, which was introduced as part of Kemp’s legislative agenda for this year, also requires the state Department of Education to tailor its curriculum offerings to prepare students for careers in high demand among Georgia employers.
“We have made incredible progress in aligning our business and education stakeholders … helping all Georgia students succeed no matter their zip code,” Kemp said.
The governor also signed Senate Bill 85, creating a college scholarship program for current or former foster children.
“This law removes financial barriers that too often force foster youth to abandon their college dreams,” Georgia House Speaker Jon Burns, R-Newington, said Monday.
House Bill 38 will ease the requirements for income-eligible students who already have earned most of their credit requirements to qualify for the need-based financial aid they need to complete their degrees.
House Bill 172 will increase the limits on loan forgiveness provided to veterinary students who have completed their degrees and plan to specialize in animals raised for human consumption.
by Dave Williams | May 9, 2025 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA – Gov. Brian Kemp and his allies in the General Assembly say they’re determined to prevent foreign adversaries from doing business with state agencies.
Toward that end, Kemp signed legislation Friday requiring the Georgia Technology Authority to establish and maintain a list of companies and products produced and/or sold by citizens or governments the U.S. Commerce Department has designated as foreign adversaries. State agencies will use the list to govern purchasing decisions.
House Bill 113 was part of Kemp’s legislative agenda for this year. It cleared the Georgia Senate unanimously and passed the state House of Representatives with only a smattering of “no” votes.
“We will keep our state government free from interference,” Kemp vowed Friday during a bill signing ceremony at the Georgia Capitol.
The governor also signed a series of other bills aimed at reforming the process the state uses to license businesses in Georgia.
Under House Bill 579, the director of the Professional Licensing Board Division will have the authority to approve applications for new and renewed business licenses, bypassing lengthy board reviews of qualified applicants.
“This reform is about getting government out of the way,” said Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, whose office oversees business licensing. “By modernizing outdated regulations, we’re unlocking doors for qualified Georgians to contribute to our economy without sacrificing public safety or standards.”
Other bills aimed at streamlining state government Kemp signed on Friday include:
- Senate Bill 96, which gets rid of state agency boards that either have become inactive or perform duplicative roles.
- House Bill 148, which creates two additional pathways for obtaining a certified public accountant’s license.
- House Bill 322, allowing the Georgia Board of Dentistry to license applicants already licensed in another state, country, or territory.
- House Bill 630, streamlining the process for licensing used car and used car parts dealers.
- House Bill 635, easing the three pathways to license residential and commercial general contractors.
- Senate Bill 125, which decouples the pathway to licensing professional engineers and land surveyors.
More comprehensive legislation known as the “red tape rollback” introduced into the state Senate on behalf of Lt. Gov. Burt Jones didn’t make it through the General Assembly this year. Senate Bill 28 would have required the state to produce an analysis of any proposed rule that could cost the public or local governments at least $1 million to comply with during its first five years and prohibited state agencies from implementing such rules without legislative approval.
