by Ty Tagami | Jun 18, 2025 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA — A major shakeup is underway in the leadership of the Georgia Senate, after the Republican caucus elected a new majority leader and tentatively named a new president pro tempore.
The two positions rank just below the lieutenant governor, who is elected by voters statewide.
Republicans, who control the Senate, selected Sen. Jason Anavitarte, R-Dallas, Tuesday as the new majority leader through next year, the second half of the two-year legislative biennium.
As the lead strategist for Senate Republicans, Anavitarte, who has served in the Senate since 2021, said he will “meet this moment with focus, discipline, and a commitment to improving lives across our state.”
Anavitarte’s promotion to third in command, behind the lieutenant governor and president pro tempore, leaves his caucus chair position vacant.
Likewise, an internal caucus vote Tuesday to nominate Sen. Larry Walker III, R-Perry, as the next president pro tempore, would create another leadership vacancy. Walker, in the Senate since 2015, is majority caucus secretary (and also chairs the Senate Committee on Insurance and Labor). The full Senate will vote on his promotion when the body reconvenes in January.
The big shuffle was triggered by the anticipated departure of Lt. Gov. Burt Jones. He has not yet announced a run for governor but is widely expected to do so, as the term-limited Gov. Brian Kemp prepares to leave office after next year.
Jones’ expected departure has prompted two top Senate leaders to run for lieutenant governor.
Sen. Steve Gooch, R-Dahlonega, the former majority leader, declared for Jones’ seat in mid-May. Sen. John F. Kennedy, R-Macon, the former president pro tem, announced the same intention at the Republican state convention in Dalton in early June.
Assuming Jones vacates his spot atop the Senate, four of the six Senate Republican leadership posts below Jones will change hands for next year’s legislative session.
by Ty Tagami | Jun 18, 2025 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA — Federal budget cuts aimed at Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act could eventually cost 16 million Americans their health insurance coverage, and Georgia would not be immune from the impact, a health care advocacy group is warning.
The state already lags most of the country in The Commonwealth Fund’s performance indicators. Their new report, 2025 Scorecard on State Health System Performance, ranked Georgia 45th — behind all of its neighbors. The scoring is derived from indicators such as health care access and affordability, infant mortality rates and potentially avoidable emergency room visits.
The rankings are based on 2023 data, when 16% of Georgians from age 19 to 64 were uninsured compared with a national average of 11%.
Health care cuts in the budget reconciliation bill by the U.S. House of Representatives would reduce the insured population in two ways, the report says.
It predicts more than 8 million would become uninsured in less than a decade if Affordable Care Act (the ACA) premium tax credits are allowed to expire and new marketplace enrollment requirements are implemented.
And it says about 8 million more would become uninsured if proposed Medicaid work requirements and more frequent eligibility checks are enacted.
Georgia already has work requirements for its Pathways to Coverage program, a limited form of Medicaid expansion rolled out by Gov. Brian Kemp in 2023.
If the rest of the country imposes such work requirements, other states will see higher administrative costs and lower enrollment, said Sara Collins, a vice president at The Commonwealth Fund. Georgia enrolled a relatively small number in Medicaid “at an enormous federal and state expense that far outweighed what it would have cost just to do a normal Medicaid expansion,” she said.
Kemp has declined to expand Medicaid more broadly, fearing — perhaps prophetically — that Congress would reduce funding and force states to shoulder a larger share of the costs.
But Georgia still won’t be immune if the cuts come, Collins said. Because fewer Georgians had access to Medicaid, more of them chose the marketplace subsidized by the ACA tax credits.
They may face big premium increases as soon as November, with many falling off the ACA rolls by next year, she said. “The passage of the bill would still have a very big effect on people in non-expansion states like Georgia,” she said, adding that hospitals, doctors and other medical providers who rely on insured patients would also be affected.
by Ty Tagami | Jun 17, 2025 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA — Georgia will join other states and U.S. territories in a settlement that extracts $7.4 billion from Purdue Pharma and its owners, the Sackler family, as recompense for their role in the opioid crisis that ravaged the country for a generation.
“For years, the Sackler family profited off other people’s pain – destroying lives and families in Georgia and throughout the country,” Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr said in announcing the decision to join the settlement. “While nothing can undo the harm caused, this settlement will provide our state with significant resources to support those struggling with addiction and Georgians in recovery.”
Georgia is positioned to receive $126 million for addiction treatment, prevention, and recovery services, Carr’s office said Monday, adding that local governments will be asked to join the settlement contingent upon bankruptcy proceedings.
The settlement would end the Sackler family’s control of Purdue and their ability to sell opioids in the United States, Carr’s office said. It comes after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned a prior multistate settlement last year.
The Sacklers and Purdue would make installment payments, with the family contributing $1.5 billion in the first year and the company paying $900 million, the annual amounts declining thereafter.
If approved, the settlement would also open to the public more than 30 million documents related to the opioid business of Purdue and the Sacklers, according to the Pennsylvania attorney general’s office.
The settlement includes five U.S. territories and Washington, D.C., plus all states except Oklahoma, which, according to Reuters and other reports, had already reached its own $270 million settlement in 2019.
by Ty Tagami | Jun 16, 2025 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA — The head of a multi-million-dollar drug trafficking and money laundering ring faces at least a decade in prison after pleading guilty to federal charges involving methamphetamine “conversion” laboratories.
Monica Dominguez Torres, 36, of Mexico, pleaded guilty Friday to conspiracy to possess with intent to distribute methamphetamine and conspiracy to commit money laundering, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Georgia announced Monday.
The agency said her organization operated labs that converted liquid methamphetamine from Mexico into hundreds of kilograms of crystal meth, some of it destined for sale in the Atlanta area.
“Dominguez’s elaborate criminal operation has been dismantled, and more than $3.5 million of illicit drug proceeds have been seized as a result of our federal, state, and local law enforcement partners’ diligent work,” U.S. Attorney Theodore S. Hertzberg said.
When agents arrested Dominguez at her home in Conyers in February of last year, they found and seized more than $1.7 million in cash, five firearms and three vehicles, the U.S. Attorney’s Office said.
Dominguez, who is scheduled for sentencing Sept. 15, led a criminal organization that laundered drug proceeds and sent the money to Mexico, the government said. Their methods included buying five residences, among them a seven-bedroom waterfront home in Jonesboro, most of them with cash. They also bought nine luxury vehicles worth about $780,000.
Dominguez also spent nearly $400,000 at Louis Vuitton and more than $425,000 at Burberry, over about four and a half years, the government said.
The investigation was conducted by numerous federal and state agencies plus the sheriff’s offices in Cobb and Paulding counties. It was part of a nationwide initiative targeting cartels and transnational criminal organizations.
In April, federal agencies in Atlanta announced 22 arrests involving two Mexican drug cartels and the seizure of more than 100 pounds of fentanyl. That was enough to kill every Georgian twice, Jae W. Chung, acting special agent in charge of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration’s Atlanta division, said at the time.
Chung said after Dominguez’s guilty plea that she and her organization had been “removed from our streets,” adding, “this criminal organization had no regard for the destructive impact on our communities.”
The announcement included no information about Dominguez’s conspirators but said she faces a mandatory minimum sentence of 10 years to life in prison for her trafficking conviction. The money laundering conviction carries a sentence of up to 20 years in prison.
by Ty Tagami | Jun 13, 2025 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA — A botched FBI raid on a suburban Atlanta home has led to a U.S. Supreme Court decision against the government in a lawsuit brought by the victims.
In October 2017, a six-member SWAT team rammed the door of “a quiet family home” and tossed in a flash-bang grenade. The raiding party had relied on a GPS device to locate a suspected gang hideout, failing to notice the address on the mailbox. The agents had mistakenly entered the home of Hilliard Toi Cliatt, his partner Curtrina Martin, and her 7-year-old son Gabe.
They sued the federal government under the Federal Tort Claims Act, but the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta upheld a district judge’s decision in favor of the government, which had claimed sovereign immunity.
The Supreme Court’s decision Thursday revives the residents’ lawsuit, returning it to the courts in Atlanta.
Justice Neil Gorsuch, who wrote the decision for the unanimous ruling, summed up the question at hand: “If federal officers raid the wrong house, causing property damage and assaulting innocent occupants, may the homeowners sue the government for damages? The answer is not as obvious as it might be.”
A tort is a wrongful act that causes harm or injury and is subject to monetary damages and other legal remedies. Sovereign immunity generally shields government from tort lawsuits, but that shield can be penetrated, sometimes in the case of “wrong-house” raids, Gorsuch wrote.
It is a complicated area of law, based on legal precedents that go back to the late 1800s with a sordid affair involving a former state supreme court justice in California who was shot dead by a federal marshal. The marshal, a former Tombstone, Ariz., police chief, was protecting a U.S. Supreme Court justice but was arrested by California authorities.
He convinced the U.S. Supreme Court to free him, the high court reasoning that allowing states to prosecute marshals for acts in the line of duty would “frustrate” federal law.
The 11th Circuit’s decision for the government reflected that history, but the U.S. Supreme Court justices concurred that the Atlanta circuit had issued an “outlier” opinion at odds with how most other courts have ruled on tort and sovereign immunity in such cases.
Georgia law allows a homeowner to sue a private person for damages in the event of a house raid and assault, and the high court determined that the 11th Circuit had improperly relied on cases such as that one from the 1800s, adding, “the 11th Circuit did not identify any federal statute or constitutional provision displacing Georgia tort law.”
The Institute for Justice, which represented the plaintiffs, said the decision explains that federal tort law “allows people to sue the federal government when its agents violate individual rights — intentionally or by accident.”
