by Ty Tagami | May 15, 2025 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA – As Georgia looks ahead to the 2026 elections, a court fight is still brewing over the election maps scheduled to be used.
The federal court of appeals in Atlanta heard three cases Thursday stemming from those early maps, which were drawn by state lawmakers in response to the decennial population count in 2020.
The outcome could influence the next elections, and it could inform future courts about how to interpret the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which prohibits race-based discrimination.
At issue is the way lawmakers responded to a district court’s order to redraw maps that were found to have discriminated against Black voters by diminishing their influence.
The court ordered the state to redo the maps so that more districts were majority Black.
The state redrew them, and the court approved the results, leading to the appeals by the American Civil Liberties Union and by numerous voters.
Lawyers in those three cases made many of the same points Thursday morning.
The plaintiffs argued that the state violated the federal election law by creating new Black majority districts by using Black voters from other Black majority districts or districts where white voters tended to vote with Black voters.
The state’s attorney countered that the law doesn’t prohibit that.
“Are there the right number of districts? Yes,” said Stephen J. Petrany, solicitor general for Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr. “Are they basically in the right area? Yes. That is the end of this case.”
Judge Adalberto Jordan, one of the three judges hearing the cases before the U.S. 11th Circuit Court of Appeals, pressed Petrany, saying the plaintiffs were asserting that the state’s remedy “completely excludes” the aggrieved Black voters who used to be part of a racial majority voting area but were now in the minority, by creating new Black-majority districts with other Black voters.
Petrany said not all Black voters were so moved and that it wouldn’t be illegal if they had been.
Abha Khanna, arguing for the plaintiffs in two of the cases — Coakley Pendergrass et. al. v. Georgia Secretary of State and Annie Grant et. al. v. Georgia Secretary of State — said the state was moving voters around on a board without changing the game.
“In the Grant case, there are 185,000-plus Black voters who have suffered a vote dilution injury,” she said, meaning they were shifted into a white-majority area that was unlikely to elect Black candidates while other Black voters in a Black-majority voting district were moved to a new district with a Black majority.
“It was a shell game,” she said.
Ari Savitzky of the ACLU argued for the plaintiffs in the third case, Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity, Inc. v. Georgia Secretary of State. He said the district court failed to do due diligence on the remediation maps.
He alleged that the state simply re-labeled districts and that the district judge accepted them on their face.
“The district court fundamentally didn’t look at these numbers,” Savitzky said.
It is unclear when the appeals court will issue decisions. Judge Jordan said there would be no ruling until another case also pending in the appellate court is decided. That is the case that led to the remediation maps.
Although the state lost that first round and then redrew the maps, it also appealed that court loss.
It’s unclear whether any of these decisions will be made in time to affect next year’s elections.
by Ty Tagami | May 13, 2025 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA – The penalty for trafficking fentanyl just got more serious in Georgia after Gov. Brian Kemp signed legislation that seeks to suppress illicit sales of the dangerous drug.
When used in a medical setting with proper dosing, the painkiller can help patients experiencing discomfort. But it is 100 times more potent than morphine, according to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency, and it can be lethal on the street where it can be found laced with other drugs, such as Adderall, Oxycodone and Xanax.
Two milligrams can kill depending on a person’s body size, tolerance and past usage, according to the DEA, which maintains a memorial exhibit for the drug, which has predominantly killed teenagers.
The Fentanyl Eradication and Removal Act imposes a range of mandatory minimum sentences on convicted traffickers in fentanyl. Four grams to 14 grams, the smallest amounts covered by the legislation – Senate Bill 79 — will result in at least five years behind bars.
Kemp signed the legislation Monday, along with 19 other bills.
Sen. Russ Goodman, R-Cogdell, drove more than eight hours round trip to watch the ceremony. The South Georgia blueberry farmer said Tuesday that he introduced SB 79 because fentanyl is unlike any other drug experienced by older generations. If those older drugs are BB guns, then fentanyl is a nuclear bomb, he said, and teenagers are particularly at risk because they are unaware.
He has many anecdotes from his part of the state — about a medical administrator whose child died after consuming marijuana laced with fentanyl or three young men who took cocaine laced with fentanyl while harvesting crops late one night. Two of them died, Goodman said.
“It’s really gotten personal for me. I’ve met so many people who’ve lost their children.”
by Ty Tagami | May 12, 2025 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA – Schools across Georgia will have to figure out how to pry cellphones from students’ hands next year now that a new ban will be taking effect.
House Bill 340 prohibits personal communications devices in public school classrooms from kindergarten through eighth grade.
The ban goes into effect in the summer of 2026. Gov. Brian Kemp signed the legislation last week after it passed the Georgia General Assembly with broad bipartisan support earlier this year.
A handful of school systems have already implemented local bans, including Marietta City Schools.
Marietta Superintendent Grant Rivera was among the leading proponents for a statewide ban, telling lawmakers in March that he’d seen dramatic changes in middle school, where students were talking with each other rather than hunching over screens.
“It impacts academics, it impacts their well-being, it impacts their relationships,” Rivera said at a legislative hearing. He said disciplinary issues were down, as well.
School districts have until January to write policies and procedures for locking up students’ phones from the first bell in the morning to the last one in the afternoon.
They must implement those policies by July 1, 2026, with hundreds of thousands of students affected when school starts that fall.
School leaders welcome the legislation. John Zauner, executive director of the Georgia School Superintendents Association, called the ban a well-meaning attempt to remove a major distraction during the school day.
“Cellphones in the hands of youngsters are definitely a distraction,” he said.
Fulton County School System, one of the largest school districts in Georgia, is already preparing.
“These new restrictions were already planned for the upcoming school year, and the new law affirms the direction we were taking to reduce distractions and strengthen student learning,” a district spokesman said. School board members will vote on the new policy in June. It not only would ban use during the school day through eighth grade, but also would prohibit use in high schools during instructional time.
While the idea of a statewide ban is popular, some have expressed concern about being unable to reach their children during an emergency, such as a school shooting.
That’s why the bill’s chief co-sponsor, Rep. Scott Hilton, R-Peachtree Corners, didn’t push for a ban in high schools. But he and others expect the K-8 ban to spread to high schools in the future, after middle school students and their parents become accustomed to it.
Hilton said in an interview Monday that high school is more complicated, and it will take time to study implementation there and to develop a cellphone-free culture.
“I think this bill begins an important conversation that’s going to lead to a cellphone-free environment in grades 9 through 12,” he said.
That culture is deeply embedded. Hilton said that when Kemp signed HB 340 on Friday, lawmakers instinctively pulled out their smartphones to capture the moment. And Hilton said that when he was presenting his bill on the floor of the House of Representatives, his colleagues couldn’t resist the moment.
“My phone starts to light up,” he said. “People are calling, texting — and it’s my colleagues in the House having fun with me. It was distracting.”
by Ty Tagami | May 12, 2025 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA – John King, Georgia’s insurance commissioner, has joined the Republican primary election in hopes of unseating Democratic U.S. Sen. Jon Ossoff next year.
Gov. Brian Kemp’s announcement last week that he would not be running for the Senate opened the door to a host of potential candidates. Days later, U.S. Rep. Buddy Carter of St. Simons Island became the first Republican to enter the race.
King, a major general in the U.S. Army National Guard and a former police chief, is the first official elected statewide to join the race. He won the election for insurance and safety fire commissioner in 2022 after Kemp appointed him to the position in 2019.
The native of Mexico is the first Hispanic to have won statewide office in Georgia.
King came to America at age 17 and enlisted in the National Guard, rising from private to major general when he retired in 2023. He was deployed to Afghanistan, Africa, Bosnia, and Iraq. Over four decades in law enforcement, he rose from beat cop in Atlanta to police chief in Doraville.
In his announcement Monday, King emphasized these roles, his statement saying he “was shot and stabbed in the line of duty.” King also underscored his ties to President Donald Trump, noting that he was deployed to the southern border during Trump’s first term and co-chaired Trump’s 2020 campaign in Georgia.
Despite his statewide election success, King could struggle with national name recognition, which plays a role in campaign fundraising. Ossoff has proven a prodigious fundraiser, bringing in more cash than any sitting U.S. senator.
Still, King drew a veteran GOP strategist to his campaign. Dan McLagan, who worked for Gary Black’s campaign in the U.S. Senate primary won by Herschel Walker, is handling communications for King.
by Ty Tagami | May 8, 2025 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA – Educators who want to open a charter school will have an expedited process under new rules adopted by the state school board Thursday.
The board overhauled its rule that controls the charter school petition process, shifting much of the authority from the Georgia Department of Education to the State Charter Schools Commission.
The commission was established more than a decade ago by a constitutional referendum promoted by lawmakers who were frustrated by local resistance to charter schools and the slow approval pace. It can approve charter schools that have been denied by local school districts, but some complain that local school boards drag out their own process, leading to delays in state approvals.
Lawmakers continue to pass legislation favorable to charter schools, including House Bill 318 last year, which mandated the new rule that was adopted Thursday by a unanimous vote of the Georgia Board of Education.
The rule requires local school boards to approve or deny local charter petitions in less than a year. School districts must publish their petition schedule by Sept. 1, with a petition deadline of Jan. 1 and a board vote by the following June 30.
And it replaces the education department’s authority over most of the process, handing it to the commission’s Office of Charter School Compliance.
That office’s senior director, Allen Mueller, summarized the effect at a state board committee meeting on Wednesday.
The changes amend procedures “so that when folks make local decisions, it creates a path for those petitioners to move to the commission, not have to wait another year or two years as had been happening,” he said.
