Home > Political Insider > Archives > 2007 > March > 18
Sunday, March 18, 2007
The return of the Jedi: With luck they’ll be gone by Memorial Day
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
You have only 10 days left to live, your doctors have declared. Somehow, what you do with the few sunrises left seem more important than the multitude that passed before.
This is the situation facing the state Legislature, which returns today[cq Monday] after a two-week recess, to finish out the rest of its 40-day session.
We are at Day 28. The rules say that if legislation has not passed one of the two chambers of the General Assembly by Day 30, it’s dead for the session. Resurrections do occur, but as in the Bible, they’re few and far between.
In other words, the next three working days will determine what state lawmakers will argue about for the next 10. The short answer? Red-light cameras, executions and the Civil War.
Money is always the bottom line. Constitutionally, the Legislature is required to approve a $20 billion budget for 2008, and a second, smaller budget bill to make changes for the current year.
Central to the spending bills is the financing of PeachCare, the federal-state program to provide health insurance for 280,000 or so children of the working poor. A $131 million hole in federal funding was the reason Gov. Sonny Perdue gave for requesting the two-week recess. The gap is still there, and the state will have to fill it.
The House and the governor want to limit access to the program, to diminish its reach into the lower middle-class. The Senate would like to preserve the range of children under the PeachCare umbrella, by increasing the premiums paid by parents with higher incomes.
Pay attention to this. It’s Casey Cagle’s first big test as lieutenant governor.
Beyond that, the boys and girls in House Speaker Glenn Richardson’s playpen have a short list of items they want to fight over.
The proliferation of red-light cameras is one matter. Whether to readmit payday lenders into the state is another. Then there’s the opportunity to let Georgia voters join a multitude of other states next year in a near-national, Feb. 5 presidential primary.
House leaders would also like to deprive lone jurors of their power to spoil perfectly good executions.
But time is short, and late last week, House Republicans also signaled their willingness to walk away from complicated issues that might bog down the process. Any talk of new taxes for transportation has been jettisoned.
House Majority Leader Jerry Keen (R-St. Simons Island) said an effort to change the permitting process for hospitals could fester until next year. (Crass observation: The delay would allow health care operations and doctors time to review the amount of money they give to political campaigns.)
On the Senate side, the lieutenant governor has already moved his signature legislation, which would encourage entire city and county school systems to shift to a charter format free of state mandates.
For Cagle, it’s now a matter of avoiding internal GOP feuds, by keeping its most controversial legislation bottled up.
Though he hasn’t said so publicly, Cagle, the lieutenant governor, doesn’t want a vote on the bill to permit grocery stores to sell beer and wine on Sunday.
Nor does he want debate over a bill that would permit employees to keep guns in their cars parked on company property. Both measures pit the state’s business community against the GOP’s ideological base.
A third snake was defanged last week, when Senate Rules Chairman Don Balfour (R-Snellvile) announced he’d killed his own bill to mandate that sixth-grade girls be given a vaccine to prevent cervical cancer.
The trees are leafing, and the Legislature’s re-assembling, which must mean it’s time to talk about Robert E. Lee
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
But if the Legislature is down to its last few scripted hours, if crisis after crisis is bearing down on Georgia, then it also must be time to talk about the Confederacy and segregation.
Perhaps it was a deficiency of Wilson Pickett in their diets when they were young. Or a simple lack of practice. Either way, our ruling Republicans have displayed a tin ear when it comes to politics and race in Georgia.
Two springs ago, they devoted an entire day in the Legislature to sweeping ancient - and unenforced - Jim Crow laws from the Georgia Code. It was a wasted gesture.
The day before, they had unleashed a bill to require photo IDs at the voting booth, a measure that a federal judge would ultimately condemn as a poll tax that would have the effect of dampening turnout among black and elderly voters.
Weeks ago, Republican leaders dismissed an effort to squeeze an apology for slavery out of the state and its current GOP management. Republicans rallied around a single talking point: We’re about the future, they said, not the past.
The comments rang hollow, betrayed by a resolution to declare April a month to honor the Confederate attempt at “Southern independence.” The bill shot through a Senate committee, toward a vote by the entire Senate that will come in the next several days.
It was another opportunity lost, a failure by this party of Lincoln to recognize the other people in the room. In fact, the legislation was a splendid example of how the South continues to segregate its history as efficiently as it once segregated its people.
A deliberate slap? Probably not, but white Republican sponsors recognized the volatile ground they walked on. S.B. 283 is intended to encourage instruction about the Confederacy in schools, but allows that principals need not tolerate “behavior that disrupts or involves substantial disorder or the invasion of the rights of others.”
Which brings us to Senate President pro tem Eric Johnson of Savannah, the No. 2 Republican in the Senate. He’s formed an alliance with state Rep. Al Williams, an African-American Democrat from coastal Georgia.
Johnson will spend the rest of this year’s session on a resolution that - if not apologizing for slavery and segregation - might express regret.
“I’ve been arguing privately for a while that Georgia ought to be in the lead, and not forced into anything, on the slavery issue,” Johnson said Friday.
The senator broadly hinted that whatever he proposes will focus on how the state should publicly approach the 150th anniversary of the beginning of the Civil War. Success in the hectic, last days of the session is possible, but distant.
House Speaker Glenn Richardson has said he’s not interested. Democrats, he said, had 130 years to make their apologies, and did not. Which is true, but only half the point.
Democrats lost their hold on power because, after decades of papering over the past, they failed in their efforts to - through a new state flag - rally behind a single history that satisfied both black and white Democrats.
In the next few days, and perhaps next year as well, Johnson will warn Republicans not to build on the same sand.
