The Trumpification of our state politics is ahead of schedule.
Major statewide offices won’t open up until 2018, and Sen. Johnny Isakson has only token primary opposition before facing a Wall Street Democrat. But the just-ended legislative session showed the three-way schism among GOP leadership, rank-and-file members and the business community is already a gap of Make Georgia Great Again proportions. Like the political crisis that has engulfed the GOP nationally, there’s plenty of blame to go around.
The central issue here is not illegal immigration, but religious liberty. Critics first branded the effort unnecessary, then counter-productive; before long, if you took the same position the Clintons did not so long ago, you were a “bigot.”
The bill’s backers, meanwhile, came to see their traditional business allies as enablers of their opposition — led by some pols happy to ride anti-establishment sentiment until they are the new establishment. Top elected officials were in a bind.
Here, the analogy falls apart. Unlike in D.C., Georgia’s proposal erred on the side of the grassroots — maybe a sign of how things have changed since the Gang of Eight just three years ago. But this time, the chambers of commerce didn’t have their backs.
There are starkly divergent accounts as to how Gold Dome leaders and the CEO set wound up so far apart on House Bill 757. The former claims the latter sang a different tune behind closed doors than once the bill emerged publicly; the latter vehemently denies that and says some of its red lines were ignored.
What’s clear is two-fold. First, there was a fatal lack of salesmanship for the bill. Had the final text not been revealed and passed so suddenly, but explained in detail to those executives who have denounced it, the bill might have been seen as the defusing of a political bomb. Not by all parties, but by enough that we wouldn’t be talking about boycotts.
Second, the split may have been foreordained when the Metro Atlanta Chamber set out its two pre-session priorities: more money for transit, and no RFRA, as the religious-liberty bill is known. The clear signal to the two-thirds of GOP legislators who live outside the 10-county metro region: We aren't one of y'all. Trust between the two never recovered.
In the session’s dying hours came the response from lawmakers who felt jilted: Study committees to reconsider their preferential treatment of industry. Then, a bid to make corporations’ PR-friendly non-discrimination policies subject to class-action lawsuits if they aren’t upheld. Companies would either risk devastating lawsuits (not exactly a traditional GOP principle) or they’d have to betray their LGBT allies by dropping such policies. It was eventually withdrawn, but not before sending a chill throughout the Capitol.
In the climate of 2016, it had the patina of a certain Republican front-runner who last month said a wealthy family giving to his opponents "better be careful, they have a lot to hide" and just this past week threatened to "spill the beans" about his chief rival's wife. It was unmistakably Trumpian.
And so we head into a primary season less likely to change the bent of Republicanism in Georgia as to solidify it. The GOP soul-searching desperately needed nationally will have to happen here, too.
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