It makes a lot of sense, at least if you look at it through the eyes of state Rep. Greg Morris. But from any other perspective it looks like a telling failure of leadership and a big waste of taxpayer money.
Morris, an eight-term South Georgia Republican legislator, needs some political help. After running unopposed for years, he faces a challenge in the May primary from a former Navy SEAL with strong ties to the Tea Party. Morris also has some personal baggage involving his role in a failed local bank.
So to keep his seat, Morris needed a way to polish his conservative credentials. And in a GOP primary, what better way to do that than to sponsor bills that put the Ten Commandments on display outside the Capitol and that require drug tests for those applying for food stamps and welfare benefits.
Sure, the bills amount to meaningless posturing. Everybody knows that. Lawsuits will be filed and the courts will block the Ten Commandments display for what it is: an expression of support for a particular religion. Under the First Amendment, government can’t do that. And federal officials have already warned Georgia that states can’t alter eligibility requirements for food stamps, which is a federal program.
Even if they could get away with it, it would be a bad idea. Georgia officials are already so far behind in the processing of food-stamp applications that federal officials have had to intervene, demanding that the state clear up a backlog of 30,000 unprocessed applications or face the loss of federal money. Now we’re going to ask those same overworked employees to act as drug-enforcement officers, deciding which applicants will have to be tested and handling the additional paperwork, appeals, etc.?
It’s simply bad governance. More importantly, the courts have ruled repeatedly that you can’t force American citizens to undergo drug tests as a condition of participation in government programs. It violates the Fourth Amendment ban on unreasonable searches, and being poor enough to need food stamps doesn’t mean you lose the freedoms that you are guaranteed under the Constitution. (It’s remarkable how often people who claim to be stalwart defenders of liberty against government intrusion rush to use government to take that liberty from others.)
But again, to Morris, none of that really matters, and in a way I can’t really blame him. He’s just a guy trying to get re-elected, and sponsoring hopeless if popular legislation is a time-honored way of doing that.
The problem is that in the rudderless, driftless 2014 General Assembly, Morris’ legislation was given committee time and floor time and allowed to pass. State legislative leaders who ought to know better either did not try or lacked the power to simply let those bills die in obscurity, as they should have. If the bills are signed into law by Gov. Nathan Deal, it’s going to cost taxpayers a lot of money to try to defend them in court, and the outcome is all but ordained.
In the past, under Republicans as well as Democrats, bills like those sponsored by Morris rarely survived the committee process. If somehow they passed one chamber, they would languish in the second chamber as more important bills — transportation, education, little things like that — were given priority. A vetting process was exerted largely unseen from the speaker’s office and the lieutenant governor’s office, and it kept embarrassments to a minimum.
That no longer exists, as also proved by passage of the atrocious gun bill passed in the last hour of the session. The grownups have given up.
