Kemp to send 15 to 20 troops to support Texas gov in fight with White House
Gov. Brian Kemp is sending 15 to 20 National Guard troops to the U.S.-Mexico border to support Texas in its fight with President Joe Biden over immigration policy.
It’s part of an effort to put Democrats on the defensive after Republican leaders in Congress scuttled a border security deal at the urging of former President Donald Trump, who wants to keep illegal immigration as a campaign issue if he wins the GOP nomination to run against Biden.
Republicans in the General Assembly also joined in, passing resolutions in both the state House and Senate that condemned Biden’s immigration policies, endorsed construction of a border wall and backed Kemp’s effort to “allocate resources and assistance” to block illegal crossings.
Democrats called the Republican efforts posturing intended to score political points in an election year.
“What a shame that this is the priority of the majority party,” state Rep. Sam Park, a Democrat from Lawrenceville and one of his party’s leaders in the state House.
The federal government reported 302,000 encounters with unauthorized migrants in December, setting a record for a month and fueling new calls to take action at the border.
Polls show increasing concern among voters about illegal immigration.
Kemp has long called for stricter border controls, and he deployed a National Guard force to the border during Trump’s presidency in 2019. Officials say 29 Georgia troops are still stationed there, mostly assigned to aerial surveillance units.
Kemp recently traveled to the border with about a dozen other Republican governors to support Texas Gov. Greg Abbott in his stand against the Biden administration.
“Because of Joe Biden’s failure to address the crisis at the southern border, every state is now a border state,” Kemp said then.
Credit: TNS
Credit: TNS
Senate backs tax break for purchases involving firearm safety
The state Senate, with nearly unanimous support, approved legislation to waive the sales tax on the purchase of gun safes and other firearm safety mechanisms.
Senate Bill 340 would add “firearm safe” and “firearm safety device” to the list of products where purchasers are not charged sales taxes.
“This bill is simply an incentive for lawful gun owners to purchase safe storage devices, including firearm safes and firearm safety devices, such as trigger locks, by exempting them from Georgia sales tax,” said state Sen. Kay Kirkpatrick, a Marietta Republican and the sponsor of SB 340.
It’s just one of several bills tying tax breaks to firearms.
Senate Republicans earlier in the session, in a party-line vote, approved Senate Bill 344, which would create a five-day tax holiday for the purchase of firearms, ammunition and other gun accessories during the first week of hunting season in October.
State Rep. Mark Newton, an Augusta Republican, is sponsoring House Bill 971, which would offer Georgians who purchase a gun safe or a gun safety course a tax credit of up to $300 each year.
UGA med school proposal gains support of regents
A proposal to create a medical school at the University of Georgia won the backing this past week of the state Board of Regents.
It would be the state’s second public medical school, and officials say it is needed to address Georgia’s physician shortage.
The plan still faces other hurdles.
It needs accreditation in compliance with the standards of the Liaison Committee for Medical Education, and funding must be secured for the new facility.
Last month, Gov. Brian Kemp recommended spending $50 million in state funds for the medical school’s design and construction, and the state House approved the project earlier this month as part of its midyear budget. The matter is now under consideration in the Senate.
Officials have estimated the total cost will be $100 million, with UGA providing additional funding.
State tax collections slow down
Georgia’s tax collections continue to trickle in this fiscal year well short of the pace they set the past three years to produce massive surpluses.
For the first seven months of the fiscal year, which began July 1, collections are up 1.7%, or $316 million, over the same months in fiscal 2023. That comes with a big however: The state collected fuel taxes for much of this year and did not for comparable months in 2023. Without that, revenue collections would be down 2.7%.
The revenue report released this past week for January fell along those lines, with the state’s take up 2.1% over the same month in 2023.
Gov. Brian Kemp warned lawmakers at the end of the 2023 legislative session that the economy would likely take a downturn, and his economist projected a slowdown in 2024. The governor’s budget projections call for slow revenue collections for the next 18 months.
Credit: Arvin Temkar/AJC
Credit: Arvin Temkar/AJC
Black churches plan voter turnout effort
The African Methodist Episcopal Church and the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church, driven by polls showing flagging enthusiasm among Black voters, are teaming up to boost turnout for this year’s election.
In Georgia, Black voters generally support Democrats, and that held true in the 2020 presidential election, when exit polls showed that about 88% of African American voters in the state supported Joe Biden.
Support, however, may be slipping this year.
An Atlanta Journal-Constitution poll of registered voters last month showed 59% of Black respondents said they support Biden in this year’s election, while 20% would back Republican Donald Trump. The remaining 21% of Black voters surveyed said they preferred a different candidate, don’t plan to vote for president, or didn’t know who they would support.
The two denominations, which represent about 140,000 Black Georgians, will lead an election-year engagement effort that includes Sunday voter registration events, church town halls, training of faith leaders, voter guides and assistance for voters getting to the polls.
Credit: HYOSUB SHIN / AJC
Credit: HYOSUB SHIN / AJC
House backs plan to audit more elections
The Georgia House voted 164-3 to increase the number of election audits to two races after each statewide election.
The legislation, House Bill 977, is the latest Republican-sponsored proposal to tweak election rules ahead of this year’s presidential race. Other proposals call for eliminating computer codes from ballots, investigating the secretary of state’s office, posting ballot pictures online, adding watermarks to ballots and banning ranked-choice voting.
After the 2020 presidential election, the state conducted a manual audit of all 5 million ballots cast, confirming the computer count that showed Democrat Joe Biden defeated Republican Donald Trump by about 12,000 votes in Georgia. However, that didn’t stop Trump from claiming he was robbed and legislative Republicans from tinkering with election laws to please the former president’s supporters.
House Bill 977 would require that the top race on the ballot be audited each election along with another statewide race chosen by the governor, lieutenant governor, speaker of the House and the minority leaders in the state House and Senate.
The bill now goes to the Senate for its consideration.
State Election Board rejects call to end absentee balloting in most cases
By one vote, the State Election Board rejected a proposal to seek legislation ending no-excuse absentee voting for most Georgians.
John Fervier, recently named the board’s chairman by Gov. Brian Kemp, cast the deciding vote against the proposal, which called for limiting absentee voting to people who are disabled, older than 75 or out of town.
The proposed restriction, pushed by GOP board member Janice Johnston, was based on complaints stemming from broad adoption of remote voting during the COVID-19 pandemic in the 2020 presidential election, when Republican Donald Trump narrowly lost to Democrat Joe Biden in Georgia.
Johnston said she opposed no-excuse absentee voting because she believes it is less secure than in-person voting. Election fraud is rare in Georgia, and investigations have repeatedly dismissed allegations of wrongdoing in the 2020 election among both absentee and in-person voters.
Absentee voting exploded in popularity during the coronavirus pandemic, when a quarter of all Georgia voters in the 2020 presidential election voted outside polling places to avoid in-person contact.
The rate of absentee voters returned to historic norms in the 2022 midterms, with about 6% of voters casting their ballots remotely.
Swatting bill advances
Senate Bill 421, legislation that would make swatting a felony in Georgia, won the backing of the state Senate Judiciary Committee.
A number of state senators are among the elected officials in Georgia who were recently targeted in swatting incidents, which occur when an anonymous caller contacts police to report a fictitious crime at the home of a swatting victim. It often results in a massive police response, as well as fear and confusion.
Political expedience
- Special elections: Former state Rep. Tim Bearden, a Republican, won a special election to win the state Senate seat that had been held by Mike Dugan of Carrollton, who resigned to run for the U.S. House. In a separate special election, to fill the state House seat that Barry Fleming gave up to become a superior court judge, former Columbia County Commissioner Gary Richardson and conservative activist C.J. Pearson qualified for a March 12 runoff after neither Republican won a majority in the five-candidate contest.
- Impeachment role: U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Rome, will serve as an impeachment manager against U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas as the case moves to the Senate. Greene sponsored the bill that led to Mayorkas’ impeachment this week by one vote in the House.
- New chair: State Rep. Butch Parrish, a Republican from Swainsboro who was first elected to the Georgia House in 1984, is the new chair of the chamber’s Rules Committee. Parrish takes over the panel that determines what legislation gets a floor vote in the House following last month’s death of Richard Smith.
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