Capitol Recap: Trump loyalists seek ways to punish Fulton DA over indictments

Opponents of Senate Bill 92 warned during debate earlier this year in the General Assembly that it could be used to target Willis and her investigation of Trump. The bill passed this year at the urging of Republican Gov. Brian Kemp and Lt. Gov. Burt Jones, who won election last year with the backing of the former president.

Kemp and Republican sponsors said SB 92 was designed to pursue “rogue prosecutors” who were ignoring their duties or flouting the law. They avoided overt mention of Willis.

While the new commission will start receiving complaints in October, it could take months before it starts to mete out punishments.

Georgia legislators already have the power to impeach district attorneys, although they are rarely invoked. There are other checks on wayward prosecutors encoded in the law, plus elections and recall provisions that give voters a chance to remove them at the ballot box.

But the commission’s sponsors say existing rules are not strong enough, and they drew the support of nearly two dozen district attorneys from mostly rural parts of Georgia who signed a letter backing the law that created the commission.

Opposing the law, however, is a bipartisan group of prosecutors who this month filed a lawsuit challenging it.

One of those prosecutors, DeKalb County District Attorney Sherry Boston, said the law amounts to a power grab.

“We can’t do our jobs fairly and impartially,” she said, “if we don’t have discretion or independence.”

Trump supporters have pursued other options targeting Willis.

Republican State Sen. Colton Moore called for a special legislative session to investigate Willis, but that is unlikely to happen.

Others explored changing the state’s pardon laws to make it easier to exonerate the former president if he’s convicted, but state Republican leaders said they would block such an effort.

Several GOP legislators are drafting a statement condemning Willis for deploying her office’s investigators in a case against Trump, which state Sen. Jason Anavitarte called an “egregious” use of resources.

At the federal level, U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Rome, has talked to U.S. House leaders about investigating Willis. House Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, then launched a probe, demanding that Willis provide records and documents related to any communication she had with federal officials related to her investigation by Sept. 7.

Judge puts hold on law limiting treatments for transgender children

Transgender children in Georgia, at least temporarily, will be able to resume hormone therapy after a federal judge blocked a new state law banning certain treatments for minors.

U.S. District Judge Sarah E. Geraghty wrote in her ruling that the law violates the 14th Amendment right of equal protection by discriminating against transgender minors.

Several Georgia families filed a federal lawsuit against the state in June asking the courts to stop the measure, Senate Bill 140, before it took effect July 1. They argued that the law takes away the rights of parents to make health care decisions for their children.

Opponents of the law say it conflicts with published medical “standards of care” and will hurt transgender children, who commit suicide at a higher rate than their nontransgender peers.

Supporters say the law protects children from taking permanent steps toward gender transition.

In her ruling, Geraghty wrote that hormone therapy treatment improves mental health outcomes in various ways for minors diagnosed with gender dysphoria, such as easing anxiety and depression and reducing suicidal thoughts and self-harm. Gender dysphoria — the distress that comes from feeling you’re not the gender you were assigned at birth — is a diagnosis often given to transgender people.

“A ban on hormone therapy would deprive patients of the possibility of these benefits,” she wrote. “It would, indeed, be likely to put some individuals at risk of the serious harms associated with gender dysphoria that gender-affirming care seeks to prevent.”

In addition to the ban on treating transgender minors with hormones such as estrogen and testosterone, SB 140 barred doctors from performing surgeries on children seeking to align with their gender identity.

The families did not challenge the ban on surgeries, which minors rarely seek. That provision remains in place.

Other states have faced challenges to laws similar to SB 140.

The 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld statutes in Kentucky and Tennessee after judges in lower federal courts initially blocked them.

U.S. district judges also stopped transgender treatment laws from taking effect in other states, including Florida and Alabama. A panel of three judges on the Atlanta-based 11th U.S. Circuit of Appeals, however, overruled the temporary injunction on Alabama’s law the day after Geraghty issued her ruling, meaning that state’s ban is once again in effect.

Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr has filed a motion asking Geraghty to reconsider her order. His office argues that the findings by the 11th Circuit in the Alabama case contradict her decision and that she should vacate her ruling and allow Georgia’s law to be in effect during the court process.

Alabama’s law is more restrictive than the Georgia statute, banning the use of all treatments for transgender minors. The Georgia law still allows children to receive puberty blockers, and minors who began hormone therapy before it took effect are allowed to continue their treatments.

Credit: Nathan Posner for the AJC

Credit: Nathan Posner for the AJC

Two Georgia Republicans play hardball with threat of federal shutdown

A pair of Georgia Republicans are among those in Congress pushing hardest for a shutdown of the federal government unless an agreement is reached that advances conservative causes.

The threat makes a federal shutdown more likely at the end of September unless House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., cements a deal with Democrats for a continuing resolution to provide temporary funding.

In a letter to constituents, U.S. Rep. Andrew Clyde of Athens said the Freedom Caucus will require any deal on a spending bill to “secure the border, address the weaponization of the Department of Justice, and end the woke policies that continue to undermine our military.”

He added that the group of conservative Republicans will “oppose any blank check for Ukraine.”

“Ultimately, we strongly believe that it’s time to use the power of the purse to defund Joe Biden’s reckless, woke, and bloated agenda,” Clyde wrote.

McCarthy holds a slim majority in the House and can’t afford to lose more than a handful of Republican votes if he wants to pass legislation without the help of Democrats. Finding Democratic support for the Freedom Caucus’ priorities is unlikely.

U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Rome, is no longer a member of the Freedom Caucus, but at a recent town hall meeting in Gordon County, she called for a return of federal spending to pre-COVID-19 levels. She said she opposes a continuing resolution that would keep funding at levels implemented when Democrats were in the majority.

Greene’s demands found favor in Gordon.

“Do y’all care if the government shuts down?” she asked the crowd.

It responded with an enthusiastic “no.”

Credit: Savannah Morning News

Credit: Savannah Morning News

Warnock makes pitch to help Head Start after it helped him

U.S. Sen. Raphael Warnock picked territory he knows well this past week to pitch a proposal to help a program he knows well.

Only a 5-minute walk from the public housing where he grew up, Warnock announced legislation to allow student teachers to work in Early Head Start classrooms.

Warnock is a Head Start alum, having attended a Savannah-area preschool, known as Early Birds, in the early 1970s.

It had a great impact on his life, he says.

“Head Start did for me exactly what the name suggests: It gave a kid growing up in public housing a head start, gave me a path toward academic success and laid the foundation for everything that I’ve done ever since,” Warnock said. “I’ve never forgotten that.”

Warnock, with Indiana Republican U.S. Sen. Mike Braun as a co-sponsor, intends to file the Early Head Start bill in September. It would alter Head Start rules to allow students working toward child development associate credentials, also known as CDAs, to teach alongside degree-holding educators in the classroom.

Early Head Start, which serves children ages 6 months to 3 years, and Head Start, for children 3 years old to 5 years old, face a chronic workforce shortage nationwide. Savannah is a prime example: The city has funding for 327 children but operates at less than half capacity.

Alycia Brown, the program’s local director, said Savannah Head Start facilities have six empty classrooms — five of those for Early Head Start attendees — and 21 teacher vacancies. The student-to-teacher ratio is 4-to-1 in Early Head Start classes and 10-to-1 in Head Start classes.

She said Warnock and Braun’s legislation would give her the “flexibility” to pair student teachers with veteran educators and increase the number of classes.

“We have a waitlist, a long one,” Brown said. “We want to be able to serve more students.”

Food stamp enrollment drops, while decline in welfare use continues trend

Food stamp use fell again in Georgia after a brief swing up during the coronavirus pandemic, while state welfare enrollment continues a decline that began more than a decade ago.

The number of Georgia households that receive benefits through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, the formal name for food stamps, was down nearly 11% — from 778,000 in June 2022 to 694,000 this year.

On the welfare front, benefits from the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program went to 4,809 Georgia households, down from 6,190 at the same time a year before.

That’s a decrease of about 21%, a big contribution to an overall decline since 2006, the earliest year for which the Division of Family and Children Services could provide data, of nearly 86%, when 33,302 Georgia households received welfare benefits.

The numbers are falling amid some positive economic data.

Inflation has begun to ease across the nation, according an NBC News tracker, and Georgia’s unemployment rate dropped to a historically low 3.2% in July from 12.5% in April 2020 — the highest point during the pandemic.

At the height of the pandemic, in September 2020, 905,000 Georgia households were relying on food stamps.

Before the pandemic, food stamp use had been on a decline, especially after the state set up work requirements for the program for some counties in 2016.

The federal work rules required able-bodied adults without dependents between the ages of 18 and 49 to work at least 20 hours a week or be engaged in some sort of education or work training. They were given three months to find a job or training program before losing their benefits.

About 600,000 fewer people received food stamps in 2019 than in 2013.

The plan was to extend the requirements to recipients across the state in April 2020, but that was also when the economy started shutting down as COVID-19 spread, forcing the policy to be abandoned. The work requirements were put back in place at the beginning of last month.

The federal work rules required able-bodied adults without dependents between the ages of 18 and 49 to work at least 20 hours a week or be engaged in some sort of education or work training. They were given three months to find a job or training program before losing their benefits.

About 600,000 fewer people received food stamps in 2019 than in 2013.

Work requirements were abandoned once the coronavirus pandemic began, but they were put back in place as of July 1.

The criteria to qualify for TANF are more strict than for food stamps. To be eligible for welfare in Georgia, a family of three must have a gross income below $784 a month. The same family could have a monthly gross income of up to $2,311 and still receive food stamps.

The work requirements are also tougher for welfare.

In Georgia, welfare recipients must work or participate in training for at least 30 hours each week. Those who enroll get access to job-searching assistance, or, if necessary, they receive help finishing high school, completing a GED program or finding another specialized certification program.

State pension systems up after losses in previous fiscal year

The two major retirement systems for state workers and teachers have bounced back after watching their values tumble last year when the stock markets plummeted.

The Teachers Retirement System and the Employees’ Retirement System — which provide monthly benefits to more than 190,000 retirees and their beneficiaries — have not fully recovered their losses, but they are in much better shape.

The larger of the two systems, the TRS, reported that when fiscal 2023 ended on June 30, its fund had $94.7 billion. That was up from $87 billion the year before.

The ERS, which covers retired state workers, saw its assets improve from $13.8 billion to $15 billion in the same time.

The systems still have some ground to make up.

The TRS fund, for example, stood at $102 billion at the end of fiscal 2021.