Legislative Session Week 5
The most expensive thing to be in Georgia is poor.
February 12, 2024
As we race toward the critical date of February 29 in the legislative session – crossover day – there was some movement in bills that will help Georgians. But we also saw some disappointing and outrageous votes this past week.
In this week’s edition of the Draper Paper, we cover the following topics:
Voting and Election Bills
SB 63: Extra punishment for being poor
Lives diverted at a young age: Repeal the “Drug-free Postsecondary Education Act of 1990”
HB 1118: Hiding discrimination under the guise of helping women
SB 390: Now we are going after librarians?
The amended 2024 state budget
What’s in a name? The Stone Mountain Judicial Circuit
But first, have you signed up yet for a House District 90 Town Hall? Our first one is this Thursday in Cedar Grove!
Let’s talk about voting
A Senate committee unanimously approved my bill that would allow parents with young children in tow to move to the front of the line to vote.
This is a pro-voter, pro-family piece of legislation, and I’m proud to see it continues to have viability and bi-partisan support. Allowing some voters to access the front of the line is a courtesy we already offer the elderly and disabled. So it makes sense that parents would need the same opportunity to ensure they can participate in the civic process. My thanks to Republican Senator Rick Williams for carrying the bill for me on the Senate side.
And I have to share with you, the committee hearing was the most heartwarming experience I’ve had in a while. Several people and groups testified about how meaningful this legislation would be to them– and they even brought their babies to the hearing! I was fighting back a few tears by the end.
I have three small children and I know how tough it can be to just make it out of the house some days! This legislation has the potential to help people from more stages of life engage in our democracy, and I hope it continues to gain traction.
Though the bill hasn’t been put to a vote by the full Senate, that could happen this week.
I expect I will have a house-side committee hearing on my version of the bill, HB 559, this week too. Exciting!
And if you are wondering how I came up with the idea for this legislation, check out my tweet from 2022, documenting my experience waiting in line to vote with two of my kids in tow. We were in line for over two hours. We made it, but there were a couple of times I thought we might have to abort the mission!
Can't leave out my youngest, who is the other ⅓ of my inspiration for this legislation.
Also this past week, I introduced two more bills that are part of my slate of election initiatives.
Supporting Election Workers
House Bill 1118 would offer support for our election and poll workers who are fearful and vulnerable in today’s political atmosphere of hate and violence.
I’m sure you are already familiar with what Wandrea "Shaye" Moss, former Elections Department employee in Fulton County, and her mother, Georgia election worker Ruby Freeman, went through. Both women were terrorized by conspiracy theorists after the 2020 election for simply doing their jobs. Indeed, serious threats against election workers all over the state have been at an all time high since 2020, and show little signs of waning.
Supporting our front line democracy workers should be something we all care about, and I’m happy to say I have bipartisan support on this bill. It has been assigned to the judiciary non-civil committee.
Curbing Bad Faith Voter Challenges
I also filed a bill to bring some sanity to the disturbing trend of mass, meritless voter challenges– a political tool used by bad actors to overwhelm county election offices during critical election periods and chill voting by eligible voters.
As you’ll recall, Trump-supporting outside groups organized the filing of 360,000 meritless voter challenges in the weeks before the 2021 runoffs won by Senators Warnock and Ossoff.
In 2021, the Legislature changed state law to clarify that there was no limit on the number of voter challenges that could be filed. Boards of elections across the state have been swamped as thousands of challenges were filed, some in the form of spreadsheets showing names and addresses and nothing more. Critically, the overwhelming majority of these challenges have been dismissed as meritless.
Yet, even when targeted voters “win” the challenge, the counties that must process these mass, meritless voter challenges still lose because the administrative burden of processing thousands of challenges at a time is so high. Paid staff in targeted counties have had periods when they could do nothing but process these challenges, and have had to neglect their regular election duties. This hurts voters.
My bill shifts the cost burden of processing challenges to the voter challengers. Under my legislation, the challenger would pay for the time it costs counties to research, process, and execute the voter challenge process if it takes more than 15 minutes. The language I’ve selected mirrors the language in the Georgia Open Records Act, which essentially says people are entitled to records, but must pay the reasonable costs associated with collecting and producing such records so as not to overburden the counties and agencies that must do the collection and production.
If it becomes law, I believe this bill will dissuade frivolous, bad faith challenges while still allowing for good faith, legitimate voter challenges.
Addressing the voter challenge issue has been on my mind for some time. Last year, I argued against SB222, which cut off outside election funding to counties. I made the point then that it was unfair to cut off outside funding and do nothing to stem the costs of voter challenges being imposed on some counties and not others. Catch those points at the very beginning of my remarks here.
Forces outside the Legislature are also plotting to limit voting rights
A member of Georgia’s State Elections Board is proposing eliminating “no-excuse vote by mail.” No-excuse vote by mail permits any and all Georgians the option to vote by mail without having to give a reason or explanation why.
I’m not sure of her reasons, but Dr. Janice Johnson wants Georgia to revert to a voting restriction from more than two decades ago that allowed only those who can prove that they have met a strict set of eligibility requirements to secure a vote by mail ballot. Voters had to demonstrate that they would be traveling or that they had medical issues in order to take advantage of voting by mail. But people with language barriers, who work hourly jobs, with unpredictable schedules – and many others! – would be harmed if we abandoned no-excuse vote by mail, which is used by 35 other states.
A campaign to get rid of no-excuse vote by mail sends a message to Georgians that the State Elections Board wants to make it harder and not easier to exercise the right to vote.
Written comments and letters on this issue can be submitted to sebpubliccomments@sos.ga.gov until 5 p.m. on Monday, Feb. 12. The board will take it up at its meeting the next day.
Let’s make sure the State Elections Board members know they should be protecting our right to vote and not chiseling away at it.
Speaking of the right – or responsibility – to vote…
Monday, Feb. 12, at 5 p.m. is the deadline to register to vote in the Presidential Preferential Primary on March 12. And early voting is Feb. 19 through March 8.
If you have a Georgia Driver’s license or DDS-issued state ID, you can register online. If not, you can register on paper. Be sure to have your application in the mail and postmarked today, or turn it in to your county election office!
DeKalb County’s advance voting sites and times are posted on my website.
Georgia’s is an open primary state, meaning voters don’t register by party. You can request either a Democratic or Republican ballot. Even though the nominees for each party are almost settled, 14 candidates will be on the ballot.
Don’t let this opportunity to vote slip away. Make sure you’re registered and then show up!
SB 63: Extra punishment for being poor
Jails are overcrowded and people are literally dying in jail because of the decrepit conditions. But the GOP wants to put more people in jail –and keep them there– for being poor.
The GOP-dominated House voted for a bill that would, in effect, criminalize poverty, a stunning move to roll back Republican former Gov. Nathan Deal’s criminal justice reform from a few years ago. I voted no, along with the rest of my Democratic colleagues.
Senate Bill 63 would expand the list of crimes for which cash bail is required– adding 30 offenses that are mostly crimes of poverty, such as city ordinance violations and misdemeanors.
Under SB 63, those who can afford bail are freed to await a final adjudication of their cases. Yet those who cannot afford cash bail wait in jail even though they also are presumed innocent until they go to court or enter a plea. SB 63 clamps down even more on the poor by making it a misdemeanor to crowd-source bail; widely-distributed pleas for money would not be an option.
So people without means, people whose families have no extra funds, must wait in a crowded, dirty, and dangerous jails until they can go to court weeks or months or even a year later.
For those weeks, months or years, they cannot work, they cannot support their families, they cannot attend school. In many cases, some will decide to plead guilty to crimes they did not commit just in the hope of getting probation and going free.
This bill is destructive and dehumanizing. How much money you have or don’t have should not determine how the criminal justice system will treat you.
As my friend and colleague Rep. Inga Willis (D- Atlanta) passionately said on the House floor, “the most expensive thing to be in Georgia is poor.”
Lives diverted at a young age: Repeal the “Drug-free Postsecondary Education Act of 1990”
I have signed on to a very important bill for our young people who were caught experimenting with marijuana or other controlled substances.
Rep. Eric Bell (D-Jonesboro) was alone when he filed House Bill 853 last November but now he has about a half dozen colleagues -on both sides of the aisle- who have signed on to right a wrong that was part of the anti-drug frenzy at the Capitol in 1990.
HB 853 says simply that no student shall be ineligible for the HOPE scholarship because of a conviction involving marijuana or other controlled substance.
It’s a very short bill but it will have a big impact. Our children can correct the course of their lives by going to college instead of enduring a lifetime of paying for the consequences of a bad decision made in their youth.
HB 1128: Hiding discrimination under the guise of helping women
I’ve heard from a number of you opposed to House Bill 1128, which is misleadingly entitled Georgia Women’s Bill of Rights.
It proposes protecting women from discrimination but it extends those protections only to those who were born female. HB 1128 strips away protections for LGBTQ individuals. In publicly-maintained records, a person’s sex at birth replaces gender in records.
As a result, people who are transgender will forever also carry the designation of their sex at birth. For example, when a school system or a state “agency, department or political subdivision” collects vital statistics, it records whether a person was male or female at birth.
It also says police cannot treat a crime as a “bias crime” if the victim was chosen because of their sexual orientation, effectively removing sexual orientation as the basis of a hate crime. Even crime reports will note the person’s sex at birth and not their gender at the time.
I’m completely unclear how this bill purportedly protects the rights of women.
I’ll be monitoring the status of this bill closely. If it ever comes to the House floor for a vote, I will be a hard “no.” And I will do everything in my power to see that it’s defeated.
SB 390: Now we are going after librarians?
Twenty-two senators have proposed a bill that would loosen the certification requirements for librarians and cut taxpayer funds for any public libraries or state college or university libraries if they are associated with the American Library Association (ALA).
Sponsors explain that their reason for this extreme step is that ALA's leadership believes in “Marxist” ideologies, and taxpayer money should not be used to support that kind of thinking.
The bill’s sponsor also said his local library had received an ALA grant for books with LGBTQ and diversity themes and some of these books were in the children’s section.
SB 390 would strip a requirement for directors of public library systems to have a master’s degree from a school with an ALA-accredited library program. The dean of the James L. and Dorothy H. Dewar College of Education at Valdosta State University, which has a master’s program in library studies, said the school could lose millions in tuition if ties with ALA were severed.
This is another bill we will monitor closely. I appreciate the many advocates who have been to the Capitol to raise awareness of the seriousness of this threat.
The House passed an amended 2024 state budget.
We approved a new budget that gives the state $5 billion more for the current fiscal year that ends June 30.
Assuming the Senate accepts what the House approved, here is a sample of where some of this new money will go:
– A new medical school at the University of Georgia and a new dental school at Georgia Southern University.
– Funds for large-scale state computer system upgrades.
– Money for sewer upgrades and road construction and maintenance.
– $500 million to strengthen the state employee retirement system.
– Money for public safety and infrastructure costs for the 2025 College Football Playoff National Championship and the 2026 FIFA World Cup, both in Atlanta.
– Additional dollars for education.
What’s in a name? The Stone Mountain Judicial Circuit
This past week the House approved a change in the name of DeKalb’s court system. I am a co-sponsor of this bill.
For years our county’s court system has been known as the Stone Mountain Judicial Circuit and that has been a somewhat confusing nomenclature. In reality, outside of legal circles, our system is usually referred to as DeKalb County courts.
If the Senate agrees with House Bill 158 and the governor signs the bill, the court system in our county will be known as the DeKalb Judicial Circuit.
In service,
