Throughout this month there will be countless small anniversaries, as we think back on the day it became clear COVID-19 wasn’t just a big news story but something that would profoundly affect our lives.
Category: Tom Baxter
Posted inColumns
Three counties that are a problem Republicans can’t solve with legislation
Last week, as Georgia legislators were talking about limiting drop boxes and weekend voting, NBC News released an analysis which speaks powerfully to what was going on under the Golden Dome.
Posted inColumns
With Trump looming overhead, Loeffler and Perdue ponder their future in politics
With a couple of successful business careers and only one winning election between the two of them, and considering their stinging losses in last month’s U.S. Senate elections, one might think David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler would have had enough of politics. But in the past few days both have flirted with the idea of getting back in the game.
Posted inColumns
Natural gas hookup bill a sign of things to come
If there’s a bill before this year’s General Assembly which has the shape of things to come, it’s the measure which prohibits local governments from restricting utility hookups to buildings “based upon the type or source of energy or fuel to be delivered,” which means natural gas.
Posted inColumns
While voting bills abound, daylight savings bills stir passions
Two issues being considered under the Golden Dome this year illustrate the tremendous power state legislatures have, and the boundless capacity of legislators to fritter that power away.
Posted inColumns
To knock out COVID-19, we may have to vaccinate the undeserving
Should the most deserving always be the first to get their shots? It’s an uncomfortable question, but one that does arise as the nation tackles the largest logistical problem it has ever faced.
Posted inTom Baxter
Absentee voting laws are really about one party’s identity
What is truly dangerous for Republicans about all this tinkering with election laws is that it prolongs the idea that eliminating drop boxes or requiring more identification for absentee voting would really change very much, no matter what the merits of any particular measure may be.
Posted inColumns
In this inaugural week, we have not yet come down where we ought to be
is week in a normal year, legislators across the country would be getting committee assignments and their first look at the calendars for this year’s sessions. This year the calendars have a lot of wait-and-see in them. National Guard units have been called out to protect the capitols in at least 21 states. Police are on alert from Montgomery to Montpelier.
Posted inColumns
Sheep in wolves’ clothing head up the docket in riot’s aftermath, as the real wolves lurk
By Tom Baxter Who were those rioters who so unceremoniously ripped Georgia’s stunning election off the top of front pages last week? Watching them on television from the safety of the White House, President Donald Trump is said to have complained that the Capitol invaders looked “low-class,” although he was thrilled by what they were […]
Posted inColumns
Georgia couldn’t give Trump what he wants, even if it did what he asks
Suppose that after an hour’s badgering, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger had given in and promised to “find” those 11,760 votes President Donald Trump was asking for. What then? If there even was a “what then.”
Posted inTom Baxter
Locked down and increasingly inward-looking, Americans shrug at losing their secrets
Over these long months of lockdown and quarantine, our country has been the target of one of the biggest and most successful espionage efforts in history, one which the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency said last week “poses a grave risk to the federal government.”
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Anybody seen Gina Haspel? Long post-election stirs an appetite for alternative facts
Unless you’re among the select few who really know what’s going on, you may never have heard of the 305th Military Intelligence Battalion, or Executive Order 13848, or Scytl. You may not know that CIA Director Gina Haspel was killed last month in a U.S. Special Forces raid in Frankfurt, Germany, which retrieved a server used to control the Dominion voting machines in the U.S. presidential election. Or maybe she was just wounded. Or arrested, and singing like a bird about the global conspiracy to throw the election.
Posted inColumns
Robot or empty podium? Press Club debates cap a week with months of news
Is it better to debate a robot or an empty podium? That’s a tough question, as Sunday’s debates demonstrated.
Posted inColumns
Between Trump and Trumpism, Georgia Republicans trace a narrow path
You just have to wonder where Sonny Perdue’s shiny bald head is at these days. It was the secretary of agriculture and his former chief of staff Nick Ayers, you will recall, who came to President Donald Trump before the 2016 Georgia Republican primary for governor and convinced him to endorse Brian Kemp. “I did that for Sonny Perdue,” Trump would later say.
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Politics and bad math coalesce to numb our sense of pandemic’s toll
COVID-19, it was said many times during this election year, would go away on Nov. 4. There was that level of cynicism that all the alarm over the pandemic was merely politics, and would magically disappear after the election. This hasn’t proven to be the case.
Posted inColumns
As the Republican civil war over the last election rages, another battle looms
A year or so ago, no one would have characterized Buzz Brockway as anything other than a Georgia Republican of the suburban variety. But old party ties are being tested in the battle over the last election.
Posted inColumns
As Democrats lag behind their issues, Republicans eat their young
Last week voters elected a Democratic president, approved Democratic policy positions in referendums in both red and blue states, and soundly rejected the Democratic Party in most other categories of political competition.
Posted inTom Baxter
Democrats aim high in effort to win state House majority before next redistricting
In 2018, Democrats took a huge bite out of the legislative map which Republicans drew at the beginning of this decade, flipping 11 state House seats and two Senate seats. That set the stage for the battle which will be decided this Election Day.
Posted inColumns
Biden’s Georgia campaign visit signals state’s place on the margin-of-error map
What may have convinced the Biden campaign to pencil in a couple of stops in Georgia may be the extraordinary bang for the buck which it offers this year. Not only is the presidential race here too close for either party to ignore, but Georgia has two U.S. Senate races and the chance for Democrats to gain another U.S. House seat.
Posted inColumns
This year, all roads lead back to the 6th and 7th Districts
n one way or another, you can connect just about everything else that’s happening in Georgia politics this year to the two big congressional battles in the north Atlanta suburbs.
Start with this year’s most intriguing “what if?” What if Marjorie Taylor Greene hadn’t bought a condo in the mountains and jumped into another congressional race?
