Category: Tom Baxter

Moving the date of the Georgia Democratic Presidential Primary from March 24 to May 19 may prolong the endgame battle between Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders, but it isn’t likely to change the final result. That may not be the case with a couple of Metro Atlanta elections which were also scheduled for next week.

There may be no better example of the dizzying speed with which the coronavirus epidemic is affecting politics than this. On Friday, U.S. Rep. Doug Collins went to a good deal of trouble to make it into the entourage accompanying President Trump on his visit to the CDC Friday afternoon. On Monday afternoon, Collins announced he, like U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz and U.S. Rep Paul Gosar, was self-quarantining after coming in contact with someone at the recent Conservative Political Action Conference who later came down with the virus.

In the end it was just a reality show too far, the idea that U.S. Rep. Doug Collins could be lured away from a confrontation with U.S. Sen. Kelly Loeffler with the sourest plum in Washington, the job of national intelligence director.

By Tom Baxter Reflecting a complicated history, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — the CDC, as everybody in Atlanta knows it — has gone through several names changes and adjustments. Its World War II predecessor was the Office of Malaria Control in War Areas. That’s a clue as to how the CDC came […]

In 1976, when Jimmy Carter changed the way people run for president with his success in the Iowa Democratic Caucus, there wasn’t all this finickiness about what the results actually were.

Last week, a bipartisan group of legislators tried to forge a path out of the jungle, so to speak. They passed a bill out of a House subcommittee which would have abruptly changed the rules for the upcoming special U.S. Senate election, eliminating the jungle primary system in which everybody of all parties runs together runs together this November, followed by a likely runoff in January.

Even though it doesn’t always feel that way, more people will get up and go to work today in Georgia than at any time in the state’s history. Which makes the dip in state revenues a little harder to explain.

On a corner wall of my office there still hang two of the long tally sheets reporters used — maybe they still do — to record votes in the United States Senate. They are a memento of the final day of the 1999 impeachment trial of Bill Clinton, the vote count which found the president not guilty on charges of perjury and obstruction of justice. It was both a momentous and deeply dispiriting experience.

In a recent letter to his constituents, Senate Majority Leader Jack Hill explained, with refreshing candor, what has caused the biggest headache Republicans face in this election-year session: the windfall from the federal tax cut never came through.

e’re coming to the end of the season for columns which wrap up the major developments of the past year in a neat bow, and lay out what can be predicted about the year upcoming. These have been unusually hard to write this year.

The last four decades have witnessed a steady shift of power in the General Assembly toward the growing Atlanta Metro Area, which will continue unabated after the next census. It’s not as easy to imagine how things will land when the next state House and Senate maps are drawn, but all indications are the changes will be even more dramatic.

Based on current population projections, the upcoming reapportionment will be the first in four decades in which the number of Georgia’s congressional districts — 14 — remain unchanged from the previous decade. This might seem to be a harbinger of political stability in the decade ahead, but it’s just the opposite.

This year, when you sit down to watch the bowl games or the Christmas shows, you won’t have to worry about your children being frightened by scary black-and-white attack ads. Cherish that. It may not be that way next year.

Trump’s opponents have trumpeted Democratic victories in the Kentucky and Louisiana governor’s races as a personal defeat for the president because he campaigned for Republicans Matt Bevin in Kentucky and Eddie Rispone in Louisiana. Trump’s supporters have responded that he made these races closer than they would have been, and credit him for the strong showing of down-ballot Republicans in both states. There’s a little smattering of truth in both these arguments, but not enough to make these races turn out any differently than they would if somebody else was president.