Category: Tom Baxter

n Jan. 24, Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis told Judge Robert McBurney that decisions on possible charges related to the effort to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election were “imminent.” Since then, the clock has ticked, crickets have chirped, but there’s been only silence from the DA. Last week, the sphinx cleared her throat.

For the past two years, the effort to have a statue of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas erected on the Capitol grounds has been one of those late-session dramas the General Assembly is known for. What now?

Donald Trump’s arraignment was supposed to be the nation’s big story last week, but it was old news the day before it happened. When the arraignment was over, a little-noticed but more significant story rose to be the lead item on national news shows in the space of 48 hours.

George Soros’ name gets dropped a lot in Georgia, but seldom with much elaboration. For Republicans, like those in the General Assembly promoting the new law banning outside groups from contributing any money to help fund local elections, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, or former U.S. Sen. David Perdue, just the words “Soros-backed” evoke an ominous effort by shadowy outsiders to control voters’ lives. For Democrats, the mention of Soros’ name amounts automatically to an anti-Semitic insinuation, linking the 92-year-old Holocaust survivor with a host of conspiracy theories.

A test of wills involving some of the state’s most powerful figures briefly threatened to derail this year’s General Assembly session last week. It was a brief storm, but it made a stark contrast with what our neighbors in North Carolina were doing.

This month, Republican activists in Georgia took a trip down memory lane. In county GOP conventions around the state, newcomers under the banner of the Georgia Republican Assembly and allied groups seeking to move the party further to the right unseated longtime party workers in elections for party offices and slots in the upcoming district conventions.

Last week, while the Georgia House was passing legislation that would create disciplinary boards for local prosecutors, the State Senate in Florida approved a bill which bars local governments from enacting rent controls. Shortly after its passage in the Tennessee Senate, Gov. Bill Lee signed a bill that cuts in half the size of the Nashville Metro Council, from 40 to 20.

A term which seems to have increased in usage this year is “zombie bill,” for legislation which keeps coming back, no matter how many times it’s killed. That’s descriptive enough, but considering our location, “kudzu bill” would be even better.

To understand where U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene was coming from when she called for a national divorce between the red states and blue states, a couple of 19th Century novels are a better guide than any of the charts and graphs her comment has provoked.

By Tom Baxter A phrase that a lady from Cartersville used in a newspaper interview last month has rattled around in my head for weeks now. As a description of what ails us, it’s elegantly troubling. In one of those interviews newspapers use to flesh out the results of a poll they’ve taken, Charlotte Profit, […]

Because it’s so much easier and proves my point better than I could, most of today’s column has been generated on ChatGPT. Here goes: Before Hunter Biden, what children or siblings of American presidents have been associated with scandals?

he thud of excitement which has accompanied the news that the Democratic National Committee has included Georgia in its window of early primary states bespeaks how exhausted Georgia voters are with being in the spotlight of national politics after the last couple of years. They may not be able to avoid it.

Georgia’s state economist, Jeffrey Dorfman, capped off his annual presentation to the House-Senate Budget Committee last week with a brief discussion of a looming revenue challenge to the state. For longtime Metro Atlanta residents, it may come as a shock.

The Georgia General Assembly has begun this year’s session on a positive and generally bipartisan note, with a lot of new and optimistic members and plenty of money to give away. We don’t have to look very far to see that we’re lucky.

Last week we got to see the U.S. House of Representatives not as two warring factions of idealists — which is the way they pitch themselves to the suckers they raise money from online — but as one enormous, dysfunctional family stuck in the same room together. They could have been waiting for a will to be read, but in this case, they were waiting for a speaker to be elected.

At the beginning of 2023, Georgia stands at the center of the football, political and cultural universes. If you want to argue with that, go find any Bulldogs fan, or Rachel Maddow.