It was fitting that after the last arms had been twisted and the deciding votes locked down, the concluding words spoken in opposition to Governor Brian Kemp’s tort reform bill came not from Democrats but indirectly from Donald Trump.
State Senator Colton Moore, who describes himself as Trump’s floor leader in the legislature, was the last to speak before final passage of the bill Friday afternoon. He recalled Trump’s words in opposition to Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’ 2023 tort reform bill, which Trump called “the biggest insurance company bailout to globalist insurance companies in history.” Much the same could be said of Kemp’s bill, Moore said.
With the passage of this legislation, Kemp has checked all the boxes that might be expected of an outgoing Republican governor with possible future ambitions. He reached an accommodation with Trump during the 2024 election, but as Moore’s closing shot indicates, his 2020 clash with Trump remains, for good or ill, the defining chapter in his political biography.
There’s been talk of Kemp challenging U.S. Senator Jon Ossoff in 2026, but that talk has so far not come from Kemp himself. Nor was there any mention of Kemp Saturday at an Atlanta “Rally for Our Republic,” which amounted to the informal kickoff of Ossoff’s reelection campaign. The target at this rally was what U.S. Senator Raphael Warnock called Trump’s “useless pivot into chaos and revenge.”
This could become the template for a lot of Democratic rallies around the country as the party struggles to articulate a response to the fast-moving Trump administration.
In particular, you’re likely to hear a lot more speakers at Democratic rallies, like the recent retiree from the Centers For Disease Control who said Saturday she was speaking for many current employees who are remaining silent out of fear of losing their jobs. Atlanta may be especially sensitive to the plight of federal employees because of the facilities located here, but this is likely to be an issue in many American communities.
“Georgia will bow to no king, and Georgia will lead the way once again,” Ossoff said in closing Saturdays. He carries a lot of Democratic anxieties on his shoulders as he enters this campaign, but, for the moment, he is striding forward with no opponent.
In addition to the long-anticipated tort reform bill, the legislature last week approved a measure that will give current filers a rebate later this year and speed up the current schedule for reducing the income tax, lowering the flat rate from 5.39 percent to 5.19 later this year.
Democrats protested that the tax cut is skewed in favor of upper-income filers, and it would be good to ask whether any cut is wise at a time when the federal government envisions passing down many of its costs to the states. But at least you could say the process in Georgia was more orderly than what transpired last week in Mississippi.
Mississippi’s state senators thought they were voting for a proposal that would have eliminated the state’s personal income tax over many years, but because of a few misplaced decimal points that legislative proofreaders didn’t catch, the lawmakers instead passed a bill that would eliminate the tax — which accounts for about a third of the state’s overall budget — far more quickly. The measure would also result in a nine-cent increase in the gasoline tax over three years.
The Mississippi House, which opposed the Senate’s more moderate approach, spotted the errors and quickly passed the bill, typos and all. There was no public discussion of the errors, and shortly after its final passage, Governor Tate Reeves indicated that he would sign the measure.
In a social media post, Reeves mentioned the possibility of “future tweaks” to the law but made no mention of its accidental nature. Instead, the governor congratulated the legislature on passing “historic tax reform,” calling it “a great day for Mississippi taxpayers” despite the chaos it is likely to cause in the state’s budget.
So through sheer ineptitude, Mississippi has achieved what simple venality and greed had not been able to accomplish in years of effort. That’s an object lesson for the times we’re living in.
