The legislature which got elected last week looks a lot like the last one, and that’s no accident.
With a comfortable majority in both the House and Senate, Republicans have focused on protecting incumbents and benefited from the campaign fund money Gov. Brian Kemp has poured into legislative races. The result after last Tuesday’s election was a Senate that remained in exactly the same place, with Republicans in a 33-23 majority. At the beginning of the week there were still a couple of uncalled House races, but with only marginal losses, the Republican majority was holding at right about 100-80, down only a couple from their 102-78 in the last session.
There are some 20 freshmen in this class, but some of them are well-known under the Golden Dome. Randall Mangham, who represented a DeKalb district in the House and ran for governor in 2010, returns to fill the seat left by departing Senate minority leader Gloria Butler. Floyd Griffin, who has served in the Senate and been mayor of Milledgeville, ousted Republican Ken Vance in a district which had been redrawn under a federal court order. Hall County Republican Drew Echols will be new to the Senate, but he is filling the seat which was held by his wife, Shelly Echols.
It was a mixed year for renegades. Sen. Colton Moore, who was expelled from the Republican Senate caucus and banned from the House floor for his remarks attacking the late House Speaker David Ralston, was re-elected to his northwest Georgia district with 79 percent of the vote. Such was not the case for Mesha Mainor, the Atlanta representative who switched parties in her first term. Democrat Bryce Berry, an APS middle school teacher, defeated her with 84 percent of the vote.
Berry’s resounding win over a party-switcher in deep blue Atlanta, and Griffin’s win in a redrawn South Georgia district were the Democrats’ only takeaways in House races. They could draw grim consolation in having done better than the top of their ticket, but that wasn’t much to celebrate.
The issue Republicans are aiming to put on the front burner in the next session is also familiar: tort reform. Historically, tort reform has been hard to pass but easy to raise money on, which may help to explain its longevity.
Speaking to reporters in Savannah after the election, the new Senate minority leader, Harold Jones II, admitted that Democrats “don’t get to control the agenda, at all,” but said his caucus will oppose the new push for tort reform, which he said is based on “a lot of fiction.”
But Democrats see a small ray of hope for their top agenda item, coming from a surprising direction.
Late in last year’s session, Lt. Gov. Bert Jones allowed a vote to go forward on a Democratic Medicaid expansion bill. Kemp opposed it and the bill failed to go forward on a 7-7 vote, with two Republicans voting for it. Last week, on the “Politically Georgia” podcast, Jones said he still wasn’t sure where he stood on the issue, but he was open to a legislative debate.
This reflects the difference in the political calculations of Kemp, a term-limited governor thinking of his future in the Republican Party, and Jones, who’s planning to run for governor and thinking through where a Republican might be most vulnerable. It’s an ironic position for the state’s MAGA-centric lieutenant governor to be in, but a politically understandable one.
Leaving the whole complicated business of Medicaid aside, a major activity of this upcoming, and the one after it even more so, is likely to be adjusting to the Trump Administration’s plans. The economy and governmental budget of every state runs in tandem with what the federal government wants and delivers, and Georgia is certainly no exception.
The only people in Georgia against Tort Reform are the ambulance chasers.