The Georgia General Assembly will be adjourning on March 29th, with a voting day today, a committee day on Tuesday and the final voting day on Wednesday. The following are a few controversial pieces of legislation that our readers should be interested to watch:
HB 231: This bill by Rep. Houston Gaines, R-Athens, creates a Prosecuting Attorney’s Oversight Commission. It passed the House but languishes in the Senate Judiciary Committee. It basically is a reaction to permissive district attorneys in several high-crime jurisdictions (most notably Athens-Clarke County) who openly refuse to prosecute various crimes or who otherwise violate their oath of office.
The oversight body would include one five-member panel that investigates allegations made against prosecutors and a three-member panel that would conduct hearings on any charges filed by the investigative panel, issue disciplinary orders, standards and advisory opinions regarding the grounds for disciplining prosecutors.
HB 233: This school voucher legislation, which polls show is popular with parents and cuts across racial and political lines, is surprisingly in trouble in the Republican-controlled body. The bill debate ended last Thursday without a vote in the House due to some rural Republican defections. But Gov. Brian Kemp last week signaled he’d sign the bill if it passes.
The legislation by Sen. Greg Dolezal would allow parents to take students out of low-performing public schools after one year and place them in private or home school with a $6,500 stipend. While support for the bill falls largely along party lines, some Democrats are for it. For example, Rep. Mesha Mainor, D-Atlanta, grew up in an area with a poor school system, but her mother used a different address to send her to a different school. Comparing education to McDonald’s hamburgers, the Democrat lawmaker says all families should have the same choice. “If you went to McDonald’s every day and got a burnt hamburger and burnt fries, are you going to keep going back to that McDonald’s?” she asks.
HB 237: This is officially called the Georgia Lottery Game of Sports Betting Act. It would allow sports betting under the auspices of the state lottery corporation which funds the popular HOPE scholarship and k-12 school programs. Conservative estimates calculate that it would bring in at least $75 million a year in revenue.
It’s a different bill than the one passed in the House, which would have designated an official soapbox derby. This bill sits in the Senate awaiting a full vote of the chamber but, as of Friday, it appeared there may not be enough Senate GOP votes to push it through.
HB 520: Thanks to a revolt among Republican conservatives, this complex mental health legislation appears to be dead. It is an extension to last year’s HB 1013 and critics argue that it would grow government and bureaucracy to take care of every basic need of those with persistent mental health issues at the expense of the taxpayer.
HB 520 remains in committee and in order for it to get any action the Senate would have to vote to suspend its own rules to have a meeting of the Senate Health and Human Services Committee. It would need to pass out of committee and then go to the Senate Committee on Rules which would have to implement a supplemental calendar. But due to the Senate Rules Committee chairman proclaiming any bill that has yet to pass committee is now dead, it’s hard to see how any resurrection could occur.
SB 132: Authored by Sen. Brandon Beach, R-Alpharetta, this Senate-passed legislation would limit people holding valid visas and foreign companies from acquiring farmland or land within 25 miles of military installations in Georgia if they are from countries designated as a “foreign adversary” by the U.S. Secretary of Commerce or as “countries of particular concern” by the U.S. State Department. That covers a broad range of countries, including Communist China, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Russia and Venezuela that are listed as foreign adversaries.
Beach says he is particularly concerned by the national security threat posed by China continually buying up farmland and believes House Speaker Jon Burns is sympathetic to passage.
HB 338: The Student Technology Protection Act, which prevents obscene materials from being on school-owned devices, passed out of committee and has been placed onto the Senate rules calendar for the last two days of the session. Unless time runs out on Wednesday, Rep. Chris Erwin and other Republican co-sponsors aim to pass it on a mostly party-line vote.
