Former Sen. David Perdue, R-Ga., running for governor against incumbent Brian Kemp in the May 24th Republican primary, is leveling tough attacks against the governor and Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan for failing to support the Buckhead cityhood movement.
David Perdue
In an interview with Breitbart News Saturday, Perdue charged that Duncan’s deliberate derailing of the legislation in the Senate and Kemp’s inaction “is the height of corruption that you see under the Gold Dome in Atlanta. … They’re so afraid of the connection between big business and the politics of that city that they don’t want to take a chance on that.”
Perdue believes people in the Buckhead section of Atlanta, an area continuing to be plagued by rising violent crime, should have the right to vote on de-annexing from Atlanta and forming their own city with their own police force and magistrate system.
“I said right up front, back in December, that the people should have a right to the vote. I trust the people of Buckhead. I’ve said it repeatedly,” Perdue said. In fact, just last week, an Atlanta-based Trafalgar Group poll found a 75 percent of Georgia Republicans support cityhood for Buckhead.
“The fact that these elected officials in the Statehouse are denying those people the right to vote for their own destiny is un-American,” Perdue told Breitbart. “I mean we do live in a democratic republic. Where’s our governor been on this thing? This is what gets people elevated. That’s what gets me elevated. This is nothing but corrupt politicians trying to protect their careers. I’m running against a governor who most people don’t realize has been in office for 20 years, and this is what you get, when people try to protect their own destiny.”
In his own interview with Breitbart News Saturday, Kemp said he wants to see a healthy debate in the state legislature play out and that it will allow Atlanta’s new Democrat Mayor Andre Dickens to “feel pressure” to stem Atlanta crime. Yet Kemp challenger Perdue scoffed that Dickens could curb crime. He cited Dickens, when he was a City Councilman in 2020, voting to withhold $73 million from the Atlanta Police Department.
“We have a mayor that has literally voted to defund the police,” Perdue said. “We’re short some several hundred police officers [in] the city of Atlanta. The city of Atlanta has tied with Chicago as the murder capital of America. This is all on Brian Kemp’s watch. There are things the governor can do. They have the GBI [Georgia Bureau of Investigations], they have State Patrol, they have the National Guard. There are things that this governor can do to shine light on this absolutely ridiculous situation in Atlanta, Georgia. And I’ll tell you this. People around the rest of the state are fed up with this, and this is being protected by the political elite, the politically connected in the Statehouse, and those powerful people that are connected to the governor.”
