Georgia Politics, Campaigns, and Elections for December 10, 2020

Solomon’s Masonic Lodge, the first in Georgia, was organized on December 10, 1735. Upon his return to the colony, James Oglethorpe would join the group.

John Jay was elected President of the Continental Congress on December 10, 1778.

Emory College was incorporated on December 10, 1836, as Governor William Schley signed legislation chartering the school.

On December 10, 1850, a special convention met in Milledgeville to determine the state’s reaction to the Compromise of 1850, a series of five bills passed in Congress attempting to deal with issues between slave states and free states.

The [Georgia] platform established Georgia’s conditional acceptance of the Compromise of 1850. Much of the document followed a draft written by Charles Jones Jenkins and represented a collaboration between Georgia Whigs and moderate Democrats dedicated to preserving the Union. In effect, the proclamation accepted the measures of the compromise so long as the North complied with the Fugitive Slave Act and would no longer attempt to ban the expansion of slavery into new territories and states. Northern contempt for these conditions, the platform warned, would make secession inevitable.

This qualified endorsement of the Compromise of 1850 essentially undermined the movement for immediate secession throughout the South. Newspapers across the nation credited Georgia with saving the Union.

The Atlanta City Council appointed the first Board of Education on December 10, 1869.

The Spanish-American War was ended on December 10, 1898, with the signing of the Treaty of Paris.

The Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize on December 10, 1964 in Oslo, Norway, becoming the youngest recipient of the award.

Jimmy Carter was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize on December 10, 2002.

Georgia Politics, Campaigns, and Elections

Hollywood actors are joining Nancy Pelosi in raising money online for Georgia Democratic candidates. From The Wrap:

Will Ferrell, Zooey Deschanel and several other cast members from the classic Christmas movie “Elf” are reuniting to support Georgia Democrats in the upcoming Senate runoffs.

The live table read will take place this Sunday, Dec. 13, at 4 p.m. PT.

In addition to the film’s two main stars, Bob Newhart, Edward Asner, Mary Steenburgen, Amy Sedaris, Andy Richter, Kyle Gass, John Lithgow, Danny Woodburn, Ed Helms, Busy Phillips, and Matt Walsh will take part. The film’s director, Jon Favreau, is not taking part, but “Pod Save America” host Jon Favreau is.

“If I were any more excited to be in the #ElfForGeorgia reunion I might explode into a burst of snowflakes,” Deschanel tweeted. “Join me, Will Ferrell, and many other amazing people from the original cast along with some special guests for our live reading! All donations go to support GA dems.”

Star Trek actors will join Stacey Abrams for an online fundraiser for Georgia Democrats, according to Deadline.

Cast members from the Star Trek series will hold a fundraiser for Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock, the two Georgia U.S. Senate candidates seeking to unseat the incumbents and flip the chamber to the Democrats.

Stacey Abrams, a professed fan of the series, will also participate in the virtual event, to be held on Saturday at 6 p.m. ET.

Those scheduled to participate include Alison Pill, Anthony Rapp, Brent Spiner, Evan Evagora, Gates McFadden, George Takei, Isa Briones, Jeri Ryan, Jonathan Del Arco, Jonathan Frakes, Kate Mulgrew, LeVar Burton, Marina Sirtis, Michelle Hurd, Santiago Cabrera, Sonequa Martin-Green, Wil Wheaton and Wilson Cruz.

Tickets start at $5 per person, at the “Tribble” level, and rise to $500 per person at the “Vulcan” level. Proceeds go to the Georgia Senate Victory Fund.

The event is the latest cast reunion for the Georgia Senate races. Cast members from Veep reunited on Sunday for a virtual table read to support voter turnout in the state. Monday marks the voter registration deadline for the January 5 runoffs. Cast members from Hamilton are planning a December 13 event for the Georgia campaigns.

Cast reunions became a fundraising trend during the presidential campaign. In October, cast members from Star Trek also participated in an event for the Biden Victory Fund.

Democrat Joe Biden will campaign for the Democratic Senate candidates in Georgia next week, according to AccessWDUN.

President-elect Joe Biden will be on the campaign trail in Atlanta next week for the Democrats challenging Georgia’s incumbent Republican Senators.

The Biden Press Office made the announcement about the visit this morning, indicating Biden will be in Atlanta on Tuesday, Dec. 15. A specific time and location for the visit have yet to be determined.

The visit comes as early voting for the runoffs gets underway in Georgia.

From the AJC:

More than $400 million has already been spent or reserved in TV ads in the runoff – smashing state spending records – and thousands of volunteers and staffers have mobilized to urge Georgians to return to the polls.

Not long ago, statewide Democratic candidates in Georgia distanced themselves from national figures. But now they’re aggressively embracing the party’s top officials, eager to rally supporters from across the ideological spectrum.

Biden has good reason to make a personal appeal in Georgia. With the Senate on the line, the outcome of the twin cliffhangers will shape the fate of Biden’s legislative agenda in Congress. And both Ossoff and Warnock have promised to fight for Biden’s priorities if they flip the seats.

President Trump warned Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr against opposing the Texas lawsuit, according to the AJC.

President Donald Trump warned Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr not to rally other Republican officials against a long-shot Texas lawsuit seeking to toss out the state’s election results, according to several people with direct knowledge of the conversation.

The roughly 15-minute phone call late Tuesday came shortly before U.S. Sens. Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue issued a joint statement saying they “fully support” the improbable lawsuit asking the U.S. Supreme Court to reject election results in Georgia and three other battleground states that Trump lost.

The two men spoke at the urging of Perdue, who along with Loeffler also received calls from Trump about Carr’s opposition to the lawsuit, according to three Republican officials, two of whom described Trump as “furious” in his call with Loeffler over the attorney general’s stance.

A person on the call between Trump and Carr described it as cordial. Trump told Carr that he’s “heard great things” about him but that he’s picked up word that Carr was calling other attorneys general and urging them to stand against the Texas challenge. Carr told him that wasn’t true.

Glynn County Board of Elections staff are asking for additional resources, according to The Brunswick News.

First and foremost, the elections office needs more personnel, more computers and equipment for personnel, along with more space to put employees and store equipment, Elections and Registration Supervisor Chris Channell told board members at a Tuesday meeting.

Currently, the Glynn County office has a little over 40,000 square feet of storage and office space and could easily use more. Storage rooms were beginning to blend into the adjacent training rooms, which assistant supervisor Christina Redden noted started to spill into the board’s meeting room, which doubles as an early voting site.

With three full-time staff members, one part-time and eight to 10 seasonal employees, Channell said the elections office was hard-pressed to wade through all the work of processing registrations before the deadline and processing absentee ballot applications and the ballots themselves.

With the county’s population and voter count continually growing, the board decided to formally request a meeting with the Glynn County Commission in late January or early February, after the Jan. 5 runoff, to put their heads together and find a solution.

Cobb County is adding more in-person advance voting sites after being criticized for planning to open fewer for the Runoff than for the General Election, according to the AJC.

Cobb had planned to open just five early voting locations after having 11 for the November general election. The changes will bring the number up to seven, but the new additional sites will only be open during the third and final week of early voting.

The two locations are the Arts Place-Mountain View in Marietta and the Smyrna Community Center in Smyrna.

The Georgia Secretary of State’s Office is investigating Coffee County’s handling of the recount after the county failed to timely complete its portion, according to the AJC.

All counties were to finish the third tally of votes in the presidential election by midnight Dec. 2. But Coffee County was still trying to resolve a discrepancy of 50 votes the following day, the secretary of state said in announcing the investigation late Wednesday.

By Dec. 4 Coffee was the only county that had not completed the recount. The county notified the secretary of state that it would not certify the results.

According to the Secretary of State’s Office, Coffee County blamed the state’s Dominion Voting System for its vote discrepancy, but the county elections director could not specify what problems were encountered.

Chief Justice Harold Melton of the Georgia Supreme Court has instructed local courts to consider the COVID-19 virus conditions in deciding whether to open for in-person proceedings, according to the Albany Herald.

Judges across Georgia should be prepared to hold off resuming in-person court proceedings if the recent surge of COVID-19 cases makes returning to courtrooms unsafe, Georgia Chief Justice Harold Melton said Wednesday.

Melton’s announcement came as he signed his ninth order extending the statewide judicial emergency he first declared back in mid-March, when the coronavirus pandemic began to take hold in Georgia.

“While this order does not impose a blanket shutdown of non-essential in-person proceedings, courts should remain vigilant of changing COVID-19 conditions and be prepared to suspend jury trials as necessary and to reconsider grand jury proceedings as well,” the order states.

The order goes on to warn that courts deciding to hold in-person proceedings should only do so if they can maintain safety.

Hall County Superior Court Judges canceled trials scheduled for the first two weeks of January over COVID concerns, according to the Gainesville Times.

Court administrator Jason Stephenson said the Superior Court judges agreed Wednesday to cancel the first two weeks of January trials, which were set for Jan. 4 and Jan. 11.

Stephenson said the decision came after “the number of new cases being reported, rising hospitalizations, and out of a concern that the holidays could accelerate those trends.”

This is the second cancellation of jury trials in two weeks for the Hall courthouse. Court officials canceled the Nov. 30 jury trial week on Nov. 25.

There have been no jury trials since the judicial emergency orders announced in March.

United States Senator David Perdue (R-Glynn County) campaigned in Martinez, according to the Augusta Chronicle.

U.S. Sen. David Perdue said he’ll support the National Defense Authorization Act when it comes for a vote, despite President Trump’s threats to veto the bill, which includes $80 million for Fort Gordon.

“Yes, I will – this week, yes,” Perdue said during a Wednesday campaign stop with his first-cousin, U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue, in Martinez.

“We cannot lose this seat,” Perdue said. “You’ve got to listen to what (Sen.) Chuck Shumer says, ‘we take Georgia, we change America… AOC says we’ve got to take those two seats from Georgia because we don’t want to negotiate.”

Former Georgia Gov. Sonny Perdue, Trump’s pick for agriculture secretary, praised the early Republican stronghold for supporting him when he switched to the GOP and became in 2002, the state’s first Republican governor since Reconstruction.

“Y’all were Republicans when it wasn’t cool,” he said. “You were so helpful to me in 2002, when we broke the barrier there.”

State Rep. Ron Stephens (R-Savannah) believes gambling legislation has a better chance this year, according to the Savannah Morning News.

The future of gaming in Georgia has gained so much traction among legislators that the organizers of the Biennial Institute, a pre-legislative session primer for lawmakers, devoted an hour-long session to the topic earlier this week. Already, bills that would legalize sports betting, parimutuel horse racing and casino resorts have been pre-filed ahead of the 2021-2022 legislative session.

The Georgia General Assembly convenes Jan. 11, 2021.

“If it’s going to happen, it’s going to happen in this next session,” said veteran Georgia House Rep. Ron Stephens (R-Savannah), the chairman of the House Economic Development and Tourism Committee. “The people want it; opinion polls and more importantly public hearings show that. It’s time the legislature give Georgians that opportunity.”

Legalizing gambling “requires heavy lifting, and heavy lifting always requires bipartisanship,” said Rep. Calvin Smyre (D-Columbus), the longest-serving member of the Georgia General Assembly at 46 years. “I think we have that muscle right now.”

Sports wagering is the most likely type to pass first, Stephens and others say. Thousands of Georgians already bet on football, basketball and golf online, so the only infrastructure requirement is the creation of a tax collection method. The state already has experience with taxing web-based transactions after enacting an e-commerce tax in 2019.

In addition, sports betting legalization is the “path of least resistance,” according to Stephens, as it could potentially be implemented without a statewide vote. The idea is to run sports wagering through the Georgia Lottery “as just another game for them.”

“Casino gambling should go to the No. 1 hole in the budget: health care,” said Rep. Alan Powell (R-Hartwell). “There’s never been enough money and there never will be without it.”

Argued Rep. Smyre, “I’m advocating for needs-based scholarships” for those students who don’t qualify academically for the HOPE Scholarship. “And we need to come up with a stop-gap scholarship to help those already enrolled and close to graduation but run out of money.”

United States Attorney for the Middle District of Georgia Charlie Peeler will resign, according to the Macon Telegraph.

He plans to leave office at the end of the day Friday.

Peeler, a Donald Trump appointee, became the U.S. Attorney for the Middle District of Georgia in 2017.

The post oversees federal cases in a wide swath of Georgia that includes 70 counties and stretches roughly from the Athens area south through Macon and Columbus and down past Albany and Valdosta.

The statement quoted Gov. Brian Kemp, who said that while working with Peeler “we cracked down on gang violence and made incredible progress in our fight to end human trafficking in Georgia. On behalf of all Georgians … we wish him well in his future endeavors.”

Three Savannah City Aldermen are ready to drop the ethics proceedings against a colleague after she apologized, according to the Savannah Morning News.

Alderpersons Linda Wilder-Bryan, Nick Palumbo, and Kurtis Purtee spoke to the media following the mayor’s weekly meeting with the press. The fourth council member who also filed an ethics complaint, Detric Leggett, could not attend on Tuesday.

A three-member ethics board held a hearing on the complaints with evidence presented on Oct. 29. The board found Gibson-Carter had violated the city’s ethics code. The code was approved unanimously by the current council earlier this year.

The three said Tuesday they were ready to move forward instead of pushing for the only remedy available, a reprimand or censure, since Gibson-Carter had apologized privately to City Manager Michael Brown.

Whitfield County Commissioners are asking staff to hold the line on budget increase except for a pay raise, according to the Dalton Daily Citizen News.

Commissioners spent most of the 42-minute public hearing discussing a proposed 2021 budget that calls for $51 million in general fund spending, up from $49.4 million this year. That’s down from a $54.6 million “wish list” budget posted on the county website and advertised in the newspaper.

The budget proposal commissioners discussed Monday would hold the county’s maintenance and operations property tax rate steady at 8.312 mills. Commissioners cut the tax rate by .5 mills this year, down from 8.812 mills in 2019.

Georgia Power is a step closer to bringing the first new nuclear reactor at Plant Vogtle online, according to the Augusta Chronicle.

The first nuclear fuel shipment has been delivered for one of two new units under construction at Plant Vogtle.

Georgia Power said Wednesday that the shipment “marks a major step” for the expansion project at the nuclear power plant in Burke County, south of Augusta.

“Since the start, the Vogtle expansion project has been an investment in our energy future. Today, as we receive our first nuclear fuel shipment, we remain committed to realizing the benefits this project will provide not only to our customers, but also our state and our country,” said Paul Bowers, chairman and CEO of Georgia Power. “Achieving this historic milestone brings us closer to fuel load expected in April 2021, and, once online, these new nuclear units will provide clean, carbon-free energy for the next 60 to 80 years.”