On January 20, 1788, the First African Baptist Church was established in Savannah, Georgia, one of the first black churches in the United States.
John Marshall was nominated as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States by President John Adams on January 20, 1801.
On January 20, 1920, DeForest Kelley was born in Atlanta and he grew up in Conyers. Kelley sang in the choir of his father’s church and appeared on WSB radio; he graduated from Decatur Boys High School and served in the United States Navy. Kelley became famous as Dr. Leonard “Bones” McCoy in the original Star Trek series.
On January 20, 1928, Franklin Delano Roosevelt visited Warm Springs, Georgia for the tenth time, staying through February 11th. During the visit, he spoke to the Chamber of Commerce of Americus and Sumter County, telling them
“In Georgia the movement towards the cities is growing by leaps and bounds and this means the abandonment of the farms or those farms that are not suited to the uses of agriculture. It means that we will have vacant lands but these can and should be used in growing timber.”
January 20th became Inaugural Day in 1937; when the date falls on a Sunday, a private inauguration of the President is held, with a public ceremony the following day. The Twentieth Amendment moved inauguration day from March 4 to January 20. Imagine six additional weeks of a lame duck President.
Roosevelt was sworn-in to a fourth term as President on Jauary 20, 1945 and died in Warm Springs on April 12, 1945.
On January 20, 1939, Paul D. Coverdell was born in Des Moines, Iowa. Coverdell was one of the key figures in the development of the Georgia Republican Party.
On January 20, 1977, former Georgia Governor Jimmy Carter was inaugurated as the 39th President of the United States.
On January 20, 1981, Ronald Wilson Reagan was inaugurated 40th President of the United States.
https://youtu.be/LToM9bAnsyM
Georgia Politics, Campaigns, and Elections
The Georgia General Assembly continues to hold budget meetings today and the rest of the week.
Wednesday, 20 January 2021 at 8 AM Joint Appropriations
Thursday, 21 January 2021 at 8 AM Joint Appropriations
Thursday, 21 January 2021 at 2 PM Joint Appropriations Health Subcommittee
Thursday, 21 January 2021 at 2:30 PM Joint Appropriations General Government Subcommittee
Thursday, 21 January 2021 at 2:30 PM Joint Appropriations Education Subcommittee
Thursday, 21 January 2021 at 3:00 PM Joint Appropriations Human Resources Subcommittee
Thursday, 21 January 2021 at 3:00 PM Joint Appropriations Transportation Subcommittee
Friday, 22 January 2021 at 9 AM Joint Appropriations Higher Education Subcommittee
Friday, 22 January 2021 at 9 AM Joint Appropriations Human Resources Subcommittee
Friday, 22 January 2021 at 9 AM Joint Appropriations General Government Subcommittee
Friday, 22 January 2021 at 9 AM Joint Appropriations Economic Development Subcommittee
Friday, 22 January 2021 at 10 AM Joint Appropriations Public Safety Subcommittee
Governor Brian Kemp announced yesterday a doubling in the number of COVID-19 vaccinations performed in Georgia. From a press release:
Governor Brian P. Kemp today announced that, for the second straight week, Georgia has more than doubled its number of reported COVID-19 vaccinations. From Monday, January 11, to Monday, January 18, the Georgia Department of Public Health reported an increase from 206,900 to 423,011 vaccines administered.
“While supply for the Pfizer and Moderna COVID-19 remains extremely limited, these numbers show encouraging progress in our efforts to work through backlogs in provider reporting and get Georgians vaccinated quickly and safely,” said Governor Kemp. “Thanks to the hard work of public health officials and the support of private sector partners like Publix, Kroger, Ingles, Walmart, CVS, and Walgreens, we are making strides to vaccinate our expanded 1a populations. We still have a long way to go, but we will continue working tirelessly to get shots in arms and win the fight against COVID-19.”
State School Superintendent Richard Woods also asked legislative budget writers to increase funding for public schools, according to the Capitol Beat News Service via the Athens Banner Herald.
Many schools are still holding classes online to discourage the spread of COVID-19, a challenge for teachers pushing to keep students from falling behind on their coursework, State School Superintendent Richard Woods told Georgia lawmakers during a hearing on Gov. Brian Kemp’s budget recommendation for the state Department of Education.
“The learning loss continues to be something that we’re going to look at,” Woods said. “We’re committed to make sure that no child falls behind in our state.”
The governor is calling on the General Assembly to restore about 60% of about $950 million cut from this year’s K-12 education budget due to the economic impact of the coronavirus pandemic.
On top of restoring the cuts, Woods has asked lawmakers for more money to pay school counselors.
“The COVID-19 pandemic has made it clearer than ever that addressing students’ mental and physical health and wellbeing is an urgent need,” he said.
Georgia certified the results of the two January 5, 2021 Runoff Elections that elected Democrats Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff to the United State Senate, according to the Savannah Morning News.
The certification by Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger officially seals Warnock and Ossoff’s victories over their Republican opponents in the Jan. 5 runoffs. Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue, both incumbents, conceded days after the election.
Once Warnock and Ossoff are sworn in, there will be a 50-50 partisan divide in the Senate, giving Vice President-elect Kamala Harris the tie-breaking vote.
Warnock will be the first African American senator from Georgia, while Ossoff will be the state’s first Jewish senator and the Senate’s youngest sitting member. Their wins bookend a divisive and drawn-out election cycle that brought seismic shifts to Georgia politics and made the once reliably red state a key battleground.
Warnock and Ossoff are set to be sworn in late Wednesday afternoon, according to a Senate source who was unauthorized to speak publicly about the plans. The two new Democrats will give a 50-50 split in the chamber. They’re set to be sworn in after Joe Biden and Kamala Harris take their oaths of office as the new president and vice president, meaning Harris will officially be the president of the Senate and the tie-breaking vote allowing Democrats control of the chamber. Harris, who resigned from her Senate seat this week, is set to be replaced by Democrat Alex Padilla. He will also be sworn in on Wednesday, the source added.
With voter turnout at nearly 4.5 million, the runoffs solidified Georgia’s position as a battleground state with closely fought elections for at least the next decade and particularly in 2022, when Kemp will likely face Democrat Stacey Abrams in a rematch of the heated and close 2018 gubernatorial election.
The two Senate races drew the eyes of America and the world to Georgia over the two months after Warnock and Ossoff forced runoffs against their opponents, summoning nearly $1 billion in campaign and outreach spending along with visits from dozens of celebrities and national politicians.
It’s official: Sens.-elect Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock will be sworn in around 4:30 p.m. today, just hours after President-elect Joe Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris take office.
The 33-year-old Ossoff will be the state’s senior senator, outranking Warnock by one slot because of a rarely used Senate rule that breaks ties in seniority and state size with the spelling of senators’ last names.
Another Georgian making history this month is Chairman David Scott, who takes over as the first Black chairman of the powerful House Agriculture Committee. In an interview with AgriTalk, Scott talked about his new role and the upcoming Congress, when he said he’ll focus on food security and climate change. “Nobody suffers from climate change like our farmers,” he said.
Gwinnett County Board of Elections Chair Alice O’Lenick is receiving criticism for remarks on voting laws, according to the Gwinnett Daily Post.
O’Lenick, who is one of two Gwinnett GOP appointees on the bipartisan elections board, is facing calls from 15 members of Gwinnett County legislative delegation — all Democrats — as well as 17 voting and civil rights groups to step down.
Those calls were in response to a Daily Post report over the weekend in which she was quoted telling the county’s GOP on Jan. 14 that she felt election law changes should be made so Republicans would “at least have a shot at winning.” The comments also drew condemnation from U.S. Rep. Carolyn Bourdeaux.
“I swore an oath to uphold the laws and provide a lawful election in Gwinnett County, and that is what I do,” O’Lenick said.
The changes O’Lenick advocated including scaling back no excuse absentee-by-mail voting, limiting it to the elderly and “infirm,” and eliminating absentee ballot drop boxes.
“We, the undersigned Gwinnett state legislators, demand your immediate resignation for the irreparable harm your public statements have caused, which clearly demonstrate your inability to complete the duties of chair of the Gwinnett County Board of Elections to ensure free and fair elections and an open democratic process for the citizens of Gwinnett County,” the 15 legislators — three-fifths of the county’s legislative delegation — wrote in their letter to O’Lenick.
“Addressing absentee-by-mail is not voter suppression, it is vote security,” O’Lenick said. “We should encourage voting in person, either during early voting, known as AIP, or on election day. I have voted for and implemented more hours of early voting, more days of early voting and two Saturdays and two Sundays in the last election.”
Rep. Sam Park, D-Lawrenceville and the delegation’s chair, said he found O’Lenick’s comments “just incredibly disheartening and very concerning.”
Park also said comments she made about the possibility that dead people or individuals outside of Georgia voted helped “perpetuate these incredibly dangerous lies of election fraud” that culminated in a violent mob storming the U.S. Capitol on the day Joseph R. Biden’s election victory was to be confirmed.
“I thought it was important to make a very public statement that this is unacceptable,” Park said of the letter asking O’Lenick to step down, which he made public on Twitter. “We now see where these lies lead, where these claims of election fraud lead.”
Still, O’Lenick said she didn’t know if she could trust ballot drop boxes that the state allowed counties to use so it was easier for people to vote. At the party meeting, she called them “ballot harvesting boxes.” And she said she didn’t know whether everyone who voted in Gwinnett should have been able to cast a ballot.
Sen. Jen Jordan, D-Atlanta, is not a member of the Gwinnett delegation. But Jordan said she had researched elections boards locally, and thought Gwinnett’s might be unconstitutional because the parties, not elected leaders, named the members. It was the same problem that doomed DeKalb’s ethics board, Jordan said.
Dr. Jeffrey H. Dorfman, a UGA Professor and the Georgia State Fiscal Economist, discussed the economy before the Joint Appropriations Committee of the Georgia State Senate, according to the Capitol Beat News Service via the Dalton Daily Citizen News.
Georgians have received so much money from the COVID-19 relief bills Congress has passed that personal income is actually higher than before the pandemic struck, Jeffrey Dorfman told state lawmakers at the start of three days of hearings on Gov. Brian Kemp’s $27.2 billion fiscal 2022 budget plan.
“People have more money than they had before,” Dorfman said. “People have the money to spend. They’re just waiting until it’s safe to do so.”
A large portion of the net job losses Georgia has suffered since the pandemic began — about 113,000 — were part-time jobs occupied mostly by high school and college students or parents with child-care responsibilities, Dorfman said.
“Our labor market is about as fully recovered as it can be until the pandemic is over,” he said.
Another mark of an unusual recession has been an increase in the savings rate among Georgians, higher credit scores and a decrease in credit card debt, Dorfman said. The stimulus checks Congress has handed out since last spring have gone to Georgians whether they have lost their jobs or not.
From the Associated Press via AccessWDUN:
“Really the economy’s doing quite well,” Jeffrey Dorfman told Georgia lawmakers during joint House-Senate budget hearings. “If we could just get the virus under control, things will be fine.”
“The short answer is that the federal government has passed out a lot of free money,” Dorfman said.
Still, state tax collections are on track to run as much as $1.5 billion ahead of projections this year. That’s allowing Gov. Brian Kemp to propose boosting spending by $650 million in the current budget year, bringing total state spending to $26.3 billion. Kemp is proposing a $27.2 billion budget for the 2022 year beginning July 1, $935 million above current spending levels.
“The fact that credit card debt is down, our credit scores are up and our savings in the bank is up all mean that when we’ve all been vaccinated, we have the pandemic under control and can get back to whatever will become normal after this, that our economic recovery should be quite strong and swift because people have the money to spend and are just waiting for the chance when it is safe to do so,” Dorfman said.
Dr. Kathleen Toomey, who is the state’s public health commissioner, told lawmakers Tuesday that it could take “many, many, many months” to vaccinate the public. Toomey said the state does not “know week to week what our allocation will be.”
“When you think about our state with almost 11 million people, at the rate we’re going, it’s going to take many, many, many months,” she said. “You really need to be able to do these big vaccination sites, and we hope that that will happen soon, with the availability of new vaccine.”
More federal aid is likely. Georgia’s newly elected U.S. senators, Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock, campaigned on sending $2,000 coronavirus payments to many Americans. President-elect Joe Biden has included a $1,400 payment to follow the already approved $600 checks as part of his massive $1.9 trillion proposal to fight the pandemic and economic crisis.
Some state lawmakers, though, are clearly worried about what the future holds for the state’s revenues. “When does that joyride end?” Sen. Blake Tillery, who chairs the Senate Appropriations Committee, asked Dorfman. “When do you see that coming to an end?”
Dorfman said the “pent-up savings” and the vaccines could carry the state through much of this year.
“We may see some business failures sort of in that second half of fiscal year ‘22 as we really shake things out and figure out who really survived and who just hung on,” Dorfman said.
The Glynn County Board of Elections is asking for additional working space, according to The Brunswick News.
State and federal laws require the board’s office to include certain features for the purpose of transparency and the security of the voting process, board member Keith Rustin told the commission at a work session.
Located in the Office Park Building on Gloucester Street, the board’s office is about 4,784 square feet. It needs 7,500 square feet based on current demand and will likely need to have 10,000 square feet or more within the next decade.
Storage space for machines and ballots is nearly at a breaking point, Rustin explained.
The county’s stock of voting machines has more than doubled since the elections office moved into the Office Park Building, he said.
State law also now includes printed ballots and scanner.
The law requires the county to maintain a certain ratio of machines to citizens, currently one machine per 250 citizens. More machines and more storage space will be needed as the population grows, Rustin said.
If all machines were plugged in for recharging at once, the electricity draw would knock out the power in the whole building. Charging sometimes has to be done at night. State law requires charging to be done during normal business hours.
The Albany-Dougherty Branch of the NAACP is asking Albany Commissioners to condemn actions by their colleague, Ward III Commissioner B.J. Fletcher, according to the Albany Herald.
Fletcher, an Albany restaurant owner who represents Ward III, filed a challenge to more than 2,700 voters registered in Dougherty County ahead of the Jan. 5 U.S. Senate runoff elections in the state on behalf of Texas-based True the Vote.
The group also challenged voters in Ben Hill and Muscogee counties.
The challenge to the voters in Dougherty County was denied by the Albany-Dougherty County Joint Board of Registration and Elections. The board also rejected another challenge, filed by another individual, challenging seven voters registered in the county that were claimed to live out of state.
“In December 2020, one week before the general runoff election for the state of Georgia, Commissioner B.J. Fletcher filed a challenge against the Dougherty County Board of Elections in an effort to disqualify thousands of people from being able to vote,” the NAACP said in a statement. “She falsely accused these voters of committing voter fraud by challenging the validity of their residence.”
“As white supremacists attacked the U.S. Capitol last week, B.J. Fletcher contributed to an environment that empowered white supremacists and insurrectionists by working with organizations like True the Vote, championing Stop the Steal and exploiting the black community. She has proven to be a danger to our democracy and to this community.”
Bulloch County public schools expect to receive about $10.5 million dollars in COVID relief funding, according to the Statesboro Herald.
A list the Georgia Department of Education released to school officials Thursday shows $10.5 million earmarked for the 11,000-student Bulloch County district as more than $1.7 billion flows to Georgia’s county and city school districts and state-funded charter schools.
The $10,543,418 is roughly equivalent to 10% of the local school system’s annual general fund budget. The district already received $2.7 million in the first round of CARES Act, or Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security, funding last year. Meanwhile, although a 10% cut in Georgia’s state funding occurred in 2020, a feared decline in local sales tax revenue has, to this point, never happened.
Dr. Rochelle Walensky is expected to be named Director of the Centers for Disease Prevention and Control in Atlanta, according to the AJC.
The task falls to Dr. Rochelle Walensky, 51, an infectious diseases specialist at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital, who is expected to become CDC director this week — a time when the virus’ U.S. death toll has eclipsed 400,000 and continues to accelerate.
Walensky has said one of her top priorities will be to improve the CDC’s communications with the public to rebuild trust. Inside the agency, she wants to raise morale, in large part by restoring the primacy of science and setting politics to the side.
The speed at which she is assuming the job is unusual. In the past, the position has generally been unfilled until a new secretary of health and human services is confirmed, and that official names a CDC director. But this time, the Biden transition team named Walensky in advance, so she could take the agency’s reins even before her boss is in place.
Walensky, an HIV researcher, has not worked at the CDC or at a state or local health department. But she has emerged as a prominent voice on the pandemic, sometimes criticizing certain aspects of the state and national response. Her targets have included the uneven transmission-prevention measures that were in place last summer and a prominent Trump adviser’s endorsement of a “herd immunity” approach that would let the virus run free.
Albany City Commissioners are consider a change in the bar closing time from 4 AM to 2:45 AM, according to the Albany Herald.
The proposal was one of three alcohol-related measures presented to the commission by City Attorney Nathan Davis during a Tuesday work session at which no vote was taken. The other two deal with the advertising required of applicants for alcohol sales licenses that are posted ahead of public hearings on those requests.
There was no discussion of opposition on Tuesday to the earlier time for ending sales of alcoholic beverages. However, Mayor Bo Dorough questioned whether the 30-minute time frame after that time was sufficient to empty establishments of customers and have employees close for the night.
Dorough also suggested scheduling a public hearing prior to the commission making a final decision, which could delay making a decision.
“Before we vote on this next week, we ought to give the people who operate bars the opportunity to speak on this,” he said. “I think we need to afford the stakeholders a chance to speak on this. Because of this, I don’t think we need to vote on this next week. I think we ought to have a public hearing on this.”
A confederate memorial in downtown Lawrenceville will be moved from public view, according to AccessWDUN.
The 28-year-old monument sits on the grounds of Gwinnett County’s Historic Courthouse in Lawrenceville and became the focus of media attention and protests after it was vandalized in June 2020. In response, Gwinnett County Solicitor-General Brian Whiteside filed a lawsuit against Gwinnett County seeking a court order declaring the monument a public nuisance and directing County officials to remove it.
A second vandalization took place Thanksgiving Day, lending new urgency to today’s action. The resolution authorizes county staff to move the monument to an appropriate storage facility for protection and preservation until the court provides further direction or the lawsuit is resolved.
According to a press release from the Gwinnett County Board of Commissioners, Chairwoman Nicole Hendrickson said the present location of the monument may result in additional acts of vandalism and creates a public safety concern for both the city of Lawrenceville and Gwinnett County.
Gainesville will hold elections for municipal offices, including Mayor, two city council seats and two seats on the city board of education, on November 2, 2021, according to the Gainesville Times.
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