Georgia Politics, Campaigns & Elections for May 21, 2013

Deal to join Tea Party Protest at Capitol Today

Julianne Thompson tweeted yesterday that Governor Nathan Deal plans to join the Tea Party protest of the IRS, Benghazi and everything else wrong with the federal government. The protest will begin at 11:30 AM today on the Washington Street Side of the Capitol and is scheduled to last until 2 PM.

GAGOP Proposed Resolution on “Election Reform”

Here’s an excerpt from the full resolution that did not receive a vote at the State Convention due to the loss of a quorum. And last week we ran guest posts by Third District GAGOP Chairman Dale Jackson and Coweta County GOP Chairman Brant Frost V arguing for some form of nominating convention.

WHEREAS, the Virginia Plan will greatly increase the influence of the grassroots; grow the Republican Party’s base of volunteers, members, and participants; and

WHEREAS, the Virginia Plan will create a shorter election season; a less expensive primary process; and a far more inviting process to citizens seeking to serve in public service; and

WHEREAS, our party risks permanent minority status unless we return to our core values and become a truly representative party.

One of the major hurdles faced by proponents of the Virginia Plan is that House Speaker David Ralston opposes it, according to Jim Galloway,

Ralston was critical about a movement among some GOP delegates to press for an end to the primary system – in favor of convention-selected candidates. “Can you imagine going to young moms and dads, who have to go to soccer games and PTA meetings, and tell them that unless they can attend a political meeting, their vote doesn’t count?” Ralston asked.

Bearing Drift, a great blog covering Virginia politics looks at the numbers of the “Virginia Plan” in action and concludes that it’s a ridiculous way to choose the party’s nominees:

Let’s look at the numbers.

8,094 – The total number of registered delegates who showed up, out of over 12,000 who registered.
255,826 – The number of Republicans casting a ballot in the 2012 U.S. Senate primary.

Just from those numbers you can see that the majority of well-motivated Republicans interested in participating in our nominating processes were disenfranchised by the State Convention.

Here’s another number: $25.  As my colleague Melissa Kenney noted the other day, that’s the cost for children to attend the convention.  For a family as large as hers, or as large as Ken Cuccinelli’s, it would cost almost $200 for them to attend the convention.  That doesn’t include meals, transportation and hotel costs for those who didn’t come from Richmond or the surrounding suburbs and don’t want to risk a 5+ hour drive home after a grueling hurry-up-and-wait style convention.  Not everybody can afford the poll tax conventions effectively levy.

We’ve all heard the arguments over the years about disenfranchisement of military members, parents with small children who can’t afford the cost of childcare, small business owners who can’t afford to give up a spring Saturday to the convention, the elderly who can’t go for 16 hours at a time, and the rest.  That was clearly in evidence yesterday, given that by the time the fourth ballot rolled around, over a third of the conventioneers who had showed up had left.  The final ballot saw fewer that 5,000 votes cast.

Is that what we really want?

The Washington Post editorialized on the numbers behind the “Virginia Plan” process.

More than a quarter of Virginia’s electorate considers itself Republican, which translates to almost 1 million voters. Of that number, about 8,000 — less than 1 percent — showed up at the party’s convention in Richmond over the weekend to choose the GOP candidates in this November’s races for governor, lieutenant governor and attorney general.

That, in addition to the party’s overall rightward tilt, helps explain how, in one of the nation’s most centrist states, Republicans came to choose a slate of hard-right conservatives.

An article in Watchdog.org highlights two opposing views on the effects of adopting nominating conventions in the Old Dominion.

Tea party officials said the convention structure levels the playing field because it gives candidates who don’t have the money to sustain a long primary run a chance at the nomination.

“We advocated changing back to a convention primarily because it seemed the well-heeled, tried-and-true, same-old same-old (candidates) were going win GOP primaries time and time again,” said Keith Freeman, chairman of the Hampton Roads Tea Party.

“There’s no way that the average person could take that much time off to devote the better part of a year and the vast resources it would take to win a primary,” Freeman said. “So we thought this was the better mechanism for the average person to participate in.”

But Bolling spokeswoman Ibbie Hedricktold The Washington Post on May 8 that Bolling’s decision to drop out of the race and not attend the convention was the result of an exclusionary policy meant to sideline opposing views.

“If we want to grow the Republican Party over time, we have to involve more people in the process of nominating our candidates, not fewer. Conventions empower the most strident voices within a political party, and they effectively disenfranchise more mainstream voters. Given these concerns, the lieutenant governor does not plan on attending or participating in the convention,” Hedrick said in a statement.

And there’s the matter that the Republican Party of Virginia has nominated a candidate for Lt. Governor who may bring the entire ticket down.

The Virginia Republican Party was already taking a risk, dumping a gubernatorial primary election in favor of a convention, in order to assure the ideologically emphatic Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli II the nomination. Then on Saturday, a small turnout of party die-hards picked a nominee for lieutenant governor who is nothing short of outrageous.

He is by any definition an extremist, someone who could not muster even minimal support from GOP primary voters.

And this is the No.2 man on the ticket, with whom Cuccinelli is now campaigning on a 10-city tour of the state. You can be sure that his opponent will be taking footage to be used in ads linking Cuccinelli with Jackson’s language and view.

Cuccinelli has already told The Post, “I am just not going to defend my running mates’ statements at every turn. They’ve got to explain those themselves. Part of this process is just letting Virginia voters get comfortable with us, on an individual basis, personally.” But politics is never that simple.

Cuccinelli is a staunch social conservative who was already going to have an uphill climb with moderate voters. But he has never dabbled in the sort of egregious language Jackson has used.

Some Republicans in the state are already nervous. One state GOP insider e-mailed me, almost despondent. “This Jackson nomination illustrates something that a lot of commentators don’t appreciate — this assumption on the part of some on the hard right that blacks will automatically respond to a black Republican, even one whose views have no intrinsic appeal to blacks.” He continued, “But what a sad, corrosive day for the party, from the specter of 8000 people choosing a statewide candidate, to Cuccinelli not having the basic sense to block it. And what a hideous position it puts so many of us in.”

For those who favor going to a Virginia System, please address the following questions:

1. What happens to nominations when we lose a quorum because the State Convention has gotten at least twice as lengthy due to the nomination and elections of all the statewide candidates, much less Congressional and lower level offices? Does that mean that we cede those elections to the Democrats, or does the State Committee pick them in a meeting that is much smaller, more closed, and likely to continue to be dominated by “the Establishment”?

2. Please make your best argument for throwing away a system that has allowed us to nominate the candidates who made Georgia a red-dominated state in favor of stacking the deck to allow nomination of people who wouldn’t make it out of a primary. Because the only reason I can see for really being dissatisfied with the current system of elections is that your favored candidates aren’t being elected.

3. How will you address the argument that this is a massive disenfranchisement of soccer moms, soldier dads, and people who live in parts of the state far from wherever the Convention is held in any given year, and discriminates against people whose work schedule require them to actually, you know, work, rather than devote their lives to an unending series of political conventions?

4. Why should we trust the legislative process, through which any bill changing the current election system must pass, to not (a) tilt the odds in favor of incumbent lawmakers; and (b) fail to foresee the inevitable unintended consequences?

I am in favor of a vigorous debate over how we continue to move forward in the Georgia Republican Party

Martha Zoller: 5 Things I learned at the 2013 GAGOP State Convention

From Martha Zoller’s piece running exclusively behind the paywall on InsiderAdvantage.com until Friday, when it becomes free on zpolitics.com. Until then, you’ll get a teaser from us every day.

Second, we’ve got to better define the Resolutions Committee responsibility. The convention adjourned without hearing the committee’s report because of a lack of quorum in the convention hall. Many folks left right after the votes were completed. If they understood the role of the Resolutions committee, they might have stayed. In addition, the committee was on a roll because of the success of the ethics question on the ballot in 2012 and there was a rift on whether the Resolutions Committee is there to set policy/legislation for the Republican Party or should they pass statements of what we believe? I’m in the less activist camp and think they ought to be broad statements on what we believe without “getting in the weeds.”

Judson Hill earns perfect score, A+ rating from Georgia Chamber

The full scorecard compilation does not appear to be available yet, the Atlanta Business Chronicle tells us that 34 of 38 Georgia state Senators received perfect scores on the Georgia Chamber of Commerce 2013 Legislative Scorecard.

State Senator Judson Hill has issued a press release touting his perfect score and A+ rating from the Georgia Chamber of Commerce.

“I am thankful to the Chamber for this recognition and for their continued efforts to promote business throughout the state,” said Sen. Hill. “I firmly believe that Georgia has one of the strongest business communities in the country, and throughout my legislative career I have focused on boosting our state’s economic development through job creation. Regardless of the size, all businesses in our state are dependent on legislation that encourages job creation and enhances local and global competitiveness.”

“We commend Senator Hill for his dedication and commitment to the betterment of our state,” said Georgia Chamber President and CEO Chris Clark.

Transportation Notes

Movement is afoot to revamp the interchange between I-285 and GA-400 in Atlanta, with bond money from the state and a contribution from the Perimeter CIDs, according to an AJC story behind the paywall.

The project as proposed in the T-SPLOST cost $450 million. An additional piece, sorting lanes to the north along Ga. 400, would add an additional $190 million, and that may be out of reach even under current efforts.

Funding a $450 million project doesn’t mean finding that money all in one year. The money can be budgeted year by year: perhaps five years or more for preliminary work and construction.

A unanimous committee vote taken Friday at the ARC, and others to be held there Wednesday, would shift money, freeing up to $80 million for the state’s use without restrictions on where it should go. DOT Planning Director Toby Carr has told ARC members a likely candidate is Ga. 400 and I-285, though he stressed in interviews this week that the funding decisions would have to be weighed by the ARC first.

The freed-up bond money is made possible by what DOT officials say was a surplus of gas tax money resulting from closing out projects under budget and using buffer money that was set aside but not needed. The money would be switched around in the budget for a toll lane project on I-75 in Henry County.

Also Wednesday, Deal is expected to announce a smaller commitment of several million dollars from the Perimeter Community Improvement Districts, the self-taxing business group that pushes transportation projects for that area.

Georgia Ports set an all-time record for freight throughput in April, according to the Georgia Ports Authority.

“Our total tonnage makes April the highest volume month on record,” said GPA Executive Director Curtis Foltz. “And with companies like Haier appliances, Kent bicycles and Pep Boys recently choosing the Port of Savannah, our drawing power for cargo is only getting stronger.”

“We are seeing strong performance because cargo owners know they can get their goods to market faster when they come through Georgia,” said GPA Board Chairman Robert Jepson. “Our streamlined service on-port, combined with better connections to the hinterlands by road and rail, make our deepwater ports the obvious choice for global trade.”

Georgia’s deepwater ports and inland barge terminals support more than 352,000 jobs throughout the state annually and contribute $18.5 billion in income, $66.9 billion in revenue and $2.5 billion in state and local taxes to Georgia’s economy. The Port of Savannah was the second busiest U.S. container port for the export of American goods by tonnage in FY2011. It also handled 8.7 percent of the U.S. containerized cargo volume and 12.5 percent of all U.S. containerized exports in FY2011.