Surviving Crossover Day

We tend to focus on the legislation that makes it to the finals. But the stuff that (sort of) dies speaks to the kabuki theater of the General Assembly.

I’m driving an abominable Tesla to Selma tomorrow.

The paper rented a car, because it’s cheaper than paying me 66 cents a mile to drive my wife’s car 210 miles and back. I do not own a car. I prefer to improvise.

But the hypocrisy of showing up to cover the 60^th anniversary of Bloody Sunday in a vehicle produced by a guy who has to explain how that wasn’t really a Nazi salute is stark. I’ll forgo my traditional road stop at Target – they have stretchy T-shirts I really like – and call it even.

The president of the United States is actively trying to eliminate curriculum standards that include, among other things, explaining exactly how and why John Lewis got his skull cracked open by racist white state troopers on the Edmund Pettus bridge in 1965. We think about that like history, like reading about the Civil War, but people who were there are still alive and eager to talk about it.

When Lewis died in the summer of 2020, everything was on fire. I have to say it feels a little bit like that right now.

“I fantasized about Lewis sweeping in to mediate the conflicts in the street over police reform,” I wrote when he died. “I pictured him facing a line of riot cops with us. And then I remembered that people were doing that already, without him. It’s easy enough to say that we need John Lewis more than ever. It’s harder, I think, to say that we must be John Lewis, and that this is achievable for you or I. That John Lewis’s courage is not an excuse for lacking our own.”

I’m going to Selma tomorrow and I’m looking for John Lewis.

But today I’m in Atlanta and I have to settle for looking at Colton Moore.

A few weeks ago, I found myself in a Georgia senate hearing room at the capitol, listening to lawmakers discuss how they were going to force the City of Atlanta to hand over its albatross of a city jail to Fulton County. People are dying in the custody of the Fulton County sheriff in horror movie conditions at Rice Street after all. Surely, say lawmakers whose attitude toward Atlanta is to lock the car doors as they drive home, the problem is the physical condition of the jail and not a shortage of deputy wardens or a backlog of felony cases or something that might require meaningful policy answers.

The practical justification for this kind of bill is “because we’re the state and we can.” Cities are creations of state governments, and it has become fashionable on the right to dictate terms to municipal governments, particularly when those governments are run by Democrats and the state is run by Republicans.

The legal justification for state lawmakers getting all up in city and county business is that the capitol police send their arrestees to Fulton County’s jail, and so state senators have a stake in what the capitol city does with someone like State Sen. Colton Moore when he’s getting himself arrested in front of the assembled press corps.

I wonder if that’s why the bill never saw a floor vote.

I still want to hold a romantic view of the art and crime of making laws. I like to imagine that most of what our elected officials do is too boring to report, that most work is the legislative equivalent of changing the oil on a Corolla with 200,000 miles on it, and that most bills aren’t especially partisan.

And then I look at the list of things they tried to get through - are still trying to get through the back door - and I add another scar to my pitted, charcoal-blackened heart.

I’m not talking about bills offered by Democrats which would seem like sensible, even Milquetoast advances. I mean the raging nonsense offered on the Republican fringe that even this legislature thinks a bridge too far: legislative terrorism designed to waste the time and energy of reasonable people.

Much is being made of the legendarily obnoxious Sen. Colton Moore passing his first bill. But consider that this bill is designed to punish Savannah for trying to get its car break-in problem under control by fining the fine people who leave their damned guns in their cars.

In Georgia, about one in ten cars has a loaded weapon in it. Gangs know this. When they’re planning to shoot someone, they start with a 10-minute drill at the local parking garage. Five people break into 50 cars as fast as they can, running the clock against the expected police response time. Statistically, they’ll find five guns before the cops find them.

Moore’s bill would give people leave to sue a municipality for $50,000 if it tries to enforce a local ordinance requiring guns to be secured. It’s not enough that the underlying ordinance probably violates state law: cities must be punished for trying to solve the problems created by conservative rule. Philosophical considerations of “home rule” and “local government” and “laboratories of democracy” generally apply for conservatives only when the local government in question is the more conservative one.

It is part and parcel of a bill passed by the state senate earlier this year to strip any city of its sovereign immunity if it adopts “sanctuary city” policies – that is, a policy of noncompliance with federal immigration enforcement. Those noncompliance policies have been illegal in Georgia since 2009.

It’s posturing. We might start to take this seriously when state lawmakers go after chicken plants in Gainesville, rug manufacturers in Dalton and cotton farms in Macon.

A bill to bar undocumented children from dual enrollment as high school students in college classes failed to cross over, as did a bill to collect DNA samples from anyone in jail who has an immigration detainer notice.

The senate’s “anti-DEI” bill was sidelined, though it may re-emerge later, riding in the stripped-down husk of some bill that originally would have regulated fishing licenses or something equally anodyne.

American political language is rapidly devolving into Russian doublespeak, so let me say this plainly. “DEI” as used by Republicans refers to anything meant to reduce discrimination. The practical effect is to strip any program or policy that keeps Black people or women or LGBTQ people from having their job applications or loan applications or promotions quietly discarded, or counts up how many of these people are in senior roles and compares that to the applicant pool or the public at large. Anti-DEI is pro-discrimination.

If Republicans want us to believe it’s anything else, they need to explain the practical distinction between what they’re trying to do and what I just described.

They couldn’t quite do that with this bill, so they paused it until they can get ChatGPT or Colton Moore to give them a better line.

And it would have to be ChatGPT, or maybe Grok when it isn’t being woke, because more than one legislator has it in for Chinese tech like DeepSeek. (Honestly, I’m not even mad about that. But still.) Five different bills targeting Chinese technology and investment were heard this year. One would have banned DeepSeek on government computers. Others would have required Chinese companies to disclose their ownership of property in Georgia. Another would have banned the state purchase of Chinese drones - which, given China’s dominance of the industry, is a practical ban on drones.

All these bills failed. But the authors get to say they’re “tough on China” while having no meaningful role in foreign policy.

Maybe a quarter of legislation considered this year was similarly performative.

This state has big, big issues to consider. We still do not have an answer for Medicaid that either expands access or has enough state-level support to keep rural hospitals open. The funding formula for schools is still broken. We still have a massive housing crisis that is making it impossible for almost anyone under 30 to buy a house without a six-figure loan from their parents. While the budget offers some additional funding to raise pay for prison guards, the prisons are still murder factories.

But a ban on trans girls from playing high school sports or peeing in the “wrong” bathroom is still alive.

Priorities. Amirite?