Missing in Action

originally published April 2, 2008

The legislator sat at his desk in the Senate chamber and sighed, a little wearily, as he chatted with a reporter.

“Once again,” he said, “Sonny’s missing in action.”

He was referring to our governor, Sonny Perdue, who will literally be thousands of miles away this week as state legislators wrap up another session of the General Assembly. Perdue was part of a contingent of business leaders who took off from Atlanta Sunday morning as part of Delta Air Lines’ inaugural flight to Shanghai and he doesn’t plan to return until after the Legislature’s final adjournment on Friday.

The lawmaker describing Perdue’s “missing status” was not some Democrat trying to score partisan points against a Republican governor. He was just the latest to take note of a Perdue habit that irritates many legislators: when it gets down to crunch time and there’s important work to be done in finishing the legislative session, Perdue generally is nowhere to be found.

Past governors like George Busbee, Zell Miller and Roy Barnes would get heavily involved to negotiate a budget agreement or finalize a reapportionment plan. Perdue? He’s more likely to take off for an Atlanta Braves game, as he did late in the 2004 session when the House and Senate were deadlocked on the state budget, or fly out to China on a business junket.

It wouldn’t matter that much if Perdue were willing to sign whatever the lawmakers eventually agree upon, but that isn’t the way he works. He tends to disappear for long stretches at a time, then reappear late in the session threatening to veto a bill or a budget because he doesn’t like the way it’s written. This usually touches off disputes with lawmakers who feel, rightly enough, that if the issue was that important to the governor, he should have taken the time to get involved from the start.

The end result, unhappily, is months of arguing, name-calling, and threats to call a special session, as we saw last year when Perdue got into it with House Speaker Glenn Richardson over a legislative tax rebate that the governor vetoed.

Our lawmakers have some knotty issues to resolve during these final days of the session, but they’ll have to work them out in the governor’s absence while Perdue socializes with Chinese dignitaries.

The House wants to eliminate the auto tag tax. The Senate wants to reduce state income taxes by 10 percent. Perdue doesn’t like either tax cut and he makes a very good argument that the state should not be reducing revenues so extensively when we’re heading into an economic recession of unknown duration. He may end up being stuck with one of the tax cuts by the time he returns to the country, however.

The House and Senate both seem to be working towards an agreement that would allow local governments to hold a regional referendum on a one-cent sales tax to pay for badly needed highway projects. Perdue doesn’t like this idea either, but he may also find it being enacted in his absence.

House and Senate members want to restore some of the governor’s “austerity cuts” that have reduced state funding to local school systems by about $1.5 billion over the past five years. Perdue likes the idea of cutting state funds for education, so he may try to line-item veto this money if legislators persist in putting into the state budget.

The issue of Sunday package sales is still hanging around as the session winds down and this is something else that Perdue, a non-drinking Baptist, doesn’t like. Because rural lawmakers are a little nervous about voting on this issue in an election year, Perdue may get his wish here.

Ironically, the person who could have the biggest impact on this year’s legislative session is not Sonny Perdue but Michael Vick, the former Atlanta Falcons quarterback who’s now vacationing in the federal prison system. Public revulsion over Vick’s dogfighting activities prompted the House and Senate to finally adopt a bill that would crack down hard on people who stage or watch illegal dogfights. That measure will be on Perdue’s desk when he returns from China and the governor has indicated he may sign it.

It could be one of the few accomplishments that Perdue and the General Assembly will be able to brag about this year.

Tom Crawford

Tom Crawford is the editor of Capitol Impact’s Georgia Report, an Internet news site at www.gareport.com that covers government and politics in Georgia.