Can We Ever Move Ahead?

originally published May 9, 2007

The Georgia legislature was just inches away from passing a law to allow you to lay your Glock 9mm pistol within easy reach on your car seat while you drive, but the murders at Virginia Tech intervened. You'll have to wait 'til next year, when things have cooled off. Meanwhile, if road rage hits, you'll have to reach under your seat or lean over and open your glove compartment before you can start firing.

Even a group as public spirited as the legislature is sometimes stopped by an overwhelming brush with reality, though not often. In theory (such as evolution or gravity), legislators face the ultimate reality of approval by the voters. But the voters, even those who bother to vote, don't really know what the legislature is, or even where it is. So legislators can pretty much do whatever they want, especially when they're in the majority party.

The majority is really in the majority these days: in solid control of the State Senate, the State House of Representatives and the Governor's office. The majority happens to be Republican, though a lot of them, like the Governor, used to be Democrats. It's almost like party labels don't matter. Back before there were Republicans in Georgia, we still had two parties, or rather two factions within the Democratic Party. One faction was basically for the status quo - keeping things like they had always been; and the other faction was for moving ahead a little, adjusting to changing times.

The status quo crowd was adept at preventing African-American Georgians from voting and using them to scare white people into voting for whoever would keep blacks from voting or going to school with them. Reality, helped by more progressive Georgians, eventually did away with racial segregation enforced by law, but prejudice lingered.

Still, there was a time when Georgia was among the most progressive states in the South. There was a time when Georgia woke up and realized that we could make more money if Georgia kids got a better education and if we created a society less color-blind. It worked. While Birmingham and Jackson and Columbia were mired in racial hatred, Atlanta leapt forward as "The City Too Busy To Hate" and turned into a modern metropolis while the others remained overgrown hick burgs with bombers and riots.

The catalyst was the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that struck down the Georgia county unit system that had kept state political power in rural counties, disenfranchising Atlanta and other Georgia cities. That was the end of the status quo, or so it seemed. Progressive governors and legislators began to spend money to improve education and infrastructure: highways, airports, industrial parks. Turned out that industry liked racial harmony and an educated workforce. Who knew?

Now that bright future is in the past, and the status-quo guys are back in control, public education is underfunded and is re-segregated and undercut by vouchers and charter schools and growing class sizes. Infrastructure is underfunded. The tax burden is shifting from the rich to the poor; corporations get huge tax breaks while the legislature declines to raise the minimum wage. Health care for our children shrivels. Developers, who see the state's resources as opportunities for exploit, are in control of the legislature. The Governor is a developer.

The legislature which was temporarily halted from legalizing handguns on car seats declined the symbolic apology for slavery that even the Alabama legislature passed. The legislative leaders who see transportation innovations such as rapid rail as tomfoolery won't even fund highway projects. Our state government is turning away from its traditional role of administering to the needs of its people and is succumbing to the always present temptation to serve special interests. To plunder our resources and our people for the private gain of a few is the least conservative approach to government possible.

Our governor and legislature seem to reflect the prevailing attitude toward government that their Republican counterparts in Washington have popularized: cut taxes on the rich; cut services for the citizens; talk tough; do little; raise a lot of money and use it to convince the people that less is more.

Now, one of our state senators, Jim Whitehead, is running for Congress here in the 10th District, confident that the retrograde philosophy of the Georgia legislature will play well in the district. His party has lost power in Washington, but in the hothouse climate of the Georgia legislature, the same old status-quo issues are good enough for us. Nobody cares about the war in Iraq; immigrants are the problem here, and they're a big problem. Mexicans are flooding our state, our schools, our jobs, so politicians like Whitehead have to run against them. On the other hand, the corporations served by the Georgia legislature need the cheap labor of those Mexicans, so we can't really do anything except pass punitive laws that make life harder for the immigrants when they're off work.

Nothing could send a clearer signal that the legislative gang is out of touch with reality again than for Jim Whitehead to get beat in his race for Congress, and to get beat by somebody who understands reality. As our Capitol correspondent Tom Crawford has pointed out: this 10th District Congressional race is the first election since the 2006 elections when the issue of the Iraq war put Democrats back into power in the U.S. Congress. Whitehead says the Iraq war is not an issue in this district. Democrat James Marlow says it is. A Marlow victory could be a turning point for Georgia not only in the 10th District but in Atlanta, too.

Pete McCommons, Editor & Publisher

editor@flagpole.com