President Joe Biden on Thursday called Republican legislation such as Georgia’s new vote suppression law “un-American” and “sick.” Stacey Abrams called the legislation “Jim Crow in a suit and tie.” Wearing his Thursday evening, Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp (R) signed it anyway.
Black voters were instrumental last fall in delivering Georgia’s electoral votes to Joe Biden and in handing both of the state’s U.S. senators to Democrats. So among other outrages, Kemp and Republican legislators made it a crime in Georgia to hand out food or water to persons waiting for hours in notoriously long voting lines that occur predictably in Democratic precincts.
More ominously (Associated Press):
The law replaces the elected secretary of state as the chair of the state election board with a new appointee of the legislature after Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger rebuffed Trump’s attempts to overturn Georgia’s election results. It also allows the board to remove and replace county election officials deemed to be underperforming.
Had this and other provisions been in place on November 3, 2020, “Donald Trump might have succeeded in overturning Georgia’s results,” Ari Berman (“Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America“) told MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow after the signing. “His biggest Republican critic in Georgia was the secretary of state.” So legislators cut the secretary of state out of the loop. Georgia’s Republican legislature has taken “unprecedented power” over election administration, Berman continued, with the ability “to challenge the election results … and refuse to certify them if they don’t like who the winner is.”
Protests were immediate.
Georgia Capitol police arrested state Rep. Park Cannon after she knocked on the governor’s door to witness the signing. Police charged Cannon with two felonies: felony obstruction and preventing or disrupting general assembly session. The state constitution exempts members from arrest during sessions of the General Assembly “except for treason, felony, or breach of the peace.” Officers could legally arrest her for nothing less. The charges are unlikely to hold up in court but Cannon has been made an example.
The question now is what happens next.
Democrats’ top election law attorney, Marc Elias, immediately files a lawsuit on behalf of Stacey Abram’s New Georgia Project as well as Black Voters Matter and Rise, a student organization. Elias’s clients, like Cannon, will likely prevail in court. But the Republican party is ingenious in its efforts to disrupt democracy, Elias worries, and “we can’t count on” winning. Only Congress can protect our democracy and end these attacks because “we’re not going to beat them all in court.”
When North Carolina passed its infamous “bathroom bill” (HB2), the economic impact was immediate. A group of 68 major corporations, including Apple, Cisco and eBay, joined a lawsuit challenging the law. The ACC and NCAA pulled tournament play from the state. Lionsgate studios pulled its production. (Georgia film production became even an even larger sector of its state’s economy as a result.) Deutsche Bank froze plans to expand its workforce in North Carolina.
Bruce Springsteen, Pearl Jam, Nick Jonas, and Itzhak Perlman cancelled North Carolina performances. For them and others it’s encore time.
The Associated Press estimated the impact to North Carolina could amount to $3.76 billion over a dozen years. Neither Brian Kemp nor the bill he signed will be around that long and the economic impact to Georgia could be even greater.
The heat is already on Coca-Cola, Delta, and Home Depot, all headquartered in Atlanta. Expect it to get even hotter in Georgia than in North Carolina.
And we have not forgotten you, Chief Justice Roberts.
