Tag: Gold Dome

Maya T. Prabhu launched her “Best-Dressed Lawmakers” list in 2019, a year after joining the AJC as a legislative correspondent. “Best-Dressed Lawmakers” has since become a hotly anticipated event of the legislative session, with elected representatives elbowing fiercely for Prabhu’s favor.

If the word “redistricting” is giving you deja vu, you’re remembering correctly. Georgia just drew new district maps in 2021, but in October, a federal judge threw out those maps, calling them racially discriminatory, and instructed Georgia lawmakers to draw new ones. On Wednesday, the legislature convened for a special session to draw the new district maps. To help you understand what’s happening, here are some of your redistricting questions, answered.

The District Attorneys Oversight Commission is in, school vouchers are out. Here’s a look at which laws passed, which didn’t, and who’s salty about it

It was a busy first week back for Georgia’s elected officials. Freshmen lawmakers were sworn in, new congressional leadership was elected, and Governor Brian Kemp was inaugurated for his second term. Now, with the 2023 legislative session in full swing, here are five new developments that will likely shape this year’s lawmaking agenda.

While Georgia's recent demographic changes have favored Democrats, Georgia Republicans are benefiting from a wholly different transformation: a more conservative U.S. Supreme Court.

After Monday's Crossover Day, 12 different bills remain alive in the House and Senate and could make a variety of drastic changes to Georgia's elections laws, including doing away with no-excuse absentee voting, requiring absentee voter ID, restricting the locations of ballot drop boxes, and limiting the hours for early voting. Republicans in support of the bills say the changes are needed to protect the integrity of elections; Democrats say the bills are clearly voter suppression tactics.

Georgia House Bill 838 passed the legislature in June and is on Governor Brian Kemp's desk. While proponents say it provides necessary protections for police and first responders, some civil rights groups argue that it is a tool to muzzle protestors. Here's how the legislation quickly came to be and what people are saying about it.

Georgia state Rep. David Clark asked God for guidance before deciding to call foul on alleged abuses of power by House Speaker David Ralston. After all, Clark tells Atlanta magazine, it’s “definitely intimidating” to challenge a man some consider the state’s most powerful—and certainly popular—politician.

Jen Jordan is now approached constantly by women—“it’s almost always women,” she says—telling her how much her speech meant to them and sharing their own stories of reproductive trauma: infertility, miscarriage, stillbirth, abortion. Still, although she is strongly pro-choice, Jordan says she never wanted to be known as “the abortion speech lady.”

On January 13, lawmakers from across Georgia will converge under the Gold Dome downtown for the annual session of the General Assembly. Here are the major issues they'll be discussing in 2020.