The Georgia Legislature: 2021 session in review

The SPLC Action Fund, along with our partners, put up a great fight against bad legislation and defended the civil rights of Georgia residents during the 2021 legislative session, which recently concluded.

We tracked over 150 bills. More than 80 of the bills were related to election administration, and unfortunately most of those bills that were authored by Republicans focused on voter suppression.

Despite our victories, we remain vigilant, and we plan to regroup and strategize with our coalition partners during the rest of the year. Georgia has a two-year legislative cycle, so several troubling bills that our coalition defeated in 2021 remain eligible for passage in the second year of session. Sadly, many great bills like Medicaid expansion, a study committee on the effects of lead on children and a citizen commission that would investigate and resolve issues between communities and law enforcement were blocked by the majority.

Let’s celebrate our victories:

Criminal justice reform

• HB 479 repealed Georgia’s citizen’s arrest law, a welcome response to the demands of the families affected by vigilante violence and others after the death of Ahmaud Arbery. The 25-year-old Black jogger was killed by two vigilantes during a run, spotlighting this law that has provided legal cover for the lynching of Black people. 
   
• SB 105 improves the process for the early termination of certain felony probation sentences.
   
• HB 272 raises the age of criminal responsibility from 17 to 18. It passed the House, and it passed out of the Senate Judiciary Committee. However, it remained in rules on the last day of session. We are hopeful we can work with the Senate to gain passage next session. This is the furthest this bill has ever made it in the Georgia Legislature.

Fighting hate & extremism

• HR 14 replaces a Confederate statue with one of Congressman John Lewis in National Statuary Hall.

Economic justice

• HB 532 addressed the Department of Labor, specifically unemployment claims and investigations, but it originally included language providing Labor Department employees with “arrest” powers. Our coalition amended it, and we became a part of a small coalition working on unemployment issues. We hope to continue this important work after the session.
   
• HB 163 created a Medicaid waiver for children from low-income families. This bill will make it simpler for more children who qualify for health care coverage to receive it.
   
• HB 146 expanded parental leave for government employees.

Immigrant justice

• HB 11 creates a study committee on barriers to employment for immigrant workers in Georgia. What’s more, we plan to be at the hearings to ensure that the conversations are about real barriers to immigrant engagement in the workforce, like discrimination and lack of public transportation.

Here are the bills that we defeated with our partners:

Criminal justice reform

• HB 289/SB 171 represent attempts to pass an unconstitutional anti-protest bill that would prevent communities from protesting safely and peacefully without being criminalized. Our coalition stalled the bill before Crossover Day (the deadline for a bill to pass one chamber or another). Then, the author of SB 171 stripped the language from a House bill, HB 289, and replaced it with SB 171’s language, essentially creating a “new” anti-protest bill for the House. Our coalition worked to defeat it again on the last day of session, and it did not pass. We will have to fight against this bill again in 2022.   
   
• SB 115 would create a course for drivers that would teach them how to behave when confronted by law enforcement during a traffic stop. The bill did not include any important information about motorists’ constitutional rights when confronting law enforcement and would help to create revenue for companies that conduct these trainings. Republicans voted against the measure when it returned to the Senate because the author tried to include some school surveillance provisions that would have cost counties a lot of money. SB 115 may now be repurposed and start the process from the beginning under a new bill number in 2022.
   
• HB 194 would have mandated lifetime probation for certain sex-related offenses, providing a permanent revenue stream for supervision companies.

Children’s rights

• HB 60 would have created a new private school voucher program that would continue to siphon public funding from public schools and into private schools where there is inevitably less transparency and accountability.
   
• HB 142 would have raised the cap on existing tax-credit vouchers by $50 million, allowing more public dollars to be drained from public schools.

Fighting hate & extremism

• HB 372 would have defined the word “gender” in Georgia’s code by tying the definition to biological sex and rejecting different gender identities. This was another attempt to attack the trans community, and we worked with our partners to defend against these targeted attacks that we are seeing across the country.
   
• HB 1, the FORUM Act, was sponsored by an SPLC-designated anti-LGBTQ hate group, Alliance Defending Freedom; this bill would have codified discrimination on college campuses by allowing student groups and organizations to exclude people from their membership based on characteristics like gender identity or sexual orientation.
   
• HB 276/SB 226/HB 681 was an anti-trans youth sports ban. This bill was defeated before Crossover Day, but in the last two hours of sine die, the term for the last day of the legislative session, the legislation was resurrected. However, we caught it and prevented it from being called to the Senate floor for a vote.
   
• HB 513 would have provided new protections for Confederate monuments.

Immigrant justice

• HB 228 would have required that the driver’s licenses of Georgians, who are not U.S. citizens, include language that said they are not a citizen and could not use this document to vote. This would not add any “security” measures against potential fraud – and in fact would create avenues for discrimination and profiling against immigrants in Georgia. The bill was defeated by Republicans on the Special Committee on Election Integrity. Democrats on the committee cited the SPLC’s extremist file on D.A. King, who was brought in by the bill’s author as an “expert” on this subject. King, the leader of anti-immigrant hate group the Dustin Inman Society, and the bill’s author could not answer simple questions from the committee and were asked to go “do their homework.”

Voting rights

• HB 531 and SB 241 were the two other omnibus voter suppression bills that we managed to stop. There were more than 80 election-related bills, and before crossover only 12 of them passed from one chamber to the other. Despite the passage of SB 202, the voter suppression bill that became law, we managed to kill dozens of other voter suppression bills.

Unfortunately, these bad bills passed:

Criminal justice reform

• HB 286 prohibits local law enforcement budget reductions. Our coalition amended the legislation to include an exception for those local governments that hold a public hearing about the budget proposal, provide opportunity for public comment and provide notice in the local newspaper about the reduction.
   
• SB 174 expands the list of offenses for which cash bail must be paid for pretrial release.
   
• HB 127 mandated that phone companies provide a location to law enforcement, potentially violating someone’s constitutionally protected right to privacy and right to be free of unreasonable searches and seizures under the Fourth Amendment.  

Voting rights

• SB 202 was the omnibus bill that became law in one afternoon through some creative political maneuvering. This bill includes new voter ID requirements, limits on drop boxes, limits on early voting, and a variety of unfunded mandates for counties that will make it easier for the state Legislature to take over county election administration – which may allow them to invalidate the duly cast votes of Georgians.

Children’s rights

• SB 47 expanded a private school voucher program for students with disabilities by essentially stripping them of their federal protections.

Sine die

Despite the passage of these bad pieces of legislation, I believe that our efforts during this session were successful. We worked with our coalition partners and others to defeat or amend bad legislation and to build a strong record for potential litigation challenges. We continue to pressure legislators and stakeholders to do the right thing for Georgians.

I think that we strengthened many of our relationships across the state during this session, and I am really proud to be part of an incredible group of advocates and organizations that will continue to fight for justice year after year. After sine die, we rest, regroup, and we get ready for the next fights on redistricting, reapportionment, and making sure that restoring the voting rights of Georgians is a priority during the 2022 election cycle.

Isabel Otero is a policy associate for the SPLC Action Fund in Georgia.

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