We’re not sure if former Sen. David Perdue will wind up mounting a comeback bid, but we are pretty sure the announcement won’t slip out on a weekday evening without any fanfare.
That’s why we were skeptical of the filing late Monday by Perdue to clear the way for a 2022 run against Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock.
Several of Perdue’s aides quickly clarified for us. He has not yet decided to run, though the idea is growing on him, said one. He’s keeping his powder dry just in case, said another.
It was cast as a procedural matter, though one of his aides offered a definitive timeline: Perdue will decide by March and, if he pulls the trigger, he will announce in April with a full campaign team behind him.
Perdue’s businessman-above-politics brand took a serious hit in the last campaign, when he welded himself to former president Donald Trump to disastrous effect.
And he has never loved campaigning. In the final weeks of the runoff, he seemed particularly over it. Is he hungry enough for revenge to launch a campaign almost two years before the election?
We’ll see.
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Speaking of that Senate seat, today’s Wall Street Journal reports Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell remains livid about both losses in Georgia, which also cost Republicans the Senate majority and McConnell his own leadership post.
“Mr. McConnell is still fuming over last year’s elections, not just Mr. Trump’s unsubstantiated assertions of a stolen election but also their effects on two Georgia Senate seats, which Republicans lost, costing Mr. McConnell his role as the Senate’s majority leader.
“Georgia was a fiasco,” Mr. McConnell said. “We all know why that occurred.”
The Minority Leader is now struggling to find a path forward for Republicans that includes the votes of still-feverish Trump supporters, but also ditches the most extreme would-be GOP candidates, who McConnell believes hurt the party’s brand across the country.
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Roll Call writes about how Saturday’s impeachment vote could affect senators up for reelection in 2022, including U.S. Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-Atlanta).
Speaking to reporters following his vote to convict Trump, Warnock said, “There are these moments that define who we are. This was a moral moment for those of us in that chamber [who] have a rare privilege of standing up for our republic. And we failed to meet that moral test.”
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Under the Gold Dome (Legislative Day 17)
- The House convenes at 10 am;
- The Senate gavels in at 10 am;
- House & Senate committees meet throughout the day;
- 2:00 pm: Gov. Brian Kemp announces legislation to change Georgia’s citizen arrest statute.
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POSTED on the AJC: Violent crime in Atlanta had a high-profile witness on Sunday when Cydel Charles Young, 36, a songwriter and rapper also known as Cyhi the Prynce, detailed a harrowing attempt on his life while he was driving on an Atlanta expressway.
Writing on Instagram, he talked about what happened and the changes he’s seen in the city.
“I was born and raised in Atlanta, GA, and I have tremendous love for my city ... but it’s chaotic out here.”
Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms has been criticized for the city’s recent spike in violent crime, part of a nationwide increase since the COVID-19 pandemic began.
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The second impeachment trial of former President Donald Trump wound up solidifying public support for convicting him of inciting the deadly insurrection.
That was the verdict of a new ABC News/Ipsos poll, which found 58% of Americans saying that Trump should have been convicted.
But as Fulton County D.A. Fani Willis knows, the Senate trial was only the first attempt to convict the former president -- not the last.
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Sen. Jen Jordan (D-Sandy Springs) has filed SB 180, her legislation to require companies, including Sterigenics in Smyrna, to follow specific monitoring and reporting rules following the release of ethylene oxide into the air. It’s a companion bill to HB 3 from state Rep. Erik Allen (D-Smyrna).
Jordan and a group of Cobb residents sued the state of Georgia in 2019 over Sterigenics’ monitoring and reporting of its ethylene oxide emissions, which a Web MD report revealed could cause elevated cancer risk.
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The Brunswick News reports there’s smell in the air in coastal Georgia and it’s not the ocean.
Although the News notes unusual smells in the highly industrialized are not new, residents have reported an occasional “stench” so serious since late 2020 “in some cases (it) causes physical reactions.”
The state’s Environmental Protection Division has been notified of the spike in smells, but locals worry state regulators may not be able to act.
“Even if some solid evidence of air contamination is uncovered, the EPD may not be able to act on it. A presidential executive order spurred by the need to adjust operations at industrial plants during the COVID-19 pandemic may clear a potential culprit of what would normally be wrongdoing.”
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The Annapolis Capital Gazette asks a fascinating question: Since Jimmy Carter is the only former president to have graduated from the Naval Academy, why isn’t there a building named after him?
The answer is equally simple-- because Carter is, happily, still alive.
Two buildings on the stately bayside campus will need to be renamed soon now that the recent National Defense Authorization Act requires new names for military facilities named after Confederate soldiers.
The USS Jimmy Carter, a Seawolf-class, nuclear-powered, fast-attack submarine, is already named for the 43rd president, who is the only trained nuclear engineer to hold the job.
One Academy grad already in the running for at least a building in Annapolis: the late Sen. John McCain, whose father and grandfather were both four-star Navy admirals. McCain was buried on the campus after his death in 2018.
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Parler, the social media platform popular with conservatives, is back online after Amazon Web Services took the platform down last month. U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene advertised (R-Rome) on the site heavily before it was removed from the web.
The New York Times reports on why it went down in the first place:
“Ahead of the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, the conversation on Parler turned dark, with users calling for fellow “patriots” to take back the United States and some calling for violence, including coordinated assassinations of Democrats. Some users posted images of guns they planned to bring to the rally in Washington and others discussed streets to avoid police and tools to break into buildings.
“In the days after the riot, Facebook and Twitter removed Mr. Trump’s account from their sites, causing millions more people concerned about what they saw as censorship to register accounts with Parler. It became the No. 1 app on Apple and Google’s app stores. Then Apple and Google removed the app, and Amazon cut off its service.”
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In case you missed the lengthy Politico profile of former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley, it has a bit of Georgia intrigue, speculating that Nick Ayers and Austin Chambers would take leading roles in any Haley presidential run.
But we’re told Ayers, who was former Vice President Mike Pence’s chief of staff, is waiting to see what his one-time boss wants to do and has made no commitments to any potential 2024 candidate at this stage. Chambers, too, hasn’t made any 2024 decisions.
Ayers is an Atlanta-based GOP heavyweight and former Sonny Perdue campaign manager, while Chambers has been a top advisor to former Sen. David Perdue.
