It was harder to get a spot at Gov. Brian Kemp’s news conference Thursday than a seat at a UGA playoff game.
The squeeze, literally, came courtesy of the lobbyists, hundreds of them, lined up elbow-to-elbow in dark suits and shined shoes. They packed the Capitol corridors, even leaned over the balconies if they had to, to hear the governor announcing his plans to overhaul litigation laws in the state.
“Tort reform,” as it’s often called, is big business in Georgia, not just for the lobbyists but for the companies, hospitals and professionals defending themselves in lawsuits and the lawyers involved on both sides. And after years of spiraling insurance premiums to cover lawsuits when something goes wrong, you won’t find many people in Georgia who say the insurance system’s fine.
How to fix it, and who comes out ahead if a new law gets passed, is what the fight is about.
And that’s what the lobbyists were there for. Unlike earlier battles over roads or guns or which Georgia industry gets a tax break, the litigation battle has united what seems like nearly every lobbyist in Georgia on a single side — with the governor — pushing to get their own clients’ fixes in the governor’s bill.
“This is the train leaving the station and everyone wants a seat,” one lobbyist told me.
Publix, Kroger and Walmart want one piece in there, while truckers, builders and hospital groups want others. Kemp told the Georgia Chamber, which is also backing the package, that he is ready to call a special session of the Legislature (when lawmakers are planning family beach vacations over the summer) to get something passed later in the year if they don’t get it done now.
A dark-money coalition of 500 businesses called “Competitive Georgia,” wants a bill to end “the weaponization and abuse of Georgia’s civil justice system,” while a new group called “Protecting American Consumers Together,” backed by Waffle House and Uber, is spending more than $1 million for ads to tell consumers, “Georgia’s broken tort system is making everything more expensive.”
No one in Georgia politics is more powerful than Kemp, and even he is lobbying members for his bill.
He’s running a seven-figure public relations campaign, paid for by his Georgians First Leadership PAC, to push the legislation. For the first time, the same PAC he created to help Republicans get elected will now put social media and mail pieces in their constituents’ inboxes to push them to get them to “yes.”
“Contact your state legislator and urge them to support Gov. Kemp’s tort reform package,” one social media ad says.
The package he proposed Thursday is a collection of liability limits, funding source disclosures, courtroom procedure changes and limits on repeat attorneys fees.
Fighting to change or even kill the bill is the well-funded, but outnumbered, Georgia Trial Lawyers Association.
With less than two years left in his term, Kemp is now in what most governors consider their “legacy-building” phase. So what’s driving Kemp to make the decades-old fight over litigation regulations, which doesn’t exactly fit on a bumper sticker, his legacy issue?
People close to him say it goes back to Kemp Construction, the Athens small business he and first lady Marty Kemp started and sometimes struggled to keep afloat before it finally got off the ground. The governor still carries “Kemp Construction” business cards from his old business, complete with his cellphone number, which he often hands to constituents he meets around the state.
Calls to the cellphone are frequently about the cost of business and rising insurance rates. “Can’t you do something?” they want to know. If Kemp was still running the construction businesses now, he might be on the other end of those calls.
Along with the lobbyists at the news conference Thursday, standing behind Kemp were Caterpillar equipment dealers, doctors in white coats, Home Depot workers in aprons and other employees from businesses across Georgia. The message from Kemp was that it’s not about insurance companies, it’s about people.
But it’s also about insurance companies.
Whether insurance rates would actually come down with his bill is the real question, and Georgia Insurance Commissioner John King told me Thursday he has had no guarantees from insurers that rates would drop. Still, he supports the effort.
“I have had assurances from the insurance companies that if we continue down this path, the rates will go up,” King said. With Kemp’s bill, “I will have a lot more tools to be able to fight rate increases.”
The issue doesn’t cut across party lines, which makes the passage of the bill unclear, even now.
Doctors in the Capitol, including Democratic state Rep. Michelle Au, know the pressure medical malpractice premiums put on physicians. She’s not ready to support a bill now, but she’s open to a discussion.
“It’s been a long-standing issue — that doctors have been very public about — that the legal environment in Georgia is quite hostile to the practice of medicine,” Au said.
On the other hand, many lawyers in the Legislature, Democrats and Republicans, are the first to argue that every Georgian should have full access to the justice system when they need it.
State Sen. Blake Tillery, a South Georgia lawyer and the Republican chair of the Appropriations Committee, is open to a bill but not committing yet. State Sen. Josh McLaurin, a lawyer and Democrat from Atlanta, said Georgia needs insurance reform, not tort reform.
“I’ll look at the bill and I’ll read it,” he said, but he added, “I think this is an insurance industry play. It is to protect insurance companies profits, and unfortunately, I think they’re using a willing business community to go along with them.”
Lawmakers have about 30 days left to figure out what to do with the thorny issue. The governor, their constituents and many, many lobbyists, will be watching.
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