On Background:

Suddenly, Democrats Are Relevant Again

By Dick Pettys
InsiderAdvantage Georgia

(3/31/08) It’s taken them a while, but suddenly Democrats are relevant again in the Georgia Legislature.

To be sure, they first had to endure a kind of banishment to Siberia. That’s what happens when political control changes and those who formerly were on the outside looking in get to engage in a little payback for all manner of real or perceived slights and injustices at the hands of those who formerly were on the inside looking out.

And Republicans, after all, had 130 or so years to ponder how they would deliver some payback if they ever got the chance.

For their part, Democrats really hadn’t given much - if any - thought to how to handle themselves if ever they found themselves in the minority, and the adjustment has been hard. Even now, they’re nowhere close to being as good as Republicans were in playing the minority role. But, of course, they haven’t had as much practice.

So how is it that they are suddenly relevant again?

Without their help, Republican Speaker Glenn Richardson couldn’t have passed his modified tax relief plan through the House to ax the tag tax.

And without their help, Richardson couldn’t have passed a local option sales tax for transportation through the House.

Both are constitutional amendments requiring 120 votes to pass. Republicans have only 107 seats in the chamber, so they must look to Democrats for help on constitutional measures.

Just why would Democrats want to party with the Republicans? In a sense, it’s a case of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.”

Siding with Richardson allowed the Democrats to take some strong shots at Republican Gov. Sonny Perdue, who opposed both axing the tag tax and authorizing the local option sales tax for transportation. And that was clearly okay with Richardson, who’s had his own running feud with Perdue for more than a year.

And it’s not the first time there’s been a little teamwork between the majority GOP and the minority Dems. Last session, the Dems joined in with glee as the House voted to override the governor’s veto of the midyear budget, and they joined with Republicans this year in voting to override 12 of the vetoes he cast after lawmakers had gone home from the 2007 session.

There’s another reason Democrats might be happy to join in with Republicans on occasion. Just as Democrats used to do to them when they were in the majority, Republicans have stolen an issue from the Democrats, and Democrats couldn’t be happier. The Republicans this session are advocating an end to the “austerity” cuts to education that Perdue has kept in his budget version since the last recession.

And it clearly sticks in the governor’s craw that members of his own party are now trying to bash him with the same issue Democrats tried to use against him in his 2006 re-election campaign.

While it must be satisfying in some sense to Democrats to help foster the Republican battling under the Gold Dome, they haven’t just given their votes away as freebies. In exchange for their votes on the tax relief bill, they got Richardson to drop his earlier proposal to impose spending caps on local governments. And in exchange for their votes on the transportation bill, they were able to win passage of an amendment to divert the 4th penny of sales tax on gasoline purchases to the DOT from the general treasury.

And it’s also interesting to note that two Democrats landed on the conference committee appointed last week to try to resolve House-Senate differences over the local option sales tax for transportation - Rep. Calvin Smyre and Sen. Doug Stoner.

Smyre, who was Rule Chairman when Democrats were in power, joked: “I’ve served on many a conference committee - - but not in quite a while.”

On a somewhat related subject, the governor was remarkably voluble last week about his opposition to the transportation tax and the Sunday sales bill, on which he penned an op-ed piece for the media to explain his precise concerns with selling liquor on the Sabbath.

That was somewhat uncharacteristic, given that he’s always more or less viewed his role as one of letting lawmakers work things out for themselves and then, when they’re done, rendering his verdict with either an approval or a veto of their work product.

There’s been no resolution yet on the liquor sales question, but the tax passed, as mentioned above. Perdue had said previously that he didn’t think DOT could handle new money from a tax increase until the new commissioner had straightened things out in the agency. But there’s been speculation in the Capitol corridors that his decision to weigh-in more forcefully - and at the last minute - may have had an opposite effect from what he intended, perhaps producing as many as 20 extra votes on behalf of the measure. There’s no way to know for sure.