On Friday I held an appreciation event for volunteers who canvassed with DeKalb Dems House District 90 for Kamala Harris. I am proud of our robust canvassing effort– it’s no coincidence that House District 90 had the highest voter turnout in DeKalb County. And even though the results weren’t what we hoped, I thought it was important to acknowledge what we accomplished and bring a like-minded community together during a difficult time. 

Thank you to everyone who attended, especially Barbara Marston from my volunteer staff team and DeKalb Dems East Atlanta Chair Mike Lynch for helping with the arrangements, and future political superstar Daisy Kaine, who inspired us with her impromptu speech. And thank you to Armando at Argosy for always welcoming us.

Many of the folks at the party have been struggling with the question of where we go from here. How do we fight back? How do we help the most vulnerable– including the thousands of our neighbors who are federal employees and who are coping with dramatic instability at this moment?

What I told them, and what I will share with you, is we are trying to figure it out. I know we need leaders at this moment with clear plans and directives. I’m speaking with colleagues both at the state and federal level about how we rise to this occasion. I do have some plans for concrete action, and I’ll be sharing them shortly. 

I know the last two weeks have been overwhelming. If you have some time, check out this opinion piece by the New York Times's Ezra Klein- it helped me make sense of what I’m seeing right now and gave me hope that there is a strategic way to fight back.

Don’t get distracted by all the issues coming at you. Pick a few things and work on those. 

On that note, last week I asked you to write in to Speaker Jon Burns about replacing Janelle King on the State Election Board. I set a goal of 1000 emails. And oh boy did you deliver!

Within 3 days of the call to action, we surpassed our goal! We’ve sent over 1,159 emails at the time of this writing. Let’s keep going! Haven’t had a chance to write an email yet? Do it now. Already wrote in? Write in again (every day!) I hope to meet with the Speaker on this topic this week and provide an update soon.

In this Edition of the Draper Paper

• A tale of two school safety proposals: GOP ignores guns, Democrats address them head on

• GA GOP releases their voter suppression wish list

• Last week at the Capitol

For years, the Republican leadership at the Capitol has responded to proposed common sense gun safety laws by ignoring those ideas and instead passing laws to make accessing guns easier.  

For a brief moment, it looked like the Republican speaker of the House was softening on that position after a 14-year-old boy in Winder allegedly shot and killed two classmates and two teachers with an assault-style rifle his father had given him for Christmas. 

There were warnings that Colt Gray was troubled. But no one did anything that prevented him from taking his firearm to Apalachee High School last September.

Days after the shooting, House Speaker Jon Burns emotionally insisted that the legislature needed to find ways to stop guns before they get into schools- welcome news to the parents, kids, and school staff around Georgia who see the issue as out of control.

But since the legislative session started, he appears to have walked back his position.

The majority party’s hypocrisy was on full display this past week when House Republicans called the media together so they could brag about their 50-page bill that would “ensure a tragedy like what we witnessed in Apalachee never happens again in this state.” 

Republican House Bill 268 would create a statewide database to track student mental health histories, develop an app so students could anonymously report threats to schools and require school districts to create safety management plans, among other changes. 

What isn’t in the bill? Any mention of guns.

This is their idea of a “comprehensive” school safety bill.

It’s as cowardly as it is unacceptable. You cannot purport to care about Georgia students and teachers and not address our gun laws. 

I went on Lawmakers last week to say exactly that.

As I have pointed out before, if the Pediatric Health Safe Storage Act, sponsored by Rep. Michelle Au (D-Johns Creek), had been law, it is possible the Apalachee shooting could have been prevented.

Here are just a few more bills filed by Democrats that I support, and that would make great additions to any serious school safety package:

• HB 3 would require a universal background check whenever gun ownership changes – not just when a handgun is sold by a licensed gun dealer.

• HB 4 would require a three day wait before the sale or transfer of a gun is completed.

• HB 64 would require anyone who owns an assault rifle to have sufficient liability insurance.

• HB207 would require safe storage of guns left in a parked car or truck, taking away the opportunity to steal a firearms to be used in a holdup, sexual assault or murder.

Advocates, colleagues, and I will keep up the pressure and demand that any school safety reform package considered this session include a substantial gun safety component. In the meantime, do NOT let Republicans take credit for keeping our kids safe if they are unwilling to grapple directly with guns– the number one killer of children in America.

I expect we will hold hearings on HB 268 as early as this week.

Republican leaders at the Capitol– at least on the House side– continue to say they don’t have a large appetite for election legislation this session. 

That’s good news in my book, given the deleterious changes they’ve made to the election code over the last several years. 

But apparently the Georgia GOP didn’t get the memo. 

Recently they announced their list of election priorities, and it appears to be a checklist from an extremist voter suppression playbook.

Their priorities can mostly be summed up into the following categories: Shifting more control and power to the MAGA-controlled Georgia State Election Board, making registration more difficult, making voting more difficult, and prohibiting Democratic counties from providing services to their voters (even though all counties could provide the same services to their voters if they chose to).

Their first listed priority- voter registration by party- may seem innocuous, but it will have two unwelcome consequences in my mind: First, I believe it will drive primary turnout down because some people who do not identify as Democrat or Republican will not want to register by party. Second, it will give an edge to more extreme candidates because it will prevent voters from switching to the other party’s primary ballot to support more moderate candidates. In 2022, around 37,000 supposed Democratic voters pulled the GOP primary ballot to support non-Trump backed Republican candidates. (See Thousands of Democrats voted in GOP primaries to block Trump picks in Georgia)

Their proposals to end early voting, voting by mail, and automatic voter registration are blatantly extreme, and not grounded in any rationale other than to make voting harder for Georgians. It’s gross. And it’s dangerous; the GA Republican party has been incredibly effective at repeating non-truths enough times for them to gain traction with feckless members of the General Assembly. 

As of now I haven’t seen any bills mirroring the items on the GA GOP’s voter suppression wish list. But we will remain vigilant. 

It was an incredibly busy week at the Capitol! Students and family from Apalachee High School joined Rep. Dr. Michelle Au and Georgia Democrats in support of gun safety reforms. I was in awe of the young student, Isabel Trejo, who shared her experience of living through the shooting and witnessing her teacher’s murder. It shouldn’t be necessary for our children to have to re-live their trauma to make an impression on policy makers, but apparently it is.

And I was glad to meet with a wonderful array of other advocates and constituents. 

Yours in service,