Day 33 - Like High School, with Higher Stakes

A few weeks ago one of us left a voice mail for someone and got a text back asking, "Where are you? Church?" There are multiple school choirs singing in the rotunda or on the main stairs every day of the session. "It doesn't make it hard to hear what's going on in the House and Senate?" you might ask. Yes, it does.

Today we actually had some high school's rock band. Not kidding. They had gone electric, and there were these two kids singing alt rock.

Then we had another elementary school choir, and someone commented that they felt like they were in the cafeteria in third grade.

To which a more astute lobbyist replied, "This whole place is like high school. You've got the rich kids over there [the corporate lobbyists, who hang out in one spot], you've got the poor kids over here [the progressive non-profit lobbyists, who hang out in another spot], and then in both you've got all these different cliques."

And of course there are bullies. Leaving out some of the bullies inside the chambers, there's a certain infamous, nationally-known anti-immigrant lobbyist who likes to follow around those of us who work to protect immigrants' rights, post up on a wall, and try to stare us down. Or something. It's actually a little unclear what he's trying to accomplish. But isn't it always that way with bullies?

Speaking of which, we're fighting 3 bills that have passed the House and are in committee this coming Tuesday. They all seek to keep Georgia in the past:

First of all, there's SB 20 and SB 86. Rather than rehash the issues with those bills here, you can go back to Day 21 and read about SB 20 and HB 45, which is the House version of SB 86. (Sometimes they'll pass separate House and Senate versions of a bill in case one of them gets held up somewhere and risks not passing.) Day 21 is here: http://georgiasummithotline.blogspot.com/2009/02/just-plain-mean.html.

Then there's SB 67. It would require that driver's license exams be given only in English. The sponsors apparently want to make a point about immigrants needing to learn English. But the real effect will be to discourage foreign companies from doing business here. If you're Kia -- the car company -- for example, and you're planning to build a plant in Georgia, and you find out that your executives' spouses, who might stay home with the kids and not really need to learn English to live their lives, are gonna have to learn English just to be able to drive to the grocery store, wouldn't you take another look at some other state that doesn't have such restrictions?

The thing is, the road test is already given only in English. If you don't understand English well enough to understand the person riding with you administering your road test, and you fail that, you don't get a driver's license. But the bill's sponsors want the written test to be given only in English too. Lots of business folks oppose this bill. As one of them told us, he has plenty of clients -- foreign business-people working in the U.S., many with Green Cards -- who are completely fluent in English but who might not do well on a written English test full of technicalities. If we effectively make companies pay for those employees to get extra English training when they're already fluent, are they really gonna want to come here?

At a time when Georgians are suffering crisis levels of unemployment, we're apparently about to tell these companies that we don't want their jobs. All just to make a political point.

***We can really use your help on Tuesday. If you want to come to the capitol to help us oppose the bill at the committee meeting, please email brooksGRUS@gmail.com. You don't have to have any experience; we just need you to show up.***