ATLANTA — A little amendment to the last bill to pass the Georgia General Assembly this year could cause quite a stir if Gov. Brian Kemp signs it into law.
Or the Senate’s tweak to House Bill 1409 could do nothing, except give lawmakers pause about pursuing sex with a staffer.
The measure, which passed the Senate unanimously during the lunch hour on April 2, technically the last day of the legislative session, went on to pass the House 12 hours later, at 12:53 am, with broad bipartisan support.
The underlying bill updates a Georgia law that requires adults who interact with children to report suspected child abuse.
The amendment connects Georgia to recent events in Washington, D.C., where California Democrat Eric Swalwell and Texas Republican Tony Gonzales each resigned from the U.S. House on Tuesday.
Swalwell stepped down and suspended his campaign for California governor after he was accused of sexually assaulting a former staffer. Gonzales admitted in a radio interview to having an affair with an aide who later took her own life by lighting herself on fire.
Georgia state Sen. Randy Robertson, R-Cataula, said he was moved to introduce what lawmakers referred to as “the Epstein amendment” after he read about her death.
“I’m going to encourage our congressional delegation to look at what we did here and go up and take the same stand,” Robertson said this week after Swalwell and Gonzales resigned. “They represent us, so I think they have an obligation, the same as state senators and state representatives, to be transparent with the people who put them in office”
Calling it the Epstein amendment is a misnomer since he was a financier rather than a lawmaker, but the connotation of sexual abuse is what led to the nickname for Robertson’s transparency mandate.
HB 1409, should the governor sign it, will require that the leaders of the House and Senate treat any settled claim of “sexual harassment, discriminatory harassment, discrimination, or retaliation” as an open record, subject only to the scrubbing of the complainant’s identity. Refusal to release such records after a request would be treated as a misdemeanor punishable with a fine of up to $1,000, or $2,500 for each additional violation within a year.
Robertson, who got another bill approved that would make it illegal for clergy to have sexual contact with people taking their counsel, said he felt lawmakers should hold themselves to the same standard.
He had been trying to get his transparency amendment approved since March 6, the deadline to “cross” bills from the Senate to the House, when he stuck it onto another bill about public access to mugshots and police videos. That bill did not pass. Nor did another he tried to attach it to. But other senators started copying him.
When Senate Minority Whip Kim Jackson, D-Stone Mountain, added it to another bill, he said he looked back at her and smiled.
It is not a partisan proposal, Robertson said.
Jackson agreed to a point. She had attached Robertson’s language to a bill she opposed and hoped to kill, yet she said this week that sexual harassment is “rampant” in Congress and in legislatures across the country. Before she was elected, she toured the state Capitol with a YWCA group, and she said the lobbyist leading them warned about wearing clothing that might attract unwanted attention.
“Robertson is on the right side of history on this,” she said. But she also said that she thinks he just forced his colleagues — by that she meant Republicans — to support the measure. “You can’t vote against it, right?”
She said she thinks the disclosure mandate could use safeguards to protect against publicizing false claims of harassment, but she said she would still like Kemp to sign it into law. The Legislature can tend to those details in the future, she said, but in the meantime the transparency requirement would protect aides and other women who work under the Gold Dome.
“I think we’re all safer with having it brought to the light,” she said.
The version of the amendment that ultimately passed was tacked onto HB 1409 by Sen. Blake Tillery, R-Vidalia, who is running for lieutenant governor.
He acknowledged that the language in his amendment had originated with Robertson, and he said he was moved to act by the failure of Congress to impose transparency on itself.
“The U.S. Congress voted to not do that,” he said on the Senate floor. “I think our body is better.”
This story is available through a news partnership with Capitol Beat, an initiative of the Georgia Press Educational Foundation.
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