ATLANTA (Georgia Recorder) — It’s the last day of Georgia’s legislative session, a day full of tradition, celebration and disappointment.
Georgia’s representatives and senators have 40 days at the start of every year to pass laws that affect Georgians, and day 40 is called sine die – Latin for “without a date,” because they adjourn without setting a date to meet again.
The deadline often means lawmakers work late into the night voting on bills before time runs out, and sometimes they resort to monkey business to get their legislation across the finish line.
“It’s a lot of hurry up and wait,” said Mikayla Arciaga, a lobbyist with the Intercultural Development Research Association, an education non-profit. “You’re waiting, you know things are happening behind closed doors, you’re listening for rumors, you’re listening to hear that something’s happening. You’re walking in circles because you’re checking both chambers. You’re standing around on really hard floors. Your feet hurt, your back hurts, your head hurts. And you’re also constantly waiting for something to happen that’s probably not great.”
Arciaga said she’s monitoring the chambers for action on school vouchers and charter schools.
As Arciaga spoke, the halls of the Capitol echoed with chatter from hundreds of advocates, all hoping their key issue will get – or in some cases, escape – lawmakers’ attention.
“It’s almost crackling with electricity over here, and you can feel it,” said D’Arcy Robb, executive director of the Georgia Council on Developmental Disabilities.
“So many things are down to the wire. People are fighting for what they want most and what they believe in. And you know at the end of the night, they are going to be people who are elated. There are people who are going to be crushed. There’s going to be everything in between, but it’s such an important day.”
Robb and other disability advocates were spending the day pushing for lawmakers to keep funding in the budget for about 1,200 waivers designed to keep people with disabilities out of institutional settings.
But for many lawmakers, that “down to the wire” energy represents a problem with the way things are done. Kennesaw Democratic state Rep. Lisa Campbell said it’s frustrating to have to wait until the last minute to see final details on lawmakers’ most important duty: the state’s $38.5 billion budget.
“We should not be waiting until the very last day of the session to allocate every single one of our tax dollars,” she said. “Most of what’s happening is behind the scenes, too. It’s not in the public, and it’s not a collaboration between the two parties. So you will hear a lot of talk about bipartisanship but most of that is happening is within the majority party. I think it lacks transparency. We have an hour to review the budget for the entire year, for every single agency, for all of our tax dollars, billions of dollars.”
Campbell said she will celebrate the passage of Georgia’s first significant needs-based scholarship with language she introduced elevating fine arts classes to become eligible for the HOPE Scholarship but expects to be waiting until late in the evening to see how much funding was allocated for early childhood education.
Atlanta Democratic state Rep. Robert Dawson said late in the evening is when lawmakers can get up to shenanigans, like substituting one bill’s language inside another so it’s hard to tell what you’re voting on.
“We get those Frankenstein bills,” he said. “We already have one, a food truck bill turned into a very constitutionally questionable bill on suppressing the larger counties in the state, their partisan elections, it turned those nonpartisan. And then we have a tiny home bill that’s morphed into something I’m getting all these texts about. So, I’m still looking forward to what kind of surprises we have.”
Sine die’s most well-known tradition comes at the very end of the night, when lawmakers tear all the bills they’ve been working on into pieces and throw them into the air like confetti. Freshman Sen. Jason Dickerson, a Canton Republican who took office in October, said he’s still unsure about that particular tradition.
“You know, that’s not really my gig, I’ll probably keep up my stuff in a binder,” he said with a laugh. “That’s usually what I do every day. I try to stay pretty organized.”
“But whenever it gets here, whether it’s midnight, two o’clock, whatever it is, we’ll all celebrate,” he added. “It’s been a long, hard 40 days. All of us have put in a ton of work in both chambers, on both sides, so we’ll look forward to that when that final hour gets here on the 40th day.”
For three months out of the year, lawmakers from all over the state gather in Atlanta for the annual lawmaking session. That means time away from home and work.
“My favorite thing about today is it’s the last day and I get to see my wife more,” said Sen. Chuck Payne, a Dalton Republican.
Georgia Recorder editor Jill Nolin contributed to this report.
