I received an email today from an Emory University doctor expressing support for my Senate Resolution 748 concerning Grady’s employee health benefits plan. He writes:

I have been based at Grady for 11 years as a trauma surgeon. About 8 years ago, a close friend of mine and who was a full-time Grady paramedic (and had health insurance through Grady), was involved in a serious motor vehicle crash and was admitted to the trauma service at North Fulton Hospital (closest trauma center to the site of his crash). When I explored the possibility of having him transferred to Grady, I was shocked to learn that Grady didn’t take his insurance — despite the fact that he was insured through Grady. How absurd! I believe this has since changed… but there is good reason to encourage Grady employees to seek care there.

My resolution points out that Grady’s financial problems stem in large part from a patient mix that is devoid of insured or paying patients and urges Grady to encourage its own employees to use the hospital. Obviously, we need to first make sure that Grady accepts its own insurance. But lower co-pays or deductibles to encourage employee utilization is the logical and next step.

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I was surprised learn about the sudden departure of Otis Story as CEO of the Grady Health System.  I have found him to be open, responsive and seemingly an agent for reform.  In fact, he and I have been working closely on a funding and competitiveness initiative that was to be formally proposed next week.  We were scheduled to meet tomorrow to flesh out some of the remaining details.

Perhaps there was a good reason for this decision, but I frankly doubt it.  Whatever the long term plan for the hospital, now is not a good time to be switching CEOs.

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Grady Health System spends $18 million annually in health care benefits for its 5,000 employees. But unlike virtually every other large hospital employer, Grady makes no effort to encourage its employees to utilize Grady for their primary health care needs.

With bipartisan support, I today introduced Senate Resolution 748 which calls on Grady to consider changes to its health care benefits plan to encourage utilization of its services by its own employees, among other measures to improve the patient mix.

This is the third piece of Grady related legislation that I have introduced in this session.  The Senate Government Oversight Committe which will begin holding Grady hearings on Thursday.  I am hopeful that we will be able to move these bills to the floor next week.

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I spoke this afternoon at the 3rd Annual Rally for Darfur, an interfaith rally at the State Capitol organized to draw attention to the atrocities being committed in the Darfur region of the Sudan.

Arab militiamen backed by the Government of Sudan have killed nearly 400,000 African inhabitants of Darfur and driven millions more from their homes. Entire villages have been destroyed, and an ancient civilization is in danger of extinction. The President and Congress have labeled this campaign of terror as genocide and imposed sanctions on the Sudanese government.

Last month, President Bush signed into law the Sudan Accountability and Divestment Act of 2007 which authorizes and encourages the states to divest themselves of holdings in companies that are complicit in the genocide in Darfur.

I announced today my plans to introduce legislation that would implement the the Sudan Accountability and Divestment Act in Georgia. My bill will make sure that public funds are not invested in companies that sell military weapons to the Government of Sudan or help finance its campaign of genocidal terror against the people of Darfur.

I approach the subject of divestment with a high degree of caution. I understand the arguments on both sides of the issue, and I am not dismissive of the concern about slippery slopes. But I am persuaded that the artrocities being committed in Darfur are of such magnitude that simply doing nothing is not an option.

I will post a link to the bill as soon as it is introduced. It has been very carefully drafted. Representative Wendell Willard, who also took part in today’s rally, has agreed to carry the bill in the House.

[UPDATE]  It is Senate Bill 370 and will be posted here shortly. 

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My wife gave me an old book on the first day of the Legislative Session. The gold lettering on its worn bound cover was faded, but it turned out to be the Legislative Manual of the Georgia General Assembly for the 1929-1930 Legislative Session.

We no longer publish a legislative manual as such. This one included a list of the officers of the Executive Department and rosters of the officers and members of the General Assembly. It also included the standing rules of the Senate and House, as well as rules for when the Senate and House met in joint session and the Senate met in “executive session” to consider confirmation of the Governor’s appointees.

For those of you who are interested, the Governor of Georgia in 1929 was Larmatine Griffin “L.G.” Hardman, a physician and businessman from Commerce who as a member of the General Assembly had led the fight for prohibition. The office of Lieutenant Governor would not be created until 1946 so Senate President W. Cecil Neil of Columbus would have become Governor had tragedy befell Dr. Hardman during his term of office.

The State Senate of 1929 had 51 members, as opposed to 56 today. Most Senate Districts were composed of three counties. A handful of Districts were made up of four. The membership of the Senate, like Georgia itself, was predominately rural. In fact, not a single resident of Fulton, DeKalb, Cobb or Gwinnett County served in the State Senate. Today, residents of those four counties make up over a third of the body.

Sessions of the General Assembly began the fourth week of June, and they lasted no longer than sixty days. Today we start in January and must be done in forty days.

My Senate District, then numbered 51, was composed of Forsyth, Gwinnett and Milton Counties. It was represented by Senator Marcus Mashburn of Cumming. Senator Mashburn was Chairman of the Senate Committee on Public Printing and Vice Chairman of the Senate Committee on Hygiene and Sanitation. Today we do not have either of those committees. We also do not have a Milton County, but that may soon change.

Among the other standing Senate committees were Agriculture, Amendments to the Constitution, General Judiciary Number One, General Judiciary Number Two, Special Judiciary, Commerce and Labor, Corporations, Drainage, Forestry, Game and Fish, Highways, Internal Improvements, Military Affairs, Mines and Mining, Public Schools, Railroads, and Temperance.

Several state enterprises merited their own standing committees, including Academy for the Blind, School for the Deaf, State Sanitarium, Tuberculosis Sanitarium at Alto, University System of Georgia and Its Branches, and Western and Atlantic Railroad.

The House did not have districts as such. Instead, the eight most populous counties each elected three Representatives, the next thirty largest each elected two, and all the rest each elected one, for a total of 207 members, as opposed to 180 today.

No one thought to identify the Governor and members of the General Assembly by party. They were all Democrats. They were also all white and almost all men. By my count, five women held posts in the Executive Department, serving as Executive Secretary to the Governor, State Historian, State Librarian, Executive Secretary to the State Library Commission and Acting Superintendent of the Georgia Soldiers’ Roster Commission.

It makes me wonder what our great grand children will think 80 years from now when they look at the names, pictures, party labels and committee assignments of the 2007-2008 Legislative Session.

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I attended a meeting at the State Capitol earlier today with Governor Mike Huckabee, who later spoke at the Together for Life rally organized by Georgia Right To Life. Governor Huckabee, as always, was impressive. In the private meeting, he tied his Arkansas highway spending program back to the family, saying that the relief of traffic congestion gives moms and dads more time with their children. At the rally, he spoke about his willingness to lead on the issue of life.

My candidate, Senator Fred Thompson, officially ended his candidacy this afternoon. From my conversations with the elected officials who were supporting him, they appear to be gravitating toward either Huckabee or Governor Mitt Romney. I am deciding between the two myself.

Governor Romney was my early favorite. I heard him speak several times last year and even flew to Boston with a small group to have lunch with him. He is enormously talented, with a clear understanding of the economic challenges facing our nation. He has mounted the best organized campaign of any Republican, and like Senators Clinton and Obama, is free of federal campaign financing limits. A very compelling case can be made that he is the best choice to lead our party’s ticket in the fall.

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In this this famous letter written in 1963 from the Birmingham city jail, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. responds to a public statement issued by eight leading Christian and Jewish clergymen urging respect for the “principles of law and order and common sense.”  Even if you have read Dr. King’s Letter from the Birmingham Jail before, it is worth reading again on this day that we pause to celebrate his life and accomplishments.

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The Washington Post has identified Sonny Perdue as a potential candidate for Vice President, citing his impressive re-election victory as Governor in a year that went poorly for our party overall. The others mentioned were Governor Mark Sanford of South Carolina, Governor Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota, Senator John Thune of South Dakota and former Congressman Rob Portman of Ohio.

With the race for the Presidential nomination so unsettled, it is a little premature to speculate about running mates, but Governor Perdue would be the clear choice of that group and and an asset to the ticket in any event.

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I hesitate to comment on the impeachment resolution drafted by Representative Ron Forster for fear of giving the unfortunate matter more attention than it deserves.

As reported today in AJC, Representative Forster is seeking to impeach the Lieutenant Governor. He is unhappy that the Senate referred the veto overrides to committee. He believes the Constitution required the Senate to vote on the overrides immediately after receiving them from the House and wants the Lieutenant Governor put on trial and punished for the Senate not having done so.

The Constitution does in fact require the Senate to “immediately consider” any veto overrides transmitted to it by the House. When the transmitted overrides were received, the Lieutenant Governor immediately suspended the business of the Senate and ordered the Clerk to read the override messages aloud. On motion of the Senate Majority Leader, they were referred to the Senate Rules Committee by unanimous consent of the Senate.

There is no question that the Senate action was “immediate.” As to whether the action itself properly constituted “consideration” (a word that literally means “to think about carefully”), the answer to that question can be found in the Rules of the Senate which explicitly permit the Senate to refer a veto override to committee.

Representative Forster argues that the veto override provision of the Constitution trumps the Senate Rules.  But the veto override provision cannot be read in isolation from the rest of the Constitution.  The provision dealing with veto overrides must read in conjunction with the provision of the Constitution giving each house of the General Assembly the power to adopt its own rules of procedure.

But as far as impeaching the Lieutenant Governor is concerned, it simply does not matter whether the committee referral was constitutionally correct or not. The referral was not made by the Lieutenant Governor but by unanimous consent of the Senate. Justifiably unhappy or not, Representative Forster has taken aim at the wrong target. His recourse is to run for the State Senate.

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I today introduced two pieces of legislation addressing problems at Grady Memorial Hospital.

Senate Resolution 722 creates a Grady Oversight Committee. First proposed in 1999 by then Senator David Scott, legislative oversight has been persistently opposed by those who run Grady. Of course, their resistance to legislative oversight has not stopped them from crying the same old lament of legislative neglect whenever the coffers run dry.

The language of the resolution is drawn from legislation creating MARTOC, the highly successful legislative overview committee for MARTA. It will allow the General Assembly to continuously monitor Grady and help make sure that public funds are properly spent.

Senate Bill 353, the Public Hospital Integrity Act, prevents those with a financial tie to either Grady or a major vendor of Grady from serving in a governing capacity for the hospital. This bill will help make sure that Grady’s board gives its loyalty to Grady as an institution and not to those who do business with Grady. Senator David Adelman, Vicent Fort and Kasim Reed are among the Democrats who cosponsored the bill.

As important as they are, governance reform and legislative oversight are just the beginning. I will shortly be unveiling additional proposals for Grady concerning funding, staffing and competitiveness issues. I will keep you posted.

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