ATLANTA, Georgia – Two Georgia state senators who said they wanted to fight for the state’s election integrity after the November 2020 presidential election learned Tuesday they will not chair committees that they previously presided over.
State Sen. Burt Jones (R-Jackson) will no longer chair the Committee on Insurance and Labor. State Sen. Brandon Beach (R-Alpharetta) no longer oversees that body’s Transportation Committee.
State Sen. Matt Brass (R-Newnan), meanwhile, also questioned the integrity of the results of Georgia’s presidential election.
On Tuesday Georgia Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan (R-Cumming) and other Republican members of Georgia’s State Senate leadership informed Brass that he no longer chairs the Reapportionment and Redistricting Committee. Brass, however, will go on to chair the Banking and Financial Institutions Committee. This, according to a press release that Duncan published on his website Tuesday.
Beach and Brass did not return The Georgia Star News’ requests for comment Tuesday.
Jones, meanwhile, said Insurance and Labor is “one of a handful of A-list chairmanships.” Jones said losing that position disappointed him, but he also said he took the news in stride.
“Miraculously, they decided that some of us weren’t worthy of chairmanships anymore,” Jones said.
“It doesn’t take long to connect the dots. There were a few of us fighting for election integrity. And it just so happens that the ones who were doing that no longer have their chairmanships.”
Jones said he knew that his fight for election integrity “would rub some people the wrong way.”
“It wasn’t that most people weren’t thinking [about] it. They just weren’t willing to speak out against it. I knew it was coming,” Jones said.
“I have a business myself. I make a good living. I do public service just for that — as a public service. I will keep representing the people who put me in this seat. If someone in my party has a problem with me doing that then I will keep doing it because I am representing the folks who voted for me. With all that being said, politics is strange. What goes around comes around.”
None of the seven Republican members of the Georgia State Senate leadership returned The Star News’ requests for comment Tuesday. No one who served on the Georgia State Senate’s Committee on Assignments returned our messages either.
As reported, Beach, and Jones previously helped introduce a petition for a special session. The petition sought to determine Georgia’s electors. That petition also sought to investigate the voting irregularities and claims of voter fraud that occurred during the general election. The effort also aimed to nullify the consent decree that Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger signed into law last March.
Jones said Tuesday that he “can’t let petty politics get in the way of wanting to see a glaring problem with our elections remedied.”
“It will have to be remedied through the legislative process. We will keep trying to get that accomplished,” Jones said.
“I won’t put myself in the penalty box and be silenced by what I think is right and what I think the people who voted me [in] here would want me to do. Life goes on and this too shall pass.”
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Chris Butler is an investigative journalist at The Tennessee Star. Follow Chris on Facebook. Email tips to [email protected].
Background Photo “Georgia Capitol” by Autiger. CC BY-SA 2.0.
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Are we surprised??????????