Live from Virginia Thursday morning on The John Fredericks Show – weekdays on WNTW AM 820/ FM 92.7 – Richmond, WJFN FM 100.5 – Central Virginia; WMPH AM 1010 / FM 100.1 / FM 96.9 (7-9 p.m.) Hampton Roads; WBRG AM 1050 / FM 105.1 – Lynchburg/Roanoke; and weekdays 6-10 a.m. and 24/7 stream – host Fredericks talked to Georgia Senator Brandon Beach (#BeachBalls) and the last-minute play to dismiss a vote on election integrity in the Georgia state Senate.
Fredericks: Joining me now, beach balls. Senator Brandon Beach, Georgia. Senator, what the hell went on Tuesday at the Capitol? This is unbelievable.
Where basically COSMO-man Geoff Duncan scrapped the bill on Kemp’s orders that would have gotten rid of drop boxes, Zuckerbucks, and he wouldn’t let you bring it to the floor for a vote!
Beach: Well, you’re right, John, and thanks for having me on the show. Happy Masters Week, and it’s great to have the Braves defending their World Series championship starting this weekend. So good to be here in Georgia for those reasons.
I will tell you, Monday night was a disaster and I’m not going to blame the lieutenant governor totally. I’m also going to blame our leadership, Butch Miller and Mike Dugan, waiting till 11:45 on day 40 to try to bring up the election integrity bill, is wrong.
You’re not going to get that done in 15 minutes on day 40. We should have been bringing this up on day 37, day 38, day 39. We should not have waited until the last 15 minutes of the session to bring up an election integrity bill.
There was nothing more important than getting rid of the Zuckerberg money going to counties directly. I said this two years ago, I told my caucus between the November and the January election if we didn’t get rid of the drop boxes and make sure the signatures matched, if we didn’t do those two things, we were going to lose two U.S. Senate seats.
I said if you think Fulton County is going to get better between November and January, you’re mistaken. It will not happen. Fulton County elections on their best day are incompetent. And I said the same thing on this.
I said if we don’t get rid of this Zuckerberg money or Soros money and this money that goes directly to Fulton County, the DeKalb County election boards that are controlled by Democrats, if it doesn’t go to the state elections board like it does in this bill and then get distributed down, if we don’t get rid of that money, we’re going to lose the governor’s race.
And I’m going to tell you, those folks that get that money in Fulton and DeKalb, John, they’re going to use it to their advantage and to our disadvantage. Plain and simple.
And there will be shenanigans that go on with all that money, and it will not be to the advantage of the Republicans. And again, I got to blame the leadership for waiting until the last minute. You can’t wait until 11:45 on sine die and expect to get that done now.
You’re right. Geoff Duncan killed it, did not want it. Obviously, Governor Kemp on January 13th gave a speech and it was in the AJC that he did not want to sign any election bills after we signed 202. But we needed to refine 202.
There were some things that we needed to address: drop boxes, the chain of custody, the security of the paper for the absentee ballots. And there were just some other things we needed to tighten up on 202 and they did not want to do that. And I think it’s going to come back to haunt us come November if we’re not careful.
Fredericks: Well, the bottom line is Kemp didn’t want it, right? That’s number one.
Beach: Right.
Fredericks: So Duncan did his bidding. But here’s the other thing that happened, and you nailed it. They didn’t want it. So Butch Miller running for lieutenant governor, right, so he doesn’t want to lose the reform, the election voters.
He doesn’t want to lose the voter integrity voters all to Burt Jones, also running for lieutenant governor. So what they do is they scam it. So here’s the scam. I’m Butch Miller, and I got him on Friday, and I’m going to ask him this point-blank. He’s on Friday.
Here’s the scam: I’m in charge of the Senate along with Duncan and Dugan. I wait until the last minute to bring it up. I don’t want it to pass. I’m told by Duncan and Kemp they don’t want it to pass.
So I wait until the last minute, knowing there’s not enough time and they’ll run the clock out. But then I can say, hey, I brought it up and they scrapped it so I can get cover in my campaign while doing the bidding for Brian Kemp and Geoff Duncan COSMO-man.
And I can get cover and say, well, I could throw my hands up and say, well, I tried everything I could do and I was for it, but they wouldn’t do it. And so we all got screwed. Vote for me. Tell me that’s not what happened.
Beach: That is what happened. I will tell you this. I’ll even go further. Butch Miller, when we went to Savannah for our caucus meeting and said he wanted to remain as pro tem, if you remember, when David Schaefer ran for lieutenant governor, he gave up the pro tem’s job. He said he wanted to remain as pro tem and that he would not get involved in making it a political position. Well, he did, and he failed.
And bringing up this bill 15 minutes before day 40 was a failure. He also failed on school choice. He brought that up and couldn’t get that done. But I want to go back to this SB89. I can tell you this. There were 13 Republicans that didn’t vote.
We tried to take the ruling of the chair away from Duncan so that we could have a vote on Senate Bill 89. And there were 13 Republicans that voted to let him keep the chair, and we failed. So it was a disaster. But again, I want to go back to this.
You can’t wait till 11:45 a.m. to bring a bill of that magnitude up when it’s chaotic, and he just ran it. And you know the lieutenant governor’s against it. And they ran the clock out on it.
Listen to the full interview here:
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Photo “Brandon Beach” by Georgia State Senate.
