Atlanta<\/a> sports teams, the casino interests,\u201d said Powell, R-Hartwell. \u201cThey were working at diametrically different purposes.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\nBoth the constitutional amendment and the sports betting bill appeared to be dead back in mid-March when they failed to survive Crossover Day, the annual deadline for legislation to pass one chamber or the other to remain alive for that year\u2019s session.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But supporters took advantage of loopholes in legislative procedure to bring them back when the coronavirus-interrupted session resumed last month by attaching them to other bills that were still eligible for passage.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Powell\u2019s committee approved the constitutional amendment following a presentation by Rep. Ron Stephens, perennially the driving force behind efforts to get casino gambling on the ballot in Georgia.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cI don\u2019t understand how we can sit up in Atlanta and tell folks they\u2019re not allowed to vote for themselves,\u201d Stephens, R-Savannah, said last week. \u201cIt\u2019s 50,000 permanent jobs, $1 billion in new revenue, no tax incentives and local control. That\u2019s four things that are hard to vote against.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But state Sen. Burt Jones said his bill to legalize online sports betting in Georgia stood a better chance of passing than the constitutional amendment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For one thing, sports betting was new to the General Assembly this year. It wasn\u2019t until 2018 that the U.S. Supreme Court overturned a federal law prohibiting states from legalizing gambling on sports.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Also, since Jones\u2019 bill would not change the state Constitution, it only would have required a simple majority in each legislative chamber to pass. Constitutional amendments need two-thirds majorities to clear the House and Senate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Jones, R-Jackson, argued online sports betting doesn\u2019t require a constitutional change because it simply would represent an expansion of the existing Georgia Lottery.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThe Georgia Lottery already has an app where you can go online and play the lottery from the comfort of your cellphone,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Senate Special Judiciary Committee, made up entirely of minority Democrats, resurrected Jones\u2019 bill and approved it. He said the full Senate likely would have passed it if Republican leaders had let it reach the Senate floor for a vote.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But even if the sports betting bill had made it through the Senate, it would have died in the House.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Stephens said lawmakers there weren\u2019t going to vote for a sports betting bill that Gov. Brian Kemp would have been expected to veto.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cYou don\u2019t send him a bill knowing he\u2019s going to veto it,\u201d Stephens said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The only way to bypass the governor would have been to pass the constitutional amendment, since those go directly onto the ballot.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But Powell said any momentum the constitutional change had in the House went away during the last two days of the session when Senate Republican leaders signaled they would not take up the measure even if the House could muster the two-thirds vote necessary to clear the lower chamber.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThat\u2019s what collapsed it,\u201d Powell said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Linville said members of the coalition he represents plan to crisscross the state this summer and fall to educate the public on the advantages of sports betting and the estimated $60 million a year in tax revenue it would bring to the state.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
With a large number of incumbent lawmakers leaving office this year, supporters of legalized gambling also can hope a more sympathetic crop of newly elected legislators will join the General Assembly next year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
However, a more likely source of momentum lies in Georgia\u2019s ongoing budget woes. The fiscal 2021 state budget lawmakers adopted late last month reduces state spending by 10% across the board, but the cuts could go deeper next year if the recession brought on by the spread of COVID-19 drags on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cRight now, we\u2019re not having to lay off teachers or let prisoners go,\u201d Stephens said. \u201cNext year, if we come back here and have real budget problems again and the federal [stimulus] money is not coming back, we\u2019re going to be in deep doo-doo.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
With state tax collections running below expectations even before the coronavirus pandemic hit, supporters of legalized gambling in Georgia were optimistic they could finally prevail during the 2020 legislative session after years of failure. But even the glaring need for additional sources of tax revenue wasn\u2019t enough to get casino gambling or pari-mutuel betting on […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":29,"featured_media":16266,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"newspack_featured_image_position":"","newspack_post_subtitle":"","newspack_article_summary_title":"Overview:","newspack_article_summary":"","newspack_hide_updated_date":false,"newspack_show_updated_date":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-16265","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-government","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thegeorgiasun.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16265","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thegeorgiasun.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thegeorgiasun.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thegeorgiasun.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/29"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thegeorgiasun.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=16265"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/thegeorgiasun.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16265\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thegeorgiasun.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16266"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thegeorgiasun.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=16265"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thegeorgiasun.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=16265"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thegeorgiasun.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=16265"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}