Where Was The Leadership? — By Tommy Purser

“We were elected to do what the people want.”
That was what a county commissioner told me many years ago. It appears he slept through his American government class in high school.
Our government is not a democracy, it is a republic. In a democracy, a majority of the people make all the decisions. In our republic, we democratically elect officials to make the decisions for us.
That’s the way the Founding Fathers established the greatest form of government the world has ever known. The people elect men and women who they trust, who they believe in, who they can rest assured will make the best decisions on their behalf. In short, leaders.
I wanted to ask that commissioner of decades past, “How do you determine what the people want?”
The answer would most likely have been that the people had told him. Which people? His friends, family, customers, fellow church goers …. cronies. By making his governing decisions based on his cronies’ opinions is, by loose definition, cronyism.
There is no leadership in such cronyism.
That brings me to the Georgia Legislature which passed voter suppression/election integrity (i.e., left/right interpretations) legislation which Gov. Brian Kemp last week signed into law.
The legislators and Governor have said repeatedly that the legislation restores public confidence in election integrity. I would clarify that to say the legislation restores in “some people” confidence in election integrity. I, for one, already had confidence in the integrity of our elections.
Voters who didn’t have that confidence have been sounding their concerns to legislators across the state and, in response, the Legislature acted “to do what the people want.”
That’s not leadership.
Having read most of the legislation closely and scanned over the remainder, I don’t find it to be so sinister. However, the response from the left, I think, was formulated not so much by the legislation itself as by the racial undertones (such as targeting “Souls To The Polls” Sunday voting) in the discussion leading up to its passage. Had the Legislators shown leadership during the discussion those racial undertones would have never appeared.
Absent that leadership, Georgia is being looked upon with scorn by much of the rest of the nation.
And making it a misdemeanor crime to give water to voters standing in line has the nation laughing at us.
A Republican state legislator appeared on TV yesterday and huffily explained that water stations could be made available but someone couldn’t go from voter to voter campaigning. But that’s already against the law so putting the water provision in the bill only served to make our legislators look stupid.