State legislators make a mockery of themselves

As the news came out that two Georgia football players had been arrested because of a BB incident (yes, a BB incident), I fully expected our state legislators to be working feverishly to pass a law making it legal to shoot up property with a BB gun.

Anything to win a national championship, right?

I'm kidding ... but not really.

This week, Governor Nathan Deal signed a bill into law that allows state colleges to wait 90 days to respond to Freedom of Information Act requests, changing from the previous three days. In the grand scheme of things, making reporters wait to get information regarding athletics might not seem like a big deal to folks, but there are two key components to what the legislators did and what Deal signed.

First, let's hope this doesn't lead to something bigger and more important than athletics. Let's hope these "leaders" aren't using this as a test run to see what else they can get away with because FOI requests aren't limited to beat reporters. In case you didn't know, it is your Constitutional right to file those kinds of requests to keep up with what your government is doing (or trying to do).

If you don't care about that, well, you should. And if these "leaders" believe no one cares about this adjusted law and how it affects athletics, they could move on to something else, say, school board or city or county government issues. We should all care about that.

Secondly, several of these "leaders" said this adjusted law will help Georgia get "on a level playing field" with other programs. It also was said that changing the law will help Georgia deal with FOI requests that focus on recruiting. OK, let's deal with those individually because they are just so laughable that they can't be grouped into one response.

As far as being "on a level playing field" and helping Georgia win games, I've never filed an FOI request in my career that would have affected a game's outcome, and I don't know any that would. It's just silly to think that is true.

On to the recruiting aspect. That's so beyond laughable that it's dumb. More than one of our state "leaders" said this adjusted law will help with recruiting because people are filing FOI requests to see what recruits are on campus and that hurts Georgia's recruiting. Anyone who knows anything about college football knows coaches and programs can't talk on the record about recruits. If they did, they would be committing an NCAA violation, and that would cause more issues than any FOI request ever could.

So for our "leaders" to say that changing this law will help with Georgia's recruiting shows that they are either not very smart or not telling the truth. I'm not sure which one is worse.

Finally, Lt. Gov. Casey Cagle went as far as to say of the law, "I hope it brings us a national championship is what I hope."

I hoped that he was kidding and would focus on laws that mean something, you know, laws that can help people (maybe the cannabis oil law that our "leaders" keep shooting down) or maybe something that will bring jobs and prosperity to our state. But that's not likely.

After all, that national title is out there for Cagle and our other "leaders."

Contact Daniel Shirley at 744-4227 or dshirley@macon.com

This story was originally published April 13, 2016 at 5:30 PM with the headline "State legislators make a mockery of themselves ."