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What might have been for Lynn

By J. FRANK LYNCH

When Republican state lawmakers giddy over their new majority status in the General Assembly descended on Atlanta last month, they did so with all the dignity and decorum of a bunch of UGA fraternity boys arriving for a keg party.

I suppose we should have expected so much after 140 years of subservience to Democrats, but was it too much to ask for just a tiny bit of restraint, some goodwill or maybe common sense?

In just the first three days of the 40-day session that started Jan. 10, the new GOP leadership, led by House Speaker Glenn Richardson, tossed out the old rules and adopted new ones, raising a ruckus even among some GOP party faithful.

They evicted Secretary of State Cathy Cox (the Democrat, NOT the one from Peachtree City) from the Capitol, fired all the employees in the House Information Office, and swept 34 committees clean of (experienced) Democrats, appointing their own to chair every one.

Confusion still reigned on the recent Friday I stopped by to meet up with local lawmakers — and the legislature wasn’t even in session that week.

First, I needed to pick up the media credentials I’d ordered for The Citizen staff: One set for the Senate, the other for the House.

Getting the first was no problem: The Senate still has an information office, on the second floor of the Legislative Office Building (or LOB, affectionately). But nobody knew where to go for the House badges, not even the security guards who patted me down and emptied my pockets on the way into the LOB.

Then somebody suggested the House Clerk’s office, across the street on the third floor of the Capitol, opposite end. As I headed out, the guards said to let them know if I found the right place, because they were weary of sending people to the wrong place.

Well, the House Clerk’s Office was the wrong place. But the people there, grateful to still have jobs, made some calls and stopped someone in the hall, and all agreed that House credentials were in the hands of somebody in an office on the sixth floor of the LOB.

Back I went.

The LOB security team, good friends now, waved me on through behind an enormous head of hair that turned out to be Nancy Schaefer, the longtime conservative activist and one-time gubernatorial hopeful, elected to the Senate last fall from northeast Georgia.

Meanwhile, up in the sixth floor office suite, folks unpacking boxes, hooking up computers and trying to get the phones to work confessed that, yes, they did hold the House press badges at one time but then somebody misplaced them. They asked if I’d tried Room 136 on the ground floor of the Capitol, the big thing with the Gold Dome across the street? I assured them I was familiar with the building.

The LOB peace officers shook their heads in disbelief as I passed one last time, and I wished them well in life.

Fortunately, I didn’t have to wander the bowels of Georgia government very long before finding Room 136, a storage closet near the central elevator shaft, not far from the two-headed goat display. The door, of course, was locked.

Debating whether to laugh or cry, I looked up to see the familiar face of Sen. Ronnie Chance of Tyrone, newly elected to the 17th District that covers most of south Fayette and points beyond.

Though new to that gig, Chance is certainly no stranger to the Capitol. Acting on a hunch, he led me down a hallway to the TV studios for Georgia Public Broadcasting.

Nice try, Ronnie.

I began to vent to the Republican senator about this new Republican House — and speculated how things might have been had Lynn Westmoreland not been persuaded to run for Congress. Ronnie simply listened.

You see, Westmoreland was in line to be named House Speaker if and when the GOP finally became a state House majority presence.

For most of his 12 years representing this area, Westmoreland was a rising star in the House, with seniority enough to be named Minority Leader his last two terms.

Westmoreland orchestrated the GOP’s court challenge that overturned the state’s 2002 redistricting maps and led to the General Assembly we have today — a noble thing, if you think about it, because he essentially drew himself out of the legislature and made a way for Richardson to rise.

It was also a confident thing to do, since few within his own party thought Westmoreland would really win a seat in Washington. That’s why GOP leaders like Perdue, Newt Gingrich, Jack Kemp, Mike Crotts and others gave their support instead to his black challenger in the primary runoff, Dylan Glenn.

Perhaps Westmoreland knew what he was doing, getting out when he did. Perdue, elected in 2002, doesn’t stand much of a chance in 2006. The goings-on in the first three weeks of the General Assembly point to more chaos, not new world order.

And yet there was Westmoreland, on the floor of the state House in the first days of this historic takeover session — just a week after being sworn in to Congress. He wouldn’t have missed it, he said.

“I don’t feel like I’m on the outside looking in,” he said. “If anything, I feel like I’m somebody that has seen something they’ve worked real hard for come to pass.”

He defended the changes in rules and order made by the GOP, and even had kind words to say for Richardson, the man who took the job Westmoreland had worked so hard for during those 12 years.

But he stopped short of offering too much speculation on his own about what might-have-been.

“A lot of different things could have happened,” Westmoreland told me a week later. “I would have liked to think my colleagues would have elected me speaker, but I didn’t run in 1992 to be speaker.”

His election to Congress assures Westmoreland that his name will be more than just a footnote in the history of Georgia Republicans, he said.

“I would hope it goes down in history that Lynn Westmoreland was a part of all this,” he said. “We had the right ideas, the right principles, the right type of government to represent the people of Georgia.”