The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Cobb County Republicans split with Kemp
Fighting within the Republican Party has found a new and significant battleground: Cobb County.
The Cobb GOP’s county committee, now dominated by supporters of former President Donald Trump, voted to censure Gov. Brian Kemp.
Party Chair Salleigh Grubbs told The Marietta Daily Journal that the vote was a response to the governor’s inability to halt illegal immigration.
No matter that immigration is governed by federal policy, giving a state governor nothing to do beyond serving as a megaphone on the issue. (Still, Kemp tried to beef up his megaphone bona fides on immigration this past week with a trip to the U.S.-Mexico border, where he met with three other Republican governors: Greg Abbott of Texas, Doug Ducey of Arizona and Kristi Noem of South Dakota.)
Being censured is nothing new for Kemp. One could see a great deal of Georgia by following the trail of punitive actions that Republicans have taken against the governor, all of it coming after Kemp’s refusal to illegally overturn Trump’s defeat in the state in November.
Kemp has faced censure in Appling, Chattooga, DeKalb, Jasper, Lowndes, Lumpkin, Murray, Pierce, Pickens and Whitfield counties.
Add to that the 7th Congressional District GOP.
But Cobb’s rejection has to sting a little more.
The county was long a Republican stronghold until Democrat Hillary Clinton beat Trump there in 2016. And it was there that Kemp launched his campaign for governor in 2017, trying out his own Trump impression with a “Georgia First” pitch to voters.
The Cobb vote soon met backlash.
The Cobb Young Republicans, only a few days later, blasted the county GOP over the rebuke of Kemp, saying “the decision to censure further divides the party at a critical time.”
Former Cobb County GOP Chair Jason Shepherd assailed both the process of the vote and the concept of censuring a Republican elected official, especially with an election coming.
“How does the Cobb GOP work to reelect Brian Kemp if the voters choose him to be the nominee when it has officially censured him?” he asked. “This censure can now be used as campaign fodder in the primary by Kemp’s opponents.”
Trump is probably OK with that. At his rally last month in Perry, the former president called on ex-U.S. Sen. David Perdue to challenge Kemp in next year’s GOP primary, something Perdue has so far rejected.
The former president then suggested that Stacey Abrams, Kemp’s Democratic opponent in the 2018 race and a likely contender again next year, could be a better choice for Georgia.
“Having her, I think, might be better than having your existing governor,” he said. “It might very well be better.”