Q&A: Gov. Kemp on Perdue, Abrams, his race for a 2nd term
EDITOR’S NOTE — TimesJournal Inc. staff sat down with Gov. Brian Kemp recently to ask about his campaign, record and the issues of the day. Kemp faces former Sen. David Perdue in the May 24th Republican primary. Perdue has been invited for a similar interview prior to the primary. The winner squares off against Democrat Stacey Abrams in the November general election. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Why should voters choose you in the primary, and then in the general?
Brian Kemp: Well, No. 1 is, I can beat Stacey Abrams. No. 2 is, I’ve done exactly what I told them I would do over the last three years or so when I was campaigning for governor. And I think that’s something I really pride myself on. And quite honestly, that’s what I’ve been reminding voters of is, what we’ve done the last three years is exactly what I told them I would do. I think a lot of people got sidetracked from that, the media did too, for the last two years, because of the pandemic, the 2020 election, stuff that was going on. So it’s been refreshing for me to be back on the campaign trail reminding people what we did, even before the pandemic hit, but also what we did while the pandemic was going on. Our mission to complete the task that I ran on never left us, and we’ve got a great record. It’s a great record for conservative Republicans in the primary, but it’s also a record that can beat Stacey Abrams in November.
Q: Inflation is on a lot of people’s minds. You did the gas tax suspension, which will hopefully provide some relief. But what else can a governor do about the rising prices?
A: Well, if you look at the inflation that we’re seeing across the country, you can thank Joe Biden and Stacey Abrams, and all the activists that have been pushing this agenda, whether it’s their domestic energy policy, whether it was blue state governors and this administration convincing people to worry more about the pandemic than their livelihoods — that really drove a lot of this, well over a year ago.
It was long before the war in Ukraine that inflation started going up, gas prices were going up, food, the whole supply chain mess. And if you look back at what Georgia’s been doing, long before that we were the first state in the country to reopen after not closing most things to start with, heavily criticized by everyone in doing that, including Stacey Abrams. …
But if you look at the whole supply chain issue, think about the ports of Savannah and the ports of Brunswick, even when things were as tight as we’ve ever seen before, we were still doing better than most ports. We cleared our backlog in a matter of months because of forward thinking. And it was interesting to me that all of the federal Democrats, including President Biden and Pete Buttigieg and others, tried to take credit for saving Christmas, because they went out to California and announced that they were going to work 24/7 and do all these different things. Well, we had been working on that for months at the Port of Savannah, and we cleared our backlog. I was down there on New Year’s Day and they were already back at normal operations. …
So we’ve had a record of really working for three years to address those issues and a lot of ways before it even started. … I mean, we can’t fix all the problems of Washington, it’s impossible for us to do that. What we can do is try to help our citizens be able to offset
that, because of good policies that we’ve had in Georgia, which is passing a tax cut last year, $140 million tax cut in the middle of the pandemic.
This year, my proposal in the budget, which is now signed into law and the legislation has passed to return over a billion dollars to the taxpayers that we didn’t need … our revenues exceeded what our budget expectations were in the amended budget this year. So instead of just spending it on one-time money or porkbarrel projects, we’re giving it back to the taxpayers — $250 per filer, up to $500 for a family filing jointly.
And then on top of that, we also passed the two-month gas moratorium because of excess revenues. It’s helping Georgians cope with just a huge increase in inflation that we’ve had in gas prices, and it’s about 30 cents a gallon … So it’s pretty substantial, just to help Georgians cope with that, try to keep our economy going. …
Q: You mentioned you were one of the first governors to open back up, one of the last to close down. When you look back on that, was that the right call? And is there anything else you’d do differently
about the pandemic? A:
Oh, there’s tons I think everybody would do different now looking back. I mean, nobody had ever dealt with a global pandemic. I had a great meeting with Dr. (Kathleen) Toomey yesterday where I just thanked her for being such a great leader to put all the public health options on the table with her expertise. I mean, look, she’s one of the most highly trained epidemiologists in the world, she’s worked all over the world, but she also has a real common sense about her. And she understands that it’s not just about protecting lives, but you also have livelihoods.
You look back a year and a half ago. Her and I both at press conferences were warning about mental health issues, not having our kids in school, the detrimental effects of that on social and physical activities ... and economic viability, and just all those costs. So I think we really did a good job of balancing all that.
Now what we know now, we’d definitely do things different, but I’m not going to go back and criticize her or my administration or anybody else. I mean, we were making the best decisions we could. But I think if you look at where we are, and what we’ve done to fight and protect lives in Georgia, but also livelihoods, we’ve done it as good as any state in the country.
And the thing about it is, you know, I’ve been heavily criticized for that. And I think, to me, that’s another reason that Republican voters should vote for me, because they know I’m gonna stand up for what I believe in, for who I am and what I ran on. …
You think about last year’s baseball season, then going into the fall football season, you had a lot of people calling for reduced attendance and all these other things. We just never wavered on our position, we allowed Georgians to make choices for themselves. We didn’t mandate and cause people to fight and argue over a stupid mask mandate or try to get people to force a vaccination on them. We relied on information that we shared and put out there, and encouragement, but also telling people: go talk to your doctor, you make the best health care decision. And that’s what we’re doing today with our school children not being masked anymore. I mean, it’s past time to move past all that. And, you know, people want to wear their masks, they can, if schools want to have a mask mandate, they can. But parents have an opt-out because they should be making health care decisions for their children, not the government.
Q: There were a lot of voters who stayed home after voting in the 2020 presidential election, they didn’t come back to vote in the runoffs. Many people would say that’s why Georgia now has two Democratic senators. How can those people be encouraged to turn back out? A:
Well, look, I think you got to look back to the 2020 election even before the runoff to answer a lot of those questions, which is why I’m staying focused on my record, telling people what I have done, what direction I want our state to be in the future.
I don’t feel like our federal candidates did a very good job of that in the fall of 2020. … I think not campaigning on their record at the federal level in 2020… I mean look, David Perdue, incumbent U.S. senator, if he doesn’t go into a runoff, the balance of the U.S. Senate’s never in play, and the runoffs don’t matter. So I mean, that’s a question you’d have to ask him. Because if you look at what the state legislators did, running on the issues that we worked on together, running on my agenda of the largest teacher pay raise in state history, not allowing people to defund the police, also passing hate crimes legislation, passing the strongest elections integrity act in the country. After the 2020 election, fixing the mechanical issues that we saw that were caused by two things, No. 1, the pandemic, and No. 2, by others that were taking action, because of public health emergency powers, to do things that were never in the law. Those things needed to be addressed. And I think that’s given a lot of people confidence to go back out and participate in the process.
And we saw that in the November (2021) elections with no issues. And I think people were very glad and satisfied with what we did to secure elections in our state. … I’ve been in this fight for a long time. But I’m also not the secretary of state anymore, and a lot of things that people have called on me to do, I didn’t have the constitutional or legal authority to do. So I’ve also upheld what I told people I would do and swore when I took my oath of office with my hand on the Bible that Marty (Kemp) was holding, to protect laws and the Constitution of this state and that of the United States.