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Sonny Perdue Will Fit Right In
THE EX-GOVERNOR IS SURE TO BRING SOME LAUGHS TO TRUMP’S CABINET
By Tom Crawford tcrawford@gareport.com
The new president has filled the last
vacancy in his cabinet by nominating Sonny
Perdue as the secretary of agriculture.
Perdue is well known here for the two
terms he served as governor. While his
administration didn’t produce much in the
way of significant policy initiatives, Sonny
was always good for a laugh or two. There
was the time he held a prayer session at the
capitol in hopes of breaking Georgia’s long
drought. Perdue evidently was praying to
the wrong deity—it didn’t rain that day or
for a lot of days thereafter.
I don’t know how good a farmer Sonny
is, but he really knows how to harvest tax
credits. During his first term as governor,
a friendly legislator slipped an amendment
into a bill that quietly passed in the closing
days of the session. That “midnight amend
ment” gave Perdue a $100,000 tax credit
on some property he had purchased. Sonny
signed the bill without informing the gen
eral public of his huge tax break.
The tax credit didn’t become public
knowledge until a year and a half later,
when Perdue was running for reelection.
My friend James Salzer broke the story in
the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and it was
the kind of scandal that often will get a
politician booted from office.
The voters reelected Perdue anyway. He
now heads to Washington, where he will
soon be sworn in as member of Donald
Trump’s new cabinet. It is shaping up as
one of the most interesting cabinets in
presidential history.
Betsy DeVos, the nominee for educa
tion secretary, never attended a public
school, and never sent any of her children
to public schools. She believes there should
be guns in schools because of the ever
present threat of grizzly bear attacks. I
am not making this up: When DeVos was
asked during her confirmation hearing if
she believes guns have “any place in and
around schools,” she cited the example of a
school in Wyoming: “I think probably there,
I would imagine there is probably a gun in a
school to protect from potential grizzlies.”
The nominee for attorney general is
Jefferson Beauregard Sessions, a senator
from Alabama. As the attorney general,
Sessions would be responsible for enforc
ing the nation’s civil rights laws. But in
1986, when Sessions was nominated for
a federal judgeship by Ronald Reagan, the
Senate rejected him after hearing some of
the racially charged comments he had made
as a U.S. attorney. Sessions called one of his
black assistants “boy” on several occasions.
He was quoted as saying he thought KKK
members were “OK, until he learned that
they smoked marijuana.” He said a white
attorney who handled civil rights cases was
“a disgrace to his race.”
When Rick Perry, the former governor
of Texas who will head the Department
of Energy, was first offered the appoint
ment several weeks ago, he thought the
job entailed being a global ambassador for
the oil and gas industry. He didn’t discover
until later that the department is a complex
agency responsible for the nation’s nuclear
weapons program, nuclear reactor produc
tion and radioactive waste disposal.
There is another Georgian, U.S. Rep. Tom
Price, who’s been nominated as the secre
tary of health and human services. Price
has been actively trading medical stocks
while he was working on health legisla
tion in Congress that could favorably affect
those stock prices. This would normally be
a huge conflict of interest for an elected
official, but in today’s political atmosphere,
that’s merely considered to be sound busi
ness judgment. ©
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