[APPLAUSE] - Welcome back to the show.
By this point in the show, you may be slightly down
on legislators, the state of Georgia,
and humanity in general.
But I'm going to fix that.
Because Georgia's Democratic and Republican lawmakers
also showed us government at its very best.
Remember a year ago we told you about a rape
kit bill that was blocked?
Here's the rest of that story.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
We had an issue where rape kits
were just sitting on shelves.
We're talking thousands of kits.
This doesn't often happen, but we were able to come up
with a solution.
The bill mandates that the kits be prosecuted.
There wasn't a person who I talked to
in either party who wasn't supportive of what we
were trying to do in the House.
And when it came to the floor of the House,
it passed unanimously.
When the bill went to the Senate,
how do I say this nicely?
All hell broke loose.
[HELLISH SOUNDS]
Rene Unterman is the state senator
who was the chair of the committee
to which the bill was assigned.
And she refused to let the bill have a hearing.
She felt that if there was a problem, that she
would have known about it.
I think that she said that she would
have been Johnny on the spot.
I would be Johnny on the spot.
She would also argue that if there is a problem,
then we can just wait until next year.
Some of these kits have been sitting on shelves
for five or 10 years.
Why would we want to wait another year
before we take action?
There was a very direct recommendation for me
to not make an issue of it, to just wait,
and let her handle it if anything needed to be done.
So I just kept working and working
and working to try to show her why this was so important.
Because we knew we had a problem.
But there was no willingness to really listen.
We had four or five days left in the session,
and it did not look promising.
I was sitting at my desk, and one of the Speaker's aides
tapped me on the shoulder, and said the Speaker
would like to talk to you.
And I'd been in the house for six years,
and I've never had the Speaker ask for my advice
while we're voting on bills before.
I'm David Ralston.
I'm the Speaker of the House of Representatives in Georgia.
He asked very directly, what the [BEEP] is wrong with Rene?
When I looked at Scott Holcomb,
I didn't see Scott Holcomb, a Democrat.
I saw Scott Holcomb, a member of the House
who had a good idea about something
we needed to do in Georgia.
Speaker Ralston suggested to me
that if a bill passes the House or the Senate,
the other chamber can take action.
And that action can include completely stripping a bill,
and then pasting a different bill onto it.
And so the number stays the same, but all of the content
is completely different.
We looked and looked and looked for a bill that would work,
but there just weren't a lot of options available to us.
And there wasn't a lot of time.
Monday night I had dinner with State
Senator Elena Parent, a Democrat who represents Atlanta.
And she mentioned to me that she had a bill that
might be a possible option.
So I told her, I want to do it if you're OK with it.
But I need you to understand what that means.
That means the bill that you worked hard on and passed,
I'm just going to delete it, and I'm going to completely paste
on the text from our bill.
She didn't blink, and she said do it.
It's the right thing to do.
[CHEERING]
And then it was off to the races.
We have to get it through the Rules Committee,
the House, and the Senate.
And we had two days left.
I sent some messages over to the Senate
that there were going to be casualties,
legislatively that is, if this measure was not approved.
And on the last day, the very first bill that was called
was Senate Bill 304.
When he called the bill I went up, and I presented it.
And then the Speaker asked questions.
I asked him, is it not true that this bill, when
it was first before the House, passed unanimously?
At that time, I'd been here six years,
and I'd never seen him ask questions
from the well in that manner.
And I think it sent a message that
hopefully gave a little push to the bill,
and that was my intent.
And it passed unanimously, passed unanimously.
So then we began the long process
of running back and forth between the House
and the Senate.
And the goal was have the bill called in the Senate,
have it passed, and then we'd be done.
Was it called?
No, instead they looked for amendments.
And they wanted amendments so they could say that they made
an improvement to the bill, and that made
it more acceptable to them.
So we have one hour left.
The bill finally was called by the Senate,
and it passed, and even Senator Unterman voted for the bill.
This is "Schoolhouse Rock" on steroids,
because it has to come back to the House one more time,
because we have to pass it in the exact same version
as the Senate.
I ran out of the Senate and ran back to the House.
I immediately started thinking, oh, my goodness.
We have less than an hour.
And in order to pass the bill, people have to see it.
But we have 180 members.
So the physical act of making copies while they're busy doing
lots of other things because it's the final minutes
of the session, and I was worried
that we weren't going to have enough time to get that
finished.
The Republican members said, we're
going to help pass it out.
We're going to help pass out the physical copies.
And that's a side of politics that people don't get to see
very often, but it does happen.
When I got called to present the bill,
the person who was immediately in front of me was a preacher.
[ANGELS SINGING]
He kept talking and talking and talking.
But it wasn't a controversial measure.
And I couldn't constrain myself.
I'm sitting right in front of him,
and I was yelling, I was saying, shut the [BEEP] up.
Shut the [BEEP] up.
When it finally came up, I actually ran up.
And I recall saying, this is the legislation
that will ensure the timely processing of rape kits
in the state of Georgia.
We are good.
Please vote yes.
And it passed unanimously.
And the ayes are 167.
[APPLAUSE]
The nays are 0.
And I think it was almost at the stroke of midnight.
There was a standing ovation by the entire House,
Republican and Democrat.
Often I gavel down ovations, because probably
not all the time consistent with good decorum.
But I did not gavel that down, because he had earned it.
I waved to the survivors and the advocates
who were here and watched us.
And then I saluted--
I saluted the Speaker.
It was an example of I think how people
can come together to make a difference
and to fix a very bad problem.
And we did it.
We did it across party lines.
And we did it in a relentless way, where we never gave up.
And I'm really proud of that.
We'll be right back.
[APPLAUSE]
[MUSIC PLAYING]