McGinty: GOP lacks resolve to tackle state problems

State Sen. Bill Cowsert, R-Athens, long has earned praise for his work ethic, care for constituents and pragmatic approach to politics, and those traits have helped him rapidly climb the political ladder in Atlanta.

As of late, however, Cowsert too often has abandoned his typical pragmatism for the hollow refrain of closed-minded conservatism.

Stumping at everything from neighborhood gatherings to ham-and-egg breakfasts, Cowsert is touting how the state government balanced the budget during these difficult economic times.

To do so, he willingly adopted what has become a tried-and-true form of governance in Atlanta the past eight years, which is simply passing problems from the state level onto the local communities.

Let's start with the state homeowners' grant program, which gives local property owners some much-needed tax relief. Now, because the program has been scuttled by the state legislature, property owners across the state will receive a second bill from their respective governments asking for an additional $200 to $300, thanks to the foolishness in Atlanta.

Cowsert also has been playing his own sort of mental gymnastics with the realities of budgetary help. At one of the numerous tea parties earlier this year, he boasted that the state government managed to balance its budget and that they "did not borrow a dime to do (it)."

It's the typical "we pulled ourselves up by the bootstraps" meme that gets trotted out at those types of functions.

Of course, it's not true at all, and when a reporter called Cowsert out for fudging the facts since the federal government provided Georgia with ample supplemental funding, he merely shrugged it off. If they hadn't gotten the money from Washington, Cowsert said, they'd just have rolled up their sleeves and cut a billion more from the budget.

That type of machismo is nothing short of blatant intellectual dishonesty.

Federal assistance filled in 44 percent of the state's budget deficit and, had Cowsert had his way, it's more than likely that some of the more outrageous cuts proposed by Republicans - such as the elimination of school nurses - would have gone through had that money not come in.

Still, as the popular Homeowner's Tax Relief Grant program faces its demise, thus saddling local communities with an additional burden, Cowsert stubbornly believes it's not hard for local governments to lop off an

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