The Weekly Remix

By Ross Williams | Deputy Editor

By Ellie Fivas

The Justice Department has signaled that the federal government no longer plans to enforce a landmark court ruling that has shaped Georgia’s mental health and disability care system for nearly two decades, although the leader of the state agency responsible for disability services says nothing has changed in his mind.

A June memo from the U.S. Department of Justice argues that federal disability laws do not require states to provide community-based care to people with disabilities that limit their ability to do what the Americans with Disabilities Act considers “major life activities,” such as eating. These services allow many people with disabilities to live and receive care in their communities rather than be institutionalized in state hospitals.

By Alander Rocha

Everton Blair, a former Gwinnett County Board of Education chair, is headed to Washington to finish out the late Congressman David Scott term representing Georgia’s 13th Congressional District after defeating Marcye Scott, the daughter of the late congressman, in a special election.

Blair, a 34-year-old with a doctorate degree in education from Harvard University, is the third Black openly gay man to be elected to Congress and the first representing a Southern state. He ran a progressive campaign by advocating for Medicare for all, speaking out against Israel’s reliance on U.S. tax dollars and its influence in U.S. politics, and pledging to voters that he would be a voice in Washington against President Donald Trump’s policies.

By Maya Homan

The 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals is sending a lawsuit over Georgia’s 2021 political maps back to a lower court, ordering it to reexamine an earlier ruling that concluded the state’s maps were racially discriminatory.

The decision comes a few months after a U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Louisiana v. Callais that diluted a key provision of the 1965 Voting Rights Act by ruling that plaintiffs must prove there was “intentional racial discrimination” in order for gerrymandered districts to be overturned.

By Ariel Hart

A business rep was on the phone telling Hugh Chancey’s pharmacy in southwest Georgia to transfer all of an elderly patient’s prescriptions away to another pharmacy. 

The patient herself said that’s not what she wanted, Chancey recounted, but the company was relentless. After a three-way phone call where the patient said she wanted to keep using Chancey’s pharmacy, an order came over by fax anyway, saying to transfer the prescriptions.

By Ross Williams

A state agency is accusing the Muscogee County School District of violating state and federal law by delaying the enrollment of foster children.

The Georgia Division of Family and Children Services says the disagreement centers on the interpretation of a bill signed into law this year intended to help get kids in foster care enrolled in new schools more quickly.

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