From the Cracker Squire Archives: Office of Lt. Gov. shore ain't what it used to be (with real power being in Pres. Pro Tem & Maj. Leader).

Lt. Gov. Casey Cagle at his debate with Democratic rival Carol Porter.

A 3-1-05 post entitled "Office of Lt. Gov. shore ain't what it used to be (and many think it won't be any time soon, with real power being in Pres. Pro Tem & Maj. Leader)" provides in part:

Earlier this month Bill Shipp penned a column that began:

John Savage, a Republican candidate for lieutenant governor three decades ago, delivered such an appealing campaign promise that even Democratic Gov. Jimmy Carter endorsed the notion.

Savage pledged that, if elected, he would seek to abolish the lieutenant governor's office because it served no useful purpose.

Although Savage's vow to eliminate the job he sought received wide attention, he was doomed to lose the election. Democrat Zell Miller emerged the 2-to-1 victor and immediately converted the lieutenant governor's office into a center of power politics. . . .

You won't hear many Republicans say these days the lieutenant governor's office is an empty and impotent position - though GOP senators have stripped incumbent Democrat Mark Taylor of most significant duties.

A 7-12-06 post provides in part:

[Gov. Sonny] Perdue switched parties before the 1998 election when [Mark] Taylor became lieutenant governor and got the ability to assign senators to committees. To punish Perdue for abandoning the Democrats, Taylor essentially left Perdue powerless.

When Perdue complained, Taylor famously replied to reporters, "cry me a river."

A 1-11-05 post entitled "The pendulum is always swinging. Taylor & Richardson and comments that come back to haunt" reads:

"Cry me a river," Lt. Gov. Mark Taylor once told Republican senators who complained of their treatment in the then-Democrat-controlled Senate.

"I hear them crying," Speaker Glenn Richardson said of his rule on "hawks."

Never forget the pendulum Czar, it is always swinging.

It has swung again. Jim Galloway writes in the ajc's Political Insider:

A bait-and-switch was pulled on those of you who went to the polls on the first Tuesday of November.

For months, Lt. Gov. Casey Cagle had crisscrossed the state, warning that if Democrat Carol Porter were elected to replace him, a Republican-controlled Senate would immediately strip her of all power.

She would be an inert figurehead with a staff and a $91,609-a-year state salary, the Republican incumbent argued.

The lieutenant governor was re-elected by a comfortable margin. The people had spoken.

Three days later, at a closed meeting on the Mercer University campus in Macon, Republican members of the Senate voted to strip a stunned Cagle of nearly all his authority. When the General Assembly convenes in January, he’ll be little more than the figurehead he warned against.