The New Yorker:

Brandon Beach was a state senator in Georgia who got involved in Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election results. Now his name will be on our money.

By Charles Bethea

In Georgia, during the early days of the pandemic, a bald and baggy-eyed Republican state senator named Brandon Beach showed up to the state capitol sick. A couple of days later, the senator disclosed that he’d tested positive for the coronavirus, sending his exposed colleagues into quarantine. “I’m not a bad person,” Beach, who is from New Orleans, and still speaks with a Louisianan accent, told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, at the time. “I thought it was my regular sinus bronchitis stuff I get every year,” he added. Beach was in his fourth full term as a state legislator, representing an area north of Atlanta that includes Alpharetta, the well-off suburb where Marjorie Taylor Greeneonce ran a CrossFit gym. Prior to his 2013 election, Beach had worked as a city councilman, as C.E.O. of the local chamber of commerce, and as a member of the zoning and planning commission. In the Georgia Senate, he focussed his attention on metro Atlanta’s troubled transit system, pushed the failed cityhood movement of a wealthy north Atlanta enclave, worked to ban transgender women from playing in women’s sports, and championed doomed efforts to legalize casino gambling and sports betting in the state.

Some viewed Beach as “a ringmaster for unnecessary tax breaks,” as Julian Bene, a former board member of Invest Atlanta, the city’s economic-development authority, recently put it to me. “In particular, I think he took great glee in depriving Atlanta of tax revenues,” Bene went on. “And his reasoning was elementary-school level: when push came to shove, he’d say things, like, ‘Well, when I was opening a restaurant, everything costs more than I thought. So these people really need the tax break because this project’s going to cost them more than they think.’ He wanted taxpayers to subsidize this irresponsible nonsense.”

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