The Whitfield County Republican Party at its annual convention this past weekend issued two separate censures of state Rep. Kasey Carpenter, R-Dalton.
The first was for speaking out in support last year for a 10-year intergovernmental agreement between Whitfield County, Whitfield County Schools and the city of Varnell that allows a tax allocation district (TAD) to help fund high-end commercial development at Patterson Farms. The second was for voting against the Georgia Criminal Alien Track and Report Act, which would require local law enforcement agencies to cooperate with federal immigration authorities.
Carpenter said he was disappointed but not surprised at the censures.
“This isn’t the first time they’ve done this,” he said. “They’ve censured me before. They’ve censured others. There’s a real disconnect between the 100 people who spend their Saturday attending these meetings and the thousands of people who vote in the primary and in the general election.”
In 2021, the Whitfield County Republican Party convention censured Gov. Brian Kemp, then-Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and state Sen. Chuck Payne, R-Dalton, for what convention participants saw as insufficiently supporting former President Donald Trump in his claim that his loss in the state in the 2020 presidential election was tainted by fraud.
The Georgia Criminal Alien Track and Report Act was introduced in response to the killing of nursing student Laken Riley in Athens. Her accused killer, Venezuelan Jose Antonio Ibarra, reportedly entered the country illegally in 2022 with his wife and child. His wife told the New York Post they were arrested and then released and put on a bus to New York City.
In 2023, he and his wife split up and Ibarra came to Georgia, according to reports.
The resolution censuring Carpenter calls the Georgia Criminal Alien Track and Report Act “a modest bill” and notes that Carpenter was the only Republican in the state House of Representatives to vote against it. It calls Carpenter “wildly out of touch on the illegal immigration issue with most voters in Whitfield County” and “urges all Republicans to withhold their vote from him in the upcoming primary.”
Carpenter called the killing of Laken Riley horrible.
“But I think we ought to support our sheriffs and police officers, not penalize them for not being immigration experts,” he said. “I’m also concerned as a person who represents a 52% minority district that Hispanics and other people of color could be profiled.”
The other censure notes that Carpenter “has an ownership interest” in The Carpentry, a boutique hotel that opened in downtown Dalton last year that qualifies for funding from the downtown business district TAD. It also notes that he spoke out in favor of the tax agreement for TAD funding of Patterson Farms at the meeting of the Whitfield County Board of Commissioner where the commissioners voted to approve the agreement.
It accuses Carpenter of ignoring “the grassroots of the party and the basic principles of what it means to be a conservative.”
That censure said the party “will work to remove Kasey Carpenter from office and oppose his present and future candidacy for public office.”
Carpenter noted it was the voters of Varnell who gave the City Council there the authority to approve TADs, and it was the members of the county commission and the county school board who approved the intergovernmental agreement to help provide funding for Patterson Farms.
“I just spoke out at a meeting in favor of it,” he said.
Carpenter faces no opposition in the May Republican primary, and no Democrat qualified to run against him in November.
“If they were so unhappy with me, if they really think I’m so out of touch with my district, they should have found someone to run against me,” Carpenter said.