ATLANTA — The demotion of the state Senate’s highest ranking Republican woman has sparked a bipartisan outcry at the statehouse. 

A stream of mostly Democratic women senators took turns denouncing the all-male leadership’s decision to oust Sen. Renee Unterman, a Republican from Buford and a former nurse, from the head of the influential Senate Health and Human Services Committee. 

Unterman had held the post for the last six years, and in her place will now sit Sen. Ben Watson, a Republican from Savannah who is a medical doctor. Health care is expected to be a major issue this year, when lawmakers are set to consider whether to keep the state’s decades-old system for regulating hospitals. 

The committee assignments were announced by newly sworn in Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan and the Senate leadership on Tuesday. Unterman was instead named chair of the Science and Technology Committee, which is a lower profile committee that considers far fewer bills. She is also no longer vice chair of the Senate’s powerful budget-writing committee. 

“The most important thing is if they did this to me — the most powerful woman in the GOP — the question is what will they do to other women,” Unterman told reporters Wednesday. 

In speeches to her colleagues this week, Unterman objected to the move and said it was a sign of women being left out of the committee process — where much of the work to refine legislation is done. 

“This is part of the ‘Me Too’ generation,” Unterman said of the reaction from her colleagues across the aisle. “And this is what people have to acknowledge in the state of Georgia — that women should have a seat at the table.”  

Unterman also protested new rules on how sexual harassment claims against state senators and Senate staff will be handled moving forward, including limiting the length of time a complaint can be filed to two years. 

Duncan said in a statement Wednesday that the committee on assignments — of which he is a key member — sought to “position consensus builders as chairs.” He also noted that the changes doubled the number committees chaired by women. 

Now, women lead four of the Senate’s 27 committees, including the Senate’s one other woman Republican who was named chair of the Ethics Committee. 

“It’s a difficult process,” Duncan said of the assignment process. “Any insinuation that this year’s process was discriminatory is nonsense.” 

But Sen. Elena Parent, a Democrat from Atlanta, argued that women had been minimized on — or left off of — the most powerful committees. 

“The underrepresentation of women senators on the committees that considered and passed the most legislation over our last two-year term is truly shocking,” Parent said. 

She argued that women were overrepresented on most of the committees that handled the lightest loads last term, including Unterman’s new committee. 

Sen. Jeff Mullis, a Republican from Chickamauga who chairs the powerful Rules Committee, dismissed the objections as “whining” from Democrats who behaved the same way when in power decades ago. 

 Jill Nolin covers the Georgia Statehouse for CNHI’s newspapers and websites. Reach her at jnolin@cnhi.com.

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