The first couple of weeks down at the session were a George Lucas film finale of grand ceremony, but this week the gigantic cigars started coming out, stuck into mouths with relish, as if the big shots had arrived and were ready to do business.

The mood was changing.

Sandbags were being wedged into place.

Battle lines were being drawn along party lines.

The stakes were rising.

On Wednesday the first big proper fight went down in the Senate, and as expected it was a victory for the majority Republicans. Sen. Eric Johnson's, R-Savannah, bill enabling parents of special-needs children to use vouchers to attend private schools passed by a vote of 31 to 23.

The Democrats tried to resist.

"This is a bad bill coming up," Sen. Nan Orrock, D-Atlanta, said just before Lt. Gov. Casey Cagle introduced Johnson to speak.

The president pro tem knew the Democrats were digging in, and it was clear from the moment he reached the podium that he wanted to head off the opposition arguments before a dozen angry voices filled the chamber and threatened combustion. His bill wouldn't hurt the public school system, he assured. It taps state funds to be used for vouchers, not federal funds. His bill wouldn't only target the rich. The rich already have the capacity to send their special-needs children to private schools. Poor people can't. "Another argument you're going to hear," Johnson said, and proceeded to blast away at other anticipated objections. States with special-needs-vouchers programs -- Utah, Ohio, Arizona and Florida -- report success. In Georgia, there is just a 32-percent public-school graduation rate of special-needs children. He argued that many of the objections are "just about vouchers," describing an encounter with a lobbyist from the Georgia School Board Association who told him, "The people who pay me, pay me to oppose vouchers."

The remark drew a murmur of disgust from Republicans.

PeachCare, Medicaid, public housing, the GI Bill, food stamps, the HOPE Scholarship, etc. All vouchers, said the president pro tem.

"If we can use vouchers to determine what we eat and where we live," Johnson exclaimed, "let's not run from special-needs education."

Finally -- and here came the Republican drum roll -- "Who ultimately has the right to make the decision about when a child gets into special services and where?" Johnson wanted to know. "A parent or the government? Senate Bill 10 says a parent gets to make that choice."

There was a volley back and forth then, and Orrock emerged right away as an opposition voice. The Johnson proposal, she said, would take money out of the public schools -- and how much remained unclear -- and put it into private education, where schools are not held to the same constitutional standards.

She received fast support.

"The program itself as it relates to vouchers does strike fear in the hearts of people who have spent years working with special-needs children," said Sen. Steve Thompson, D-Marietta, who had a way of working up to the issue, who by the end of the more than two-hour debate would show himself to be the bill's toughest critic.

The old-time Democrat from Powder Springs, aging gunslinger from the Barnes era, had begun the morning serving up a sentimental slop of a speech about some of the wonderful Republican leaders in GOP history. He extolled Reagan, lingered with delight on a story about how the teddy bear received its name from Theodore Roosevelt when the wise leader had refused during a hunting expedition to slaughter a beautiful young bear. He lavished praise on Lincoln's face on the $5 bill.

"It occurred to me the other day I'm the same age as Lincoln was when he died," Thompson had announced to a half-empty chamber where the senators present at that early hour were either rummaging through papers or wheeling and dealing in small groups. Only the press row offered up a bray of laughter. Where was Thompson going with this outrageously unctuous bit of oratory, delivered in the sweetest of Sam Ervin-like tones of Southern gentility?

He didn't put a point on it right away, or pull a dagger of irony. The finish wasn't especially memorable.

But when Thompson went back to the well for the second time that morning, after Johnson had made his privatization pitch, it was evident he was in battle mode; the earlier speech a means of establishing contrast between benevolent Republicans of the past and the current GOP drive to weaken public education, in his view.

Thompson was the lead opposition voice, with Sen. Vincent Fort, D-Atlanta -- "84 percent of children's families [in states with special-needs vouchers] have to put money on top of vouchers, which means poor disabled students are going to stay in public schools" -- Sen. Emanuel D. Jones, D-Decatur, and Orrock right behind him.

"There is no accountability for private schools that there is for public schools," said Thompson, wrapping the arguments of everyone else into the most sustained case against the bill.

Maybe some private schools would only accept the mildly disabled. Perhaps they would only accept a limited number. The National Council on Disabilities estimates that vouchers for special-needs children could lead to increased institutionalization, Thompson said. Many Georgia educators oppose the bill, and he rattled off the names of different organizations: the Georgia Association of Educators, Georgia Association of School Principals, the Georgia Parent-Teachers Association, etc.

"If any children need the protection of public education under the law," Thompson said, "in danger as they have been of being discriminated against, institutionalized, marginalized, hidden -- it's special-needs kids."

But in the Republican lexicon, government is the greatest danger.

If there was a majority theme emergent in the session beyond the continued drive to shift taxes from wealth to work, it was privatization. Health care is broken, yet if we expand the possibility of health savings accounts the free market will provide. Medicaid is busted, it needs a private fix from care-management organizations. The public roads system is a mess that can be solved with a private toll system. So it was, too, that the individual demands of special-needs children are not often met in the public schools, the Republicans argued. If we simply unleash the creative potential of private-school education for these kids through vouchers, the children will flourish.

In each case the Democratic counterargument appealed to protecting the public interest -- a path fraught with peril in Georgia despite a nationwide backlash against the Bush administration.

"We don't use the word 'collective' down here," a progressive lobbyist explained this week. "That's a dangerous word." Indeed a word the Republicans associate with all of the worst traditions of anti-capitalist communitarianism. "Government is not the solution to the problem," Reagan once told the faithful, "it is the problem."

Confident in that philosophy and with the numbers in their favor, the GOP held.

"Public schools," declared Sen. Seth Harp, R-Midland, "are not meeting our needs. ... Freedom of choice is one of the most important freedoms we have. I strongly support Senate Bill 10 because it gives the middle class and people below the poverty level choice."

Johnson drove in the stake.

"The same group," he said, "that wants choice for a mother with an unborn child doesn't want choice for a mother with a special-needs child."

It was over.

The Republicans had notched the first big win of the session, yet Fort held out hope that a different version of the special-needs vouchers bill in the House might provoke another fight, this time between House and Senate, and give the Democrats one more chance to retaliate.

-- Max Pizarro