I've liked Amanda Carpenter's work at The Bulwark. She's struck me as a dependably conservative voice at a publication that started out with a simple premise - that actual conservatism was different from Trumpism and was not going away - but has exhibited some serious wobbliness as it's grown, most notably in the contributions of Richard North Patterson, who clearly doesn't fit anybody's definition of a conservative.
But today, she goes after the Republican ire toward corporations engaging in falsehood based indignation over Georgia's election law. She says it's hypocritical, especially on the part of Mitch McConnell:
For decades, McConnell was an outspoken supporter of corporations’ political expression and expenditure. His name is on the Supreme Court case challenging the campaign-finance law that limited certain kinds of corporate speech; he later praised the Citizens United decision that overturned those limitations. But now he wants corporations to shut up and put up. It’s unfair of them, you see, to criticize Republicans for supporting restrictionist laws based on Trump’s Big Lie about the election.
Yes, the Big Lie is real and it was supremely shameful and a serious blow to this country's constitutional stability. But I think she mischaracterizes the Georgia legislature's motives in crafting the election law, or at least cynically omits certain motives.
The corporations in question were not upset about the law in its developmental stages, and even right after it became law. As Allahpundit points out at Hot Air, they didn't enter the fray until they were squeezed my the cultural left:
Delta actually praised the law in its first statement after Brian Kemp signed it, noting that it “improved considerably during the legislative process, and expands weekend voting, codifies Sunday voting and protects a voter’s ability to cast an absentee ballot without providing a reason. For the first time, drop boxes have also been authorized for all counties statewide and poll workers will be allowed to work across county lines.” Shortly thereafter lefty activists grabbed the company by the lapels and urged it to reconsider its assessment, which Delta duly did.
At least Delta offered input on the law during the drafting stage, though. Georgia legislators who spoke to NRO’s Ryan Mills told him that Major League Baseball didn’t give a rip about the bill while it was being debated. No meetings, no comments, zip. Not until it passed and Joe Biden declared that he’d “strongly support” moving the All-Star Game from Atlanta in protest did the league conclude that the law was an offense to God and man.
If MLB cared about voting rights, why didn’t it intervene when it had a chance to influence the legislation? Answer: Because it didn’t care until the left told it to.
“I do not recall any interaction with Major League Baseball for sure, and I do not recall any interactions with anybody representing the (Atlanta) Braves organization the whole time that we were debating and working through the bill,” said Barry Fleming, the state representative who sponsored the House version of the election bill…
“I talked to the commissioner, offered to explain anything he wanted in the bill, because I heard they were getting pressured. He thanked me for that,” [Brian] Kemp said. “And then I got a call saying they had moved the game. No dialogue whatsoever, which is just disappointing.”…
Between the House and Senate, [Fleming] said, there were about 20 hearings on the proposal when MLB officials also could have weighed in. If MLB was dissatisfied with the legislation, “we certainly could and would have made changes along the way,” Fleming said.
Fleming did meet with other business leaders, just none from MLB because MLB didn’t care. They moved the game from Atlanta due to a progressive pressure campaign, not because they have any sincere objections to the law — not a single provision of which they have yet to identify as especially troubling, by the way. In fact, Mills notes, other states like Ohio and Florida that hosted the All-Star Game recently have voting laws that aren’t dissimilar from Georgia’s and which have been criticized in various respects by liberal activists. MLB didn’t care. Until now.
And if the answer to that is, “It wasn’t until last year that one party tried to disenfranchise millions of voters by overturning the election so go figure that voting rights are now a priority,” it only brings us back to the original question. If MLB’s consciousness about voter access had been raised by the “stop the steal” fiasco, why wasn’t it seeking to influence Georgia’s new law while in development?
My theory all along has been that they probably would have kept the game in Atlanta notwithstanding the pressure from leftists if not for Biden coming out publicly and saying he’d support moving it. They had cover on their left flank from Stacey Abrams and Jon Ossoff to decline a boycott, but once the president raised the stakes it was destined to become an issue that would follow the league and its players for months.
This is a bit of a sticky area. I even had to take issue with a Principles First ally on Twitter yesterday, who had proclaimed that there is no woke corporate mob.
The issue right now is a Georgia election law, but precedents have been getting set for some time. There was the dustup over Indiana's religious freedom law, the North Carolina bathrooms-for-gender-dysphoria-sufferers, and take-a-knee gestures and social justice slogans on uniforms in several sports leagues.
One doesn't have to be some kind of populist to find the trend disturbing. It's a disruption to the proper functioning of the free market. Companies exist to deliver particular products to their customers and thereby show their owners a return on investment. They become something other than that when virtue-signaling becomes a prominent part of their mission. That may be find with the Business Roundtable, the Great Reset crowd and stakeholder-theory proponents generally, but not everyone is up for that kind of transformation.
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