Amazing: Gov Brian Kemp has done 14 Fox News interviews on Georgia's voter suppression law, in a frantic bid to atone for his heretical refusal to help Trump steal the election. And it's still not enough! I tried to unpack the deeper pathologies here:
washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/…
Republicans keep telling their voters to fear "woke" corporations and "cancel culture."

But what Republicans really fear is *more Democrats voting.*

And what they really object to is corporations defending a future shaped by Dem voters' participation:

washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/…
Republicans are relying on what you might call the "confidence" canard.

They don't say 2020 was illegitimate. Instead, they say voting limits are needed to restore "confidence" in elections.

This is central to the ongoing GOP voter suppression project:

washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/…
What's so galling about Republicans telling their voters that woke liberalism is out to disempower them is that this is used to reverse-justify *actual* efforts to disempower people via voter suppression!

washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/…

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More from @ThePlumLineGS

9 Apr
Phony populist Josh Hawley is now claiming "woke" corporations are victimizing people like him for merely defending "election integrity" in Georgia. Yes, the leader of the effort to subvert Biden's electors really said that. I unloaded a rant in response:
washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/…
Here's Josh Hawley's full quote. It's just steaming wretched nonsense.

No sympathizer with the new "conservative populism" should accept this. It's truly deranged:

washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/… ImageImage
What's galling is Hawley is using the rhetoric of empowerment (protecting conservative voters' agency from woke elites) to defend actual efforts to disempower people via voter suppression.

This has a long historical pedigree:

(w/@mkazin & @DamonLinker)

washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/… ImageImage
Read 4 tweets
7 Apr
Republicans can whine all they want about "woke corporate virtue signaling." But here's the truth: This situation is their fault. It's in no small part the result of the continuing GOP refusal to fully renounce Trump's lie about the election. New piece:
washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/…
Another Republican threatening companies who criticize voter suppression: Texas' Dan Patrick.

He says they might “have a bill they want us to pass for them. Good luck!”

And he says voting limits are needed to boost voter confidence, which he undermined.

washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/…
The current war reflects big ongoing cultural shifts.

Trump attacked kneeling players, blasted BLM protests as urban anarchy and fomented violence to overturn an election.

Companies were pushed to take sides throughout. We're seeing the culmination now:

washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/…
Read 4 tweets
6 Apr
McConnell is threatening "consequences" against corporations that defend voting rights. So surely he'll back the new Dem push to bring back revenues multinationals are sheltering abroad, right? Stop calling the GOP "populist." You're getting scammed:
washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/…
GOP threats against woke corporations are toothless. This is deliberate! Rs are targeting tax privileges to create the aura of acting in the public interest. But they won't target real tax privileges in a way that has serious distributional consequences:

washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/… ImageImage
“If Republicans are interested in ensuring megacorporations pay their fair share — not just punishing perceived enemies that support voting rights — I’m all ears."

@RonWyden to me. Dems have a new plan to tax multinationals. It exposes sham GOP populism:

washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/… ImageImage
Read 5 tweets
5 Apr
Today's GOP, in a nutshell: Republicans are telling their voters to rage at "woke" corporations for defending African American voting rights while also telling them raising corporate taxes to fund infrastructure is socialism.

My latest, on the MLB debate:
washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/…
It's dumb to analyze the Georgia law only in terms of impact on turnout. Even if burdened voters do turn out, limiting voting to skew elections is wrong. And it erases the larger context, in which the GOP is ramping up anti-democratic tactics everywhere:

washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/…
A new poll finds 6 in 10 Republicans say the election was stolen from Trump.

You *cannot* analyze the Georgia law's impact without reckoning with the larger degradation Republicans are inflicting.

This may be why corporations are coming out so hard now:

washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/…
Read 4 tweets
2 Apr
The ridiculous GOP claim that Biden's infrastructure plan is "socialism" actually reveals Republicans, not Democrats, as the real ideological outliers. Which helpfully confirms exactly why Democrats will all but certainly have to pass it alone. New piece:
washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/…
The GOP claim that investing in green technologies isn't "real" infrastructure spending is just another way of saying Republicans will never accept the need to fund the transition to decarbonization.

It makes the GOP an outlier relative to its own past:

washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/…
Here's how you know Republicans are full of it.

They say they only want to do a bill on roads, bridges, waterways and ports.

But they almost certainly won't support *either* higher taxes on corporations *or* deficit spending to pay for it:

washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/…
Read 4 tweets
31 Mar
Biden's new plan makes a very big bet: That huge public expenditures are the kryptonite to defeat Trumpism. While Trumpists remain lost in deranged anti-leftism, in reality center and left are rolling out the most ambitious policies in 50 years. My latest:
washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/…
Biden's plan is both nostalgic and forward-looking. It looks back to the big public expenditures and public works of the prosperous 1960s, while addressing climate, racial inequities, and the needs of the multi-racial health-care-oriented working class:

washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/…
This is a strikingly idealized vision of what a Dem center-left alliance can accomplish.

As Tucker Carlson fantasizes about leftist extremism provoking the right into full fascism, a broad liberal-left coalition is working to solve vast public problems:

washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/…
Read 5 tweets

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