I honestly don’t know how much more of this the GOP can take. First they get their biggest donor base drawn into the nasty fight against their new Jim Crow 2.0 voting restriction laws to soothe their savaged 2020 election loss feelings. Then, to paraphrase the highly forgettable Laura Ingraham, McConnell tells his corporate donor base to Shut up and donate! Then MLB pulls the All Star game from Atlanta in protest, and hundreds of companies and corporations begin communicating on ways to stop these laws with public and corporate pressure before they become law. And that was all basically in one week.
But this is a new week, and with it a brand new crisis for the GOP to deal with. Nicolle Wallace reported today on Deadline White House that more than a dozen of the biggest, baddest mofo white shoe law firms have all joined forces to fight the GOP’s new voter restriction laws. They are all assigning select highly qualified voting rights and civil rights lawyers to form Lightening Strike Teams to instantly swoop down on state capitols, Austin, Texas, can you hear me? to evaluate and instantly challenge these laws in federal and state courts.
But here’s the kicker. These are not liberal arts law firms from Hollywood and Broadway, who represent clients like Meryl Streep and Robert Diniro, these are some of the longest established conservative law firms in the country. These are the kinds of law firms that boast names like Robert Mueller, and George Conway under the partner header on their stationary. And now they’re going to war with the GOP over voting rights.
Here’s the part I love. These are the kinds of high quality conservative law firms that wouldn’t touch Donald Trump with fire tongs because he doesn’t pay his legal bills. But they’re exactly the kind of GOP friendly law firm that somebody like Matt Gaetz and his father would love to hire to send a fleet of lawyers to defend him if he gets indicted for child sex trafficking charges. But will they be in such a hurry to represent Trump acolytes when they are engaged in a principled legal war against their racist voting laws And the cherry on top? These are the kinds of law firms that donate generously to the GOP, and where partners hold high ticket fund raisers for GOP candidates in their own homes. Stand up and take a bow, fool!
But the part I love the most is that the GOP is totally misunderstanding the reason for corporate interference in the first place. As Donny Deutsch explained it on Deadline White House today;
This is purely a business decision for these companies. They all operate under 5 and 10 year plans. And in 10 years, only 3 voters out of 10 will have been born before 1964. The Millennials are going to become the dominant voting bloc. And 1 out of 3 millennials, when applying for a job, apply at a company that they feel shares their values.
These companies are acting purely out of their own best self interest. If they want to attract the best talent, then they have to have a well displayed record of inclusive policies. If it comes down to a choice between tax breaks and loopholes, or their bottom line, especially when the idjits in the GOP are threatening their tax breaks, it’s a no brainer. And until the GOP learns that bitter life lesson, they are doomed to keep endlessly taking pratfalls, like The 3 Stooges, on that doomed road to Niagara Falls!
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The GQP is having to come to terms with demographic change and they aren’t dealing with it well. Corporations aren’t automatically going to support them any more, regardless of what the party promises. (And the corporate employees aren’t supporting them as much, if they ever did.)
They’ve hit the anger stage of their grief on this one. The negotiating stage is going to be a while yet.
Red and Blue? Nope. Not even Red, White and Blue matter. The ONLY color that has EVER mattered to corporate America and the titans of Wall Street is GREEN. As in the shade of green on U.S. Currency. They have squeezed the fuck out of the masses and accumulated so much wealth that people were already having trouble buying stuff and that’s bad for the bottom line. The pandemic and its length taught people there was a lot more that they could do without. Less spending means less money flowing through the economy and that means less money that can flow upwards.
I think you are on to something important. If as it seems corporate America and the rich & powerful have assessed their long term interests are best served by a divorce from what the GOP has become then divorce it will be. It could be a messy one, with a really ugly “custody fight.”
Oh, count on it, Denis. But I know who I’m betting on to get custody of the kids i.e. the customers. As hollowed out as the GOP became after W (does anyone appreciate the parallels between him and LBJ on how both weakened their respective ruling coalitions?), the big money was the last thing propping the GQP up. After the mess on January 6th, all bets were officially off. Between that, the ongoing violence against minorities of all stripes, the voter suppression laws AND the changing demographics, there’s no way that they can back the Republican party like old times. I look for them to start investing in Dems heavy by mid-decade.
I wouldn’t really draw too many parallels between LBJ and W. After all, LBJ’s “ruling coalition” largely broke down because he was trying to do a GOOD thing (ensure that Blacks were treated as human beings and American citizens in EVERY state with all the rights and responsibilities and also tried to help bring the Black community as a whole out of the racially-motivated poverty to which they’d been assigned for a century) while W didn’t really lose his “ruling coalition” as much as some parts of his party (the voting masses) were growing weary of the constant state of war that seemed to be unending in Iraq and Afghanistan.
LBJ was FULLY aware of the damage that he was doing to the coalition that FDR had built a generation earlier (but, truthfully, the coalition was already unraveling during the Truman Administration–largely from the integration of the military) and felt it was still the better option than to continue allowing bigots to keep operating with impunity. But there were other matters (such as Vietnam) which help to splinter the coalition and led to LBJ’s decision to not run for re-election in 1968.
W, on the other hand, was only losing support during his last possible term in office. He COULD have done far more to help keep the GOP in the White House and even possibly retake the House and Senate in 2008 if he’d paid more attention to what the VOTERS were telling him in 2006. But he ignored everything, preferring to let the GOP deal with 2008 WITHOUT him in the picture (as I recall, he voluntarily took almost no part in that year’s campaigning for any candidate, not even making any endorsement of any GOP candidate; by comparison, Bill Clinton was pushed away from every Democratic candidate in 2000).
If anything, the GOP was refreshed in 2010, thanks in large part to the “big money” donors’ decision to back the Tea Party “rebellion” with the hundreds of astroturf groups. If you recall, after the GOP regained the House, one of the first things they did was to harass the IRS for “going after” Tea Party groups but “ignoring” progressive groups (of course, when you’ve got 1000 “taxed enough” groups suddenly applying for that coveted “non-profit” status in the span of a single year while there are about 100 progressive groups doing the same thing, only a GOPer can see some sort of IRS conspiracy of targeted harassment). And, as long as the GOP and the “Freedom” Caucus morons were doing things that would ultimately help the big donors (ie, tax cuts), the big donors would keep the money flowing. But then, along came Trump. The big donors were still willing to let the money go to the GOPers but only the most staunchly right-wingers (the Koch brothers, Sheldon Adelson, etc) were willing to let the GOPers start really affecting their bottom lines; when a big donor starts facing possible boycotts of his business because either they’re strongly supporting things that their average consumers dislike or they aren’t willing to criticize the administration or Congress strongly enough for fighting against things their consumers do like.
You’re getting too hung up on the details, Joseph, which I believe is making you miss the true parallels. Thus it matters very little that LBJ knew what he was doing and W did not (FYI, I think less in terms of civil rights on those two–though LGBT gains in the 2000s do parallel black gains in the 1960s–and more Vietnam and Afghanistan/Iraq). The results were very much the same. As was Newt Gingrich’s “revolution” when placed side by side with Truman’s integration of the military and the Tea Party being every bit the temporary booster shot that Nixon’s Watergate scandal was to the ruling coalition in decline. Trump is very much therefore the Reagan Coalition’s Jimmy Carter, the final straw that broke the camel’s back.
Having said all that, yeah, it’s about the bottom line for Big Business and always is. Republicans are therefore looking less and less like a certain investment.
Voting rights matter, and if these law firms are opting to defend voter rights, I hope pro bono, kudos to them.
Likely is pro bono…it’s good PR.
The GQP used to understand this business mentality quite well. But now between the aging leadership who are old enough to turn into instant crude oil the moment they die and the uppity crackers who hate that their bully license is due to expire, the lesson has been forgotten. I never cease to marvel over the irony that W was the one guy who saw this coming and how none of them ever ran with his idea of including Latinx and Hispanics in the ranks more than they do.