The Metro Atlanta Chamber of Commerce on Friday pledged to help fight back against the GOP-controlled Georgia state legislature’s aggressive push to slash voting rights.
I’m a little unnerved to be rooting for big business but sometimes you gotta go with the flow.
Chambers of Commerce tend to lean very Republican so I’m sure that, deep down, they sympathize with these attempts at voter suppression. That said, business is business so, once you start threatening their bottom line they tend to forget all about their sympathies.
They are starting to get the message that racism, antisemitism, sexism, and a whole lot of other isms just aren’t that good for business. Business is starting to realize that all customers are plain old green green and I’m o.k. with that.
Sometimes the enemy of your enemy really is your friend.
The dogs fight amongst themselves but join together to battle the wolves.
This maybe a tall order but I’d like to the what the discussions in the legislatures were when GA started to expand ways to vote. Maybe a nice history of how voting changed in GA from registering, and then showing up at the polls on election day. It wouldn’t hurt to also count how much/many cases of voting fraud, irregularities that there have been since say 1965.
I say this because MO has pretty much opted out of pretty much any measure that would allow expanding voting options. We don’t have mail, and absentee voting you must has a cause from preventing you from going to the polls on election day.
I think knowing and showing the changes over time would wake some people up to the fact that these new proposed measures aren’t there to make it safer, it’s to make it harder to vote.
Good…I want big business to threaten, cajole, WHATEVER or leave the state. The ‘legislature’ has decided they and only they are the ‘ruling body’ and they aren’t accountable to anyone…even those who ELECT them or pay them under the table.
Realizing that higher voter turnout tends to harm them at the ballot box, Republicans across the country are pushing restrictions to make it more difficult to vote.
Harris County Judge (i.e., chief administrator) Lina Hidalgo moved heaven and earth to make voting in her county as accessible and safe as possible in 2020, especially absentee and early voting. The result was that Harris county recorded 1.64 million votes in 2020, up from 1.31 million votes in 2016.
And Donald Trump increased his share of that vote by 1.1%.
Being a proud resident of Dallas County, I would also like to note that we pumped up our vote totals by about the same proportion and still managed to shave Trump’s share down from 34.6 to 33.4. Suck it, Houston.
Fair enough, but here’s a salubrious note: Big Business is well-practised in the ways of hypocrisy and the world of public relations is often the only other beneficiary.
I’m glad the Chamber is finally making the right noises. I want to see a lot more than that.
At the end of this are people who came out to vote. Despite a Pandemic and long lines to boot. There was an impetus out there that was actually quite phenomenal. By actively and so damn overtly attempting to thwart the vote, I suspect the Republicans may actually be sealing their doom. Pissed off people tend to not stand around and just wait for providence to just show up. Unless the Republicans actually eliminate voting, they are fighting an upstream battle.
Indeed. I was reading today that among the entities NOT supporting this effort is Koch/Mercer. If Manchin wants his legacy to be against the gods of big business, go for it, moron.
OT: interesting background of the Klein family in Argentina in the 60’s and 70’s. Now I’m curious about how they arrived in Argentina in the first place? Assuming it was during WWII, but were they a Jewish family who were able to get out, or were they Nazi aligned???
I find it quite entertaining that the Republicans are panicking that all the ways they previously made it easier to pump up their vote totals now need to be throttled back because it turns out that non-Republicans are allowed to use them too. The GOP has absolutely owned Florida for the last three decades because they were so damn good at getting no-excuse mail ballots into the hands of their voters, and now that’s, like, the devil’s own handiwork or something.
“their voters” are changing before their very eyes. I agree, this is quiet or maybe not so quiet panic. I cannot envision that the Jan. 6 helped them at all and may have cost them more voters than we realize. At the same time, people are shifting rapidly in age (generations I mean) and politics. Face it, the GOP is in one huge tantrum of denial at the moment.
His Uncle Guillermo was born in Buenos Aires in 1936, so it doesn’t seem to be especially WWII related. Klein is also a relatively common last name in Germany to this day, so I wouldn’t count on the family being Jewish.
The Democrats are winning the marketing war. That is something I am sure not many Republicans anticipated. Republicans might just see this voter suppression effort blow up in their faces.
The people the effort will suppress are more likely to be older Republicans than highly motivated Democrats.
I tend to agree that the GOP has reached the demographic and political point of no return. And I think that’s actually why they’re so desperate to keep the MAGA bullshit going. Because as toxic as the party has to be to pump up Donald Trump’s voters, it’s also undeniable that he also got 18% more votes than any previous Republican presidential candidate in history (and it was his 2016 campaign that had held that record, albeit just barely over Bush 2004). Without the MAGAts, the GOP is well and truly fucked. The irony is that they are also well and truly fucked precisely because they are catering to the MAGAts.
Thanks. The article contains a few basic factual errors but is still very much worth a look. Of course, parts of it make for grim reading – but here’s my favorite line:
Freddie Klein’s attorney declined comment, and he couldn’t be reached directly in jail.
Less than dear Georgia Rs, please understand that your donations may be drying up if you continue.