Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell on Tuesday walked back comments in which he warned corporations of “consequences” for spreading “disinformation” surrounding the new Georgia voting law.
“I didn’t say that very artfully yesterday,” he said at an event on Tuesday. “[Corporations] certainly [are] entitled to be involved in politics. They are. My principal complaint is they didn’t read the darn bill. The president of the United States called the bill a Jim Crow exercise to suppress voter turnout, presumably based on race, because that’s what the Jim Crow allegation is.”
The top Republican on Monday issued a stern statement after liberals and Georgia-based companies spoke out against the law that imposes voter identification requirements for absentee ballots, gives state officials the authority to make changes to county elections boards, authorizes the use of ballot drop boxes (though there will be fewer than there were in 2020), and makes it a crime for politically affiliated persons to approach voters in line within 150 feet of a polling place to give them food and water.
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“It’s jaw-dropping to see powerful American institutions not just permit themselves to be bullied, but join in the bullying themselves,” he said at the time. “Wealthy corporations have no problem operating in New York, for example, which has fewer days of early voting than Georgia, requires excuses for absentee ballots, and restricts electioneering via refreshments. There is no consistent or factual standard being applied here. It’s just a fake narrative gaining speed by its own momentum.”
He continued: “Our private sector must stop taking cues from the Outrage-Industrial Complex. Americans do not need or want big business to amplify disinformation or react to every manufactured controversy with frantic left-wing signaling. From election law to environmentalism to radical social agendas to the Second Amendment, parts of the private sector keep dabbling in behaving like a woke parallel government. Corporations will invite serious consequences if they become a vehicle for far-left mobs to hijack our country from outside the constitutional order.”
Critics of the law, including Democrats and a wave of companies, claim the changes will disenfranchise minority voters and have said that is the bill’s underlying intent.
In recent weeks, liberal activists in Georgia have pushed large companies headquartered in the state, such as Delta and Coca-Cola, to speak out about the reforms. President Joe Biden and Major League Baseball, which opted to move the 2021 All-Star Game out of Atlanta, have also lambasted the law.
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Many of those who oppose the law have echoed remarks from Biden, who likened the bill to “Jim Crow on steroids.”
McConnell on Monday said, “Nobody actually believes” the president’s characterization of the proposal, adding further that it is insensitive to compare the voting laws to the “horrific racist brutality of segregation.” McConnell referenced a Washington Post report that debunked some of Biden’s remarks, and he indicated that a vast majority of U.S. residents support voter ID and other measures included in the Georgia reforms signed off by Gov. Brian Kemp last month.
