A PETTIS BRIDGE TOO FAR:

This is a significant development in U.S. politics. Traditionally, U.S. corporations have tended to march in lockstep with the Republican Party.

Corporations have always appreciated the basic deal: Republicans would deliver on low taxes and less regulation. In exchange, corporations basically stayed silent even about egregious political choices made by the Republicans.

That long-term deal may now be weakening. Why? Because the extremism to which Republicans are prepared to go in the pursuit of their political goals apparently knows no boundaries.

Corporate heroes?

The first time in recent memory that U.S. corporations took a principled stance occurred in late January 2021.

Quite a few of them announced that they would stop campaign contributions to any of the Congressional Republicans who had refused to certify the U.S. presidential election.

Trump's dark shadow

The change in corporate attitudes hardened after the Georgia State Legislature passed a law in late March to undermine fair elections by restricting voters' access to the polls and putting partisan officials in charge of the vote counting.

Beyond opening the doors to a grotesque politicization of the vote-counting process, the goal is to keep minorities away from the ballot box. This end is achieved by imposing all sorts of onerous requirements on the right to vote.

The point of it all is to "fix" election results in advance in favor of the Republican Party by weeding out voters from certain ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds as well as those in urban areas, like Atlanta and Savannah, that are likely to vote Democratic.

Corporations: No longer staying out of politics

The stance taken by corporations is an important choice. Until now, most corporations have followed the (internal) rule that they may comment on matters of policy, but not on politics per se.

While voting rights are certainly a policy matter, they are also very directly interwoven with the sphere of politics.

Democracy and corporate brand values

Evidently, these corporations are concerned about the knock-on effects of being associated with a state government or a political party engaged in passing such evidently racist legislation.

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