Inside the GOP playbook: Attack ‘woke’ corporations, protect their low tax rates

Inside the GOP playbook: Attack ‘woke’ corporations, protect their low tax rates

Washington Post 

Opinion by 

Greg Sargent

Columnist

April 15, 2021 at 12:00 a.m. GMT+9

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) (Stefani Reynolds/Getty Images)

You may have heard that Republicans are raging against “woke” corporations a whole lot these days. Republicans are furious over corporate America’s public defense of the voting rights of African Americans and over Big Tech’s supposed suppression of conservative voices.

You may have also heard that Republicans are adamantly opposed to raising taxes on woke corporations. This includes opposing efforts to tax corporate monopoly rents and curb international tax avoidance.

Oddly, these two stories are often treated as distinct. Yet this juxtaposition itself explains a great deal about our politics right now, in obvious and hidden ways.

CNBC reports on new details about the GOP campaign against corporate America. Top Republican donors and strategists are discussing developing a broader strategy, possibly including new social media platforms for conservatives.

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These would apparently attack corporate criticism of GOP voting restrictions — such as the ones in Georgia — and challenge supposed corporate censorship of conservatives. As one GOP donor put it, this will help conservatives “control their own destiny.”

Meanwhile, congressional Republicans are digging in against President Biden’s plan to reverse some of the 2017 GOP tax cuts, which would raise corporate tax rates and limit the sheltering of revenue abroad to help fund the $2 trillion infrastructure package.

We’re now learning that GOP opposition may prove unanimous. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) is flatly declaring that there won’t be “much if any sentiment among Senate Republicans for undoing the 2017 tax bill.” Another GOP senator derides tax hikes as “an almost impossible sell.”

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These two things aren’t necessarily contradictory. It’s possible to condemn corporate positions on voting rights and platform moderation while also arguing that keeping corporate tax rates low is of towering importance to the public good, as Republicans say they believe.

Instead, in tandem these two stories illustrate something else: The degree to which today’s GOP is almost entirely focused on maintaining power through anti-democratic means, at the exclusion of adopting policy positions that might win majority support.

The GOP’s real ‘autopsy’

A new piece by Jonathan Last of the Bulwark helps make sense of this. Last argues that the frequent claim that Republicans didn’t conduct an autopsy into their 2020 losses is off base.

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In reality, Last says, Republicans are conducting such an autopsy — a crowdsourced effort, not an official party committee one — and they are reaching a conclusion about how to win back power.

The rub is that that this conclusion has passed over what such autopsies conventionally do, i.e., figure out how to appeal to more voters. Instead, Last argues, Republicans are “leapfrogging the question of how to get more votes and focusing on how to use institutional leverage to take power even while losing popular majorities.”

This includes the wave of voter-suppression efforts across the country. It includes the explicit declaration that extreme gerrymanders can enable Republicans to win the House, which experts say could happen even if Democrats win the national 2022 popular vote for the House.

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It includes primary challenges to Republican election officials for attesting to the integrity of 2020 GOP losses. Some of these challenges are brazenly premised on the suggestion that Republicans must succeed in overturning despised election outcomes next time.

Above all, Last says, this includes maintaining fealty to the Big Lie that the 2020 election was illegitimate — not because such mythmaking feels good, but rather to build the “political will to use raw power” over election machinery to swing hated results, to the maximal degree possible.

This clarifies a great deal about the GOP war with corporate America.

The GOP two-step

Republicans claim to support infrastructure repair, but they won’t support corporate tax hikes to pay for it. They probably won’t support deficit spending, either, given that they’re already fake-screaming about deficits on Biden’s watch.

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If and when virtually all congressional Republicans — if not all — oppose Biden’s plan, they will be opposing extremely popular ideas. Yet they will also be siding on this matter with much of corporate America, which is lining up in opposition to Biden’s proposed tax hikes.

That could keep campaign contributions rolling in, though it’s still unclear what this rift will mean on that front. Yet it will trap the GOP on the wrong side of the public debate.

In a surprise twist, it’s arguably the truly radical nature of the GOP turn against democracy that has pushed corporate America to the point of condemning the Republican voting restrictions as vocally as it has.

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Yet this corporate outspokenness poses a problem for Republicans. It’s shining a harsh light on their tactics, which could backfire among suburban swing voters and provoke a counter-mobilization among Democratic constituencies.

This helps explain the vociferousness of the GOP attacks on “woke” corporations for speaking in defense of voting rights. Those attacks mobilize GOP constituencies, but with a little luck, they might also cow some corporations into backing off.

Indeed, the New York Times reports that some big corporations are treading carefully precisely due to these GOP attacks. In Georgia, some that initially spoke up have refrained from signing a new statement condemning voter suppression:

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People involved in the process said some of the Atlanta companies that did not sign were wary because of the blowback they had received after their earlier statements on voting rights but also did not feel the need to speak again.

There you have it. Republicans are attacking “woke” corporations to get them to stop highlighting the GOP’s embrace of anti-democratic tactics. Those in turn are necessary to win back power even as Republicans stick to highly unpopular policy positions — such as defending the low tax rates of those same corporations.

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