Little Marco positions himself as Josh Hawley with 10% less smarm
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As Michelle Goldberg observes, let us dispel with the fiction that there is any substantive content at all to Marco Rubio’s bullshit-populism:
On Sunday, in a fulminating New York Post opinion article, Rubio wrote that “corporate America eagerly dumps woke, toxic nonsense into our culture, and it’s only gotten more destructive with time. These campaigns will be met with the same strength that any other polluter should expect.”
This analogy is slightly confusing, because usually corporate polluters should expect no pushback whatsoever from Republicans. But Rubio wants us to assume that his party thinks dumping toxic waste is bad. Big business, in Rubio’s telling, used to be patriotic, but now these companies offshore jobs — a trend that well predates Rubio’s sudden anti-corporate anger — and protest restrictions on voting rights, which Rubio describes as parroting “woke talking points.” That means Republicans should no longer offer corporations reflexive deference.
“Lawmakers who have been asleep at the wheel for too long, especially within my own party, need to wake up,” wrote Rubio.
And then what? Rubio doesn’t say.
If Republicans actually wanted to scare corporations into quiescence on social issues, they have a bunch of policy options. They could, for example, support President Biden’s plan to increase the corporate tax rate to 28 percent, from 21 percent, to help fund infrastructure. (It was 35 percent before Donald Trump’s tax cuts.) But Rubio’s not going to do that: He described Biden’s corporate tax proposal as part of “a radical agenda full of left-wing priorities.” When Senate Republicans unveiled their counterproposal on infrastructure, it called for “protecting against any corporate or international tax increases.”
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If that logic has fallen apart, you might expect Rubio to back the Protecting the Right to Organize Act, a pro-labor bill in Congress. It would impose penalties on companies that retaliate against workers trying to organize a union, weaken laws that stop unions from collecting mandatory dues, and force companies to classify some contractors as employees. Rubio, however, opposes the PRO Act, writing last month that it would compel “adversarial relations between labor and management.”
Look, if corporations don’t stop coming out with tepid denunciations of Republican vote suppression efforts, Rubio will be forced to write some stern op-eds while voting to distribute as much money to corporate interests and the plutocrats who control them as possible. They must be really terrified.
The dark irony is that corporate America can’t afford to be as insulated from the preferences of the majority of Americans as the Republican Party is:
Because of gerrymandering and the small-state bias in the Senate, Republicans can afford to antagonize young people, people in cities and most people of color. Consumer businesses cannot. The Republican Party doesn’t have to care what the majority of Americans think. Public-facing corporations largely do. This creates a tension between Republicans’ foundational economic interests and ideology and their cultural grievances.
Gerrymandering and malapportionment are bad for democracy because they’re unfair, but also because they inherently reduce the democratic responsiveness of the elected officials who benefit from it.