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      McConnell: ‘Highly unlikely’ I would let Biden fill supreme court seat in 2024

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      The Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, said on Monday it was “highly unlikely” he would allow Joe Biden to fill a supreme court vacancy arising in 2024, the year of the next presidential election, if Republicans regained control of the chamber.“I think it’s highly unlikely – in fact, no, I don’t think either party, if it were different from the president, would confirm a supreme court nominee in the middle of an election,” McConnell told Hugh Hewitt, a conservative radio host.McConnell blocked Barack Obama from filling a vacancy in 2016, denying Merrick Garland, now attorney general, even a hearing after he was nominated to fill the seat vacated by the death of Antonin Scalia.McConnell said that was because no new justice should be seated in an election year – a position he reversed with alacrity in 2020, on the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg two months before polling day.Ginsburg, a liberal lion, was replaced by the conservative Amy Coney Barrett, tipping the court 6-3 to the right. Major cases are coming up on abortion rights, gun control, affirmative action and more.McConnell claimed then, and repeated to Hewitt, that no new justice should be seated in an election year when the White House and the Senate are controlled by different parties.“I think in the middle of a presidential election,” McConnell said, “if you have a Senate of the opposite party of the president, you have to go back to the 1880s to find the last time a vacancy was filled.“So I think it’s highly unlikely. In fact, no, I don’t think either party if it controlled, if it were different from the president would confirm a supreme court nominee in the middle of an election. What was different in 2020 was we were of the same party as the president. And that’s why we went ahead with it.”Asked what would happen if a vacancy arose in 2023 with Republicans in control of the Senate, McConnell said: “We’ll have to wait and see what happens.”He also said keeping Scalia’s seat open – to be filled under Donald Trump by Neil Gorsuch – “is the single most consequential thing I’ve done in my time as majority leader of the Senate”.McConnell’s hardball tactics have contributed to his status as a hate figure among progressives. On Monday, much online reaction to his remarks focused on beseeching Stephen Breyer, a liberal and at 82 the oldest justice on the current court, to retire while Biden is in the White House and Democrats hold the Senate.Rick Hasen, a professor of law and political science at the University of California, Irvine, said: “Exactly as I wrote last week. McConnell will NOT fill a Breyer seat if he’s majority leader, even if he has to wait two years with the seat open.”Jeet Heer, a columnist for the Nation, wrote: “Can someone send this to USA supreme court justice Stephen Breyer. Thanks!”The conservative hold on the court was strengthened in 2018 when Anthony Kennedy, often a swing vote on civil rights issues, stepped down and was replaced by Brett Kavanaugh, once an official in the White House of George W Bush.Kavanaugh faced and denied allegations of sexual assault during a stormy confirmation but McConnell said he was “stronger than mule piss” in support and the process was duly completed.Breyer, appointed by Bill Clinton in 1994, has shown little inclination to follow Kennedy’s example and step aside for a younger justice.Last month, he angered some on the left by telling high school and middle school students the key to working with conservatives was to talk to them more.Among progressives, support is growing for countering conservative dominance of the court by increasing the number of justices. Republicans are stringently opposed.McConnell told Hewitt he wanted to give Breyer “a shout out, though, because he joined what Justice Ginsburg said in 2019, that nine is the right number for the supreme court, and I admire him for that. I think even the liberal justices on the supreme court have made it clear that court packing is a terrible idea.”The number of justices on the court is not fixed in the constitution. More

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      How Republicans came to embrace the big lie of a stolen election

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      Sign up for the Guardian’s Fight to Vote newsletterJust a few days after the polls closed in Florida’s 2018 general election, Rick Scott, then the state’s governor, held a press conference outside the governor’s mansion and made a stunning accusation.Scott was running for a US Senate seat, and as more votes were counted, his lead was dwindling. Targeting two of the state’s most Democratic-leaning counties, Scott said there was “rampant fraud”.“Every person in Florida knows exactly what is happening. Their goal is to mysteriously keep finding more votes until the election turns out the way they want,” he said, directing the state’s law enforcement agency to investigate. “I will not sit idly by while unethical liberals try to steal this election from the great people of Florida.”Scott eventually won the election, and his comments eventually faded. But the episode offered an alarming glimpse of the direction the Republican party was turning.A little over two years later, fanned repeatedly by Donald Trump throughout 2020, the myth of a stolen American election has shifted from a fringe idea to one being embraced by the Republican party. The so-called big lie – the idea that the election was stolen from Trump – has transformed from a tactical strategy to a guiding ideology.For years, civil rights groups and academics have raised alarm at the way Republican officials have deployed false claims of voter fraud as a political strategy to justify laws that restrict access to the ballot. But the way Republicans have embraced the myth of a stolen election since Trump’s loss in November, is new, they say, marking a dangerous turn from generalized allegations of fraud to refusing to accept the legitimacy of elections.Supporting the idea of a stolen election has become a new kind of litmus test for Republican officeholders.Republican election officials in Georgia and Nevada who have stood up for the integrity of the 2020 election results have been denounced by fellow Republicans. Republican lawmakers across the US have made pilgrimages to visit and champion an unprecedented inquiry into ballots in Arizona, which experts see as a thinly veiled effort to undermine confidence in the election. One hundred and forty-seven Republicans in the US House voted to overturn the results of the November election absent any evidence of voter fraud and after government officials said the 2020 election was the “most secure in American history”.“Voter suppression is not new, the battle lines have been drawn over that for quite some time. But this new concern about election subversion is really worrisome,” said Richard Hasen, a law professor at the University of California, Irvine, who studies election rules.The willingness to deny election results comes amid heightened concern that Republicans are maneuvering to take over offices that would empower them to block the winners of elections from being seated. Several Republicans who have embraced the idea that the election was stolen are running to serve as secretaries of state, the chief election official in many places, a perch from which they would exert enormous power over elections, including the power to hold up certifying races.We’ve had disputed elections in the past, but we’ve never had the denial of the basic mathematical reality of counting votes“I do think it’s a relatively new phenomenon, unfortunately, and disturbing,” said Edward Foley, a law professor at the Ohio State University who has written extensively about the history of contested elections in the US. “We’ve had disputed elections in the past, but we’ve never had the denial of the basic mathematical reality of counting votes.”The effort to undermine the election results appears to be working. A majority of Republicans, and a quarter of all Americans, believe Trump is the “true president”, according to a May Reuters/Ipsos poll. Sixty-one per cent of Republicans believe the election was “stolen” from Trump, the same poll showed.Rohn Bishop, the chairman of the local Republican party in Fond du Lac county in Wisconsin, said it was damaging to have such widespread uncertainty about the results of elections and was generally supportive of efforts to restore confidence. But he noted his dismay that Republicans continued to push lies about the election. He noted that the Republican party of Waukesha county, a bastion of GOP voters, recently hosted a screening of a film backed by Mike Lindell, a Trump ally and prominent election conspiracist, that pushed false claims of fraud.“We need to win back those suburban Republican voters that Waukesha county used to turn out, not keep poking them in the eye by forcing down their throat more of this election stuff, Trump stuff they don’t want to hear,” he said. “I don’t know why it’s so hard for Republican elected officials to tell the base the truth. That would help.”Alexander Keyssar, a Harvard historian who studies elections, noted that there was a long history in America of using fraud as an excuse to push back on gains in enfranchisement among Black and other minority voters. White voters are becoming a smaller share of the US electorate, data shows. “There are definitely echoes of this now,” he said. “There has always been an inclination to see new voters of different ethnicities or appearance as agents, or unwitting agents of fraud.”Mac Stipanovich, a longtime Republican operative in Florida who is now retired, said the lies about the election provided a kind of cover for those unable to concede they were a shrinking minority in the population.“In the past, party elders, party leaders … exploited the crazies in order to win elections and then largely ignored them after the elections,” he said. “What has happened since then is that Trump opened Pandora’s box and let them out. He not only let them out, he affirmed them and provoked them. And so now they’re running wild and they are legitimatizing these delusions.”While there have been other nastily contested elections in US history – President Rutherford B Hayes was labeled “Rutherfraud” and “His Fraudulency” after the contested election in 1876 – both Keyssar and Foley said it was difficult to find a comparison to what was happening now.“We’ve never had that. We’ve never had McCarthyism-style fabrication of a conspiracy theory applied to the process of counting votes … I would say it’s especially dangerous when it’s the electoral process,” Foley said. “Because it’s the electoral process that ultimately allows for self-government. When the mechanisms of self-government kind of get taken over by a kind of McCarthyism, that’s very troubling.” More

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      Burrito economics: Republican claims about price rises are so much hot air | Robert Reich

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      House Republicans are blaming Democrats for the rise in Chipotle burrito prices.You heard me right. The National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) issued a statement on Wednesday claiming that Chipotle’s recent decision to raise prices on their burritos and other menu products by about 4% was caused by Democrats.“Democrats’ socialist stimulus bill caused a labor shortage and now burrito lovers everywhere are footing the bill,” said an NRCC spokesman, Mike Berg.It seems Republicans have finally found an issue to run on in the 2022 midterm elections. Apparently Dr Seuss and Mr Potato Head weren’t gaining enough traction.The GOP’s tortured logic is that the unemployment benefits in the American Rescue Plan have caused workers to stay home rather than seek employment, resulting in labor shortages that have forced employers like Chipotle to increase wages, which has required them to raise their prices.Hence, Chipotle’s more expensive burrito.This isn’t just loony economics. It’s dangerously loony economics because it might be believed, leading to all sorts of stupid public policies.Start with the notion that $300 per week in federal unemployment benefits is keeping Americans from working.Since fewer than 30% of jobless workers qualify for state unemployment benefits, the claim is that legions of workers have chosen to become couch potatoes and collect $15,000 a year rather than get a job.Republicans have found an issue to run on. Apparently Dr Seuss and Mr Potato Head weren’t gaining enough tractionI challenge one Republican lawmaker to live on $15,000 a year.In fact, evidence suggests that workers who are holding back from re-entering the job market don’t have childcare or are still concerned about their health during the pandemic.Besides, if employers want additional workers, they can do what they necessarily do for anything they want more of but can’t obtain at its current price – pay more.It’s called capitalism. Republicans should bone up on it.When Chipotle wanted to attract more workers, it raised its average wage to $15 an hour. That comes to around $30,000 a year per worker – still too little to live on but double the federal unemployment benefit.Oh, and there’s no reason to suppose this wage hike forced Chipotle to raise the prices of its burrito. The company had other options.Chipotle’s executives are among the best paid in America. Its chief executive, Brian Niccol, raked in $38m last year – which happens to be 2,898 times more than the typical Chipotle employee. All Chipotle’s top executives got whopping pay increases.So it would have been possible for Chipotle to avoid raising its burrito prices by – dare I say? – paying its executives less. But Chipotle decided otherwise.I’m not going to second-guess Chipotle’s business decision – nor should the NRCC.By the way, I keep hearing Republican lawmakers say the GOP is the “party of the working class”. If that’s so, it ought to celebrate when hourly workers get a raise instead of howling about it.Everyone ought to celebrate when those at the bottom get higher wages.The typical American worker hasn’t had a real raise in four decades. Income inequality is out of control. Wealth inequality is into the stratosphere (where Jeff Bezos is heading, apparently).If wages at the bottom rise because employers need to pay more to get the workers they need, that’s not a problem. It’s a victory.Instead of complaining about a so-called “labor shortage”, Republicans ought to be complaining about the shortage of jobs paying a living wage.Don’t hold your breath, or your burrito. More

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      Joe Biden’s reforming agenda at risk of dying a slow death in Congress

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      Joe Biden’s first hundred days surpassed progressive expectations with the scope of their ambition. His second hundred days are being mugged by reality: the one that says Washington DC is a place where dreams go to die.A once-in-a-generation investment in infrastructure and the climate crisis has hit a wall. Reforms on gun safety, immigration and police brutality are in limbo. Legislation to expand voting rights and reduce the influence of money in politics appears doomed.The stalled agenda reflects Republican obstruction, Democratic disunity and the inherent messiness of “sausage-making” on Capitol Hill. But it also shines a light on taken-for-granted structures of American government and democracy that many argue are no longer fit for purpose because they favor gridlock and militate against sweeping change.“The American system of government is a beta form of democracy,” said Ezra Levin, a former congressional staffer who is co-executive director of the grassroots movement Indivisible. “We have a presidential system that hasn’t really substantially been updated since the 19th century.“Nobody designing a democracy today would create as many veto points as we have and nobody, including the original founders, would have developed a system like the Senate filibuster where theoretically senators representing 11% of the population can veto legislation that is wildly popular.”Much has been written about Biden’s prospects of emulating Franklin D Roosevelt (FDR) and Lyndon B Johnson (LBJ) with a transformational presidency and eclipse Barack Obama by throwing caution to the winds. The excitement only grew with the passage of a $1.9tn coronavirus relief package in March.But that, it transpires, was the exception not the rule. The Democrats’ progressive wing is becoming increasingly frustrated as other promises go unrealised, fearing an all-too-familiar pattern of hopes dashed and dreams deferred that will only feed anti-Washington resentment.Ro Khanna, a congressman from California who was a co-chair of Senator Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign, told the Associated Press: “There’s a lot of anxiety. It’s a question really for President Biden: what kind of president does he want to be?”Joe Biden won a fairly significant personal victory but the 2020 elections were hardly a victory for the Democratic party as a wholeThe first problem is that Biden does not have a Roosevelt-like majority in Congress. Democrats have only a wafer-thin advantage in the House of Representatives. The Senate is evenly divided between 50 Democrats and 50 Republicans, giving Vice-President Kamala Harris the tie-breaker vote. It is hardly a recipe for revolution.Bill Galston, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution thinktank in Washington, said: “There was always the brute fact that the Democrats had the slimmest margin in the House of Representatives they’ve enjoyed since the 1940s and you can’t get any closer in the Senate than a tie broken by the vice-president.“So the fact of the matter is that Joe Biden won a fairly significant personal victory but the 2020 elections were hardly a victory for the Democratic party as a whole. Anything but. So I really had to shake my head and chuckle when I read all of those early comparisons to FDR and LBJ.”The balance of power leaves Biden’s entire legislative agenda subject to the whims of any individual senator. He got a taste of this last weekend when Joe Manchin, a conservative Democrat from West Virginia, declared his opposition to the For the People Act, a voting rights bill that many activists regard as crucial to protecting democracy and a direct response to restrictive new voting laws being passed in Republican-led states.In a newspaper column, Manchin described the bill as the “wrong piece of legislation to bring our country together” and a barrier to Senate bipartisanship. This was despite polls showing clear support for it in his home state. His stand provoked anger among progressives and prompted civil rights leaders to meet Manchin on Tuesday.Mondale Robinson, founder of the Black Male Voter Project, a member of the Just Democracy coalition, said: “There is nothing partisan about this. What’s partisan is what’s happened since 2020 where you have Republican state legislatures proposing bills and enacting laws that will restrict Black and brown people all over this country from being able to participate in our democracy.“That’s sad to me. especially because some of the Black men that we talk to voted for the first time in 2020 in ways that are no longer legal in some of the states in this country, simply because Republicans saw that if they allow people to vote by mail or use drop boxes, which are some of the most secure ways to vote, they lose elections.”Manchin has also joined the Democratic senator Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona in publicly refusing to end the filibuster, a procedural rule that requires 60 votes to advance most legislation, meaning that at least 10 Republicans would need to cross party lines to help Democrats achieve their priorities. Some senators propose reducing the voting threshold to 51.Activists increasingly regard blowing up the filibuster as essential and fundamental. Robinson added: “The fact that Joe Biden has been more progressive than I thought is a testament to him understanding the moment and I feel like some other elected officials aren’t reading the tea leaves. Roosevelt had a majority that Joe Biden can only dream for and we don’t have those majorities right now.What our lawmaking process does is make it all but impossible to enact sweeping, comprehensive change“So what it all leads back to is a need to eliminate the filibuster. We need to continue to make it clear to Senator Manchin he has a choice to do something or do nothing, and then someone has to press upon him that history will remember those choices.”America’s founding fathers constructed a government of checks and balances that guarded against rash action: a chief executive, a bicameral Congress with veto power, an independent judiciary. Washington mythology held that they invented the filibuster to guard against the tyranny of the majority but this has repeatedly been debunked by scholars who say it was created by mistake and first used in 1837.William Howell, a political scientist at the Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago, said: “The framers didn’t create the filibuster. It’s excessive even by their standards.“What our lawmaking process does generally, and what the filibuster does in particular, is make it all but impossible to enact sweeping, comprehensive change. It leaves in its wake pervasive gridlock and sporadic opportunity to make incremental changes and that’s about it.”Every major piece of legislation successfully enacted over the past decade has circumvented the filibuster through a process called budget reconciliation, Howell noted. This tool may allow Democrats to go it alone with the American Jobs Plan, which would invest heavily in bridges, railways and roads, “soft” infrastructure such as caregiving and clean energy.Sheldon Whitehouse, a Democratic senator for Rhode Island, tweeted that he is “nervous” about Congress doing too little to address the climate crisis. “We must get Senate Dems unified on climate on a real reconciliation bill, lest we get sucked into ‘bipartisanship’ mud where we fail on climate,” he wrote.The filibuster is hardly the only design fault. It comes on top of a Senate that is deeply unrepresentative because each state gets two seats, no matter the size of its population. That means small, predominantly white states carry as much heft as huge, racially diverse states such as California. An effort to make the District of Columbia the 51st state would begin to redress the balance but Manchin has again vowed opposition.Levin, the Indivisible organiser, said: “The 50 Democratic senators represent 41 million more Americans than the 50 Republican senators. I think anybody objectively looking at how legislation is passed in this country has to come away with the conclusion that we are not set up to tackle 21st-century problems with a 19th-century democracy.”I don’t think it’s fair to say that an op-ed from a single senator dictates the future of that legislationDespite these headwinds, Levin is not giving up on Biden’s progressive project, pointing out that Democratic presidents have been here before. In 1964, under Johnson, the Civil Rights Act passed the Senate after overcoming a 54-day filibuster, and the following year the Voting Rights Act took more than a month of full Senate debate to escape the threat.“Neither of those things were passed with the snap of a finger,” he said. “It is fair to say the For the People Act is a tough fight. I don’t think it’s fair to say that an op-ed from a single senator dictates the future of that legislation. It’s always easy to be cynical about these things but there’s reason to hope. There are very real pathways forward to get this done.”Groups supporting the legislation intend to press ahead with a $30m campaign pressing Democratic senators to rewrite filibuster rules and pass the bill. Manchin has talked about supporting another voting bill, the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, but activists insist that both pieces of legislation are needed.LaTosha Brown, co-founder of Black Voters Matter, said: “What we are seeing is that, as America becomes younger and more diverse, the reality is we currently do not have a political infrastructure that can support the kind of democracy that is laid out in the constitution where people have free and fair access to the ballot.“We need the For the People Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Act as a step closer to strengthening our democracy and protecting those elements that have literally been fought and won through protest, through giving of lives.” More

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      Pelosi urges Senate Democrats to back voting rights bill and ‘save democracy’

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      Nancy Pelosi is urging congressional Democrats not to abandon their marquee voting-rights legislation in favor of a narrower bill, as the House speaker attempts to stave off opposition to the embattled measure from members of the party in the Senate.Pelosi said on a caucus call on Thursday that Democrats needed to prioritize HR1 – the sweeping election reform bill known as the For the People Act – to save American democracy, according to a source familiar with the matter.The legislation is teetering on the brink of collapse in the Senate after Joe Manchin, a key conservative Democrat, said he would not back the bill, nor vote to eliminate the filibuster rule that would ease its passage.But Pelosi said on the call that she was holding out hope that Senate Democrats could persuade Manchin to support the measure and force the legislation through.“I have not given up on Manchin,” Pelosi told her colleagues, according to the source.The rare, personal move from Pelosi to influence events in the Senate reflects the deep alarm among Democratic leadership about the rapidly diminishing chances of the bill passing into law in the wake of Manchin’s announcement.It also marks the second time in three days that Pelosi reiterated her position, after pressing the issue in a letter to her Democratic colleagues on Tuesday.“We are at an urgent moment because of the Republican assault on our democracy,” Pelosi said in the letter, adding that the legislation “must become law in order to respect the sanctity of the vote, which is the basis of our democracy”.In the national struggle for voting rights, Democrats have rested their hopes for rolling back dozens of new voter restrictions passed by Republican state legislatures to limit early and mail-in voting, and empower partisan poll watchers, on HR1.The 818-page bill would expand ballot access and tighten controls on campaign spending. It would also end the president’s exemption from conflict-of-interest rules, which allowed Donald Trump to maintain businesses that profited off his presidency.Manchin has said instead that he would support the passage of a narrower election reform bill, the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, which would restore federal oversight over state-level election law struck down by the supreme court in 2013.But Pelosi noted sharply in her letter that the John Lewis bill was “not a substitute” for HR1, and stressed it would not be ready until after the summer as it undergoes intensive vetting to prepare for expected legal challenges.The John Lewis bill also faces further hurdles after the Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, condemned the measure as Democratic power grab, all but ensuring it will be defeated by an expected Republican filibuster.The Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, has vowed to force a vote on House-passed HR1 towards the end of June, but with Manchin’s vow to oppose the measure, the prospects of its passage in the Senate now appear all but impossible.Pelosi has remained undeterred. “HR1 must be passed now,” she said in the letter. More

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      Texas business leaders reluctant to take sides in heated voting rights battle

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      After Democrats derailed one of Texas’s most restrictive voting bills at the 11th hour – all but guaranteeing yet another partisan showdown in the near future – business leaders in the state have gone eerily silent as they plot their next steps.“Now would be a good time for them to say something like, ‘We’re glad it was defeated, we’re hoping that this does not move forward into a special session’,” said Cliff Albright, co-founder and executive director of the Black Voters Matter Fund.“They can actually be proactive.”With a whopping 49 restrictive voting bills, Texas led a countrywide charge to undermine voter access, even as voting rights advocates warned the proposals amounted to a new version of Jim Crow and would disproportionately disenfranchise voters of color.The targeted attack on voting rights sparked national outrage, including among the local business community, until Democratic lawmakers walked out of the Texas House to block Senate Bill 7 – one of the most controversial, far-reaching measures.But their last-minute maneuver has already set the stage for legislative overtime, rendering celebrations premature and forcing risk-averse corporate executives to consider whether they’ll re-enlist in the fight for round two.“If the fight is still ongoing, I think most businesses are gonna hold their fire, for lack of a better term, until they understand whether or not this thing is gonna come back – and in what form, and at what pace,” said Nathan Ryan, co-founder and CEO of Blue Sky Partners, which is part of the Fair Elections Texas coalition of business and civic leaders.Though timing remains unclear, Texas’ Republican governor Greg Abbott has expressed his intention to reconvene the state legislature for a special session, forcing lawmakers to address so-called “election integrity” after SB7’s failure.The sweeping legislation threatened public officials with state jail felonies for soliciting or distributing unrequested vote-by-mail applications, banned 24-hour and drive-thru voting, and made it easier to overturn an election, among other provisions.Already, Texas has earned the unenviable title as the hardest place to vote in the United States. Further obstacles to the polls could prove disastrous for the state’s economy, in part by making it harder to recruit workers, cutting into productive work time, alienating major events or conferences and deterring would-be tourists.“I certainly know, when I make my travel plans, if I was thinking about going to Texas, I wouldn’t want to go,” Albright said.By 2025, measures restricting voter access would cause Texas to shed an estimated $14.7bn in annual gross product and more than 73,000 jobs from lower earnings, employment losses and reduced household purchasing power.An additional $16.7bn and 149,644 jobs would be lost from hits to tourism and economic development, according to economic research and analysis firm The Perryman Group.That financial blowback would persist for decades, with a cumulative drop in gross product in the trillions by 2045. It would also slice tax revenue, costing state and local entities billions.“Voter suppression is bad for business. Period. It’s bad for business, it’s bad for the economy,” Albright said.During the regular session, corporate giants and local businesses alike waded into the political debate to make rare public remarks discouraging attempts to roll back voting rights.In a letter by Fair Elections Texas, dozens of coalition members – including American Airlines, Microsoft, HP, Salesforce, Etsy and Patagonia – urged elected officials to “oppose any changes that would restrict eligible voters’ access to the ballot”.“We wanted to make a strong statement against any kind of legislation that would make voting less convenient, and cause lower turnout as a result,” Ryan said.Separately, Dell Technologies lambasted state lawmakers for trying to silence citizens’ voices, while American Airlines “strongly opposed” Texas’s restrictive voting bills.“At American, we believe we should break down barriers to diversity, equity and inclusion in our society – not create them,” the Fort Worth-based airline said in a statement.Texas’s Republican leaders hit back with bitter barbs that verged on intimidation, questioning companies’ understanding of the legislation and hinting at retaliation.“They need to stay out of politics, especially when they have no clue what they’re talking about,” Abbott said.“They might come down the street next session, have a bill they want us to pass for them. Good luck!” Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick added.Those incendiary comments likely influenced companies that ultimately decided against speaking out – and may have even chilled activism among some that had already made statements, Albright said.But “it’s not like these businesses just have to be completely intimidated by these threats coming from these governors, right?” he added. “’Cause at the end of the day, these governors need these businesses.”As company executives stare down the near-inevitability of a special session, Ryan believes the appetite remains to push back against voting restrictions.Part of that boils down to the potential for financial losses if a measure such as SB7 becomes law. But it’s also about safeguarding their employees and community members.“Companies don’t see this as Democratic party vs. Republican party. They truly do see this as small ‘d’ democratic,” Ryan said. “It’s the main civil right in our country.” More