You can tell Kentucky has no provisions to recall elected officials. Otherwise, his communications office would never have let Moscow Bitch Mitch McConnell make a statement just begging some Trumpier-than-thou recall campaigner to quote out of context his allegation about
… a coordinated campaign by powerful and wealthy people to mislead and bully the American people.
Right you are — this isn’t about the “Put-in the vote” campaign of Agent Orange and his rich backers. It’s part of what Forbes calls McConnell’s
… ominous warning of “serious consequences” to businesses that have spoken out against a new Georgia election law.
Like, for example, the Major League Baseball decision to outsource its All-Star game from the state now that black folks can’t hydrate while voting there. What might those serious consequences include, you ask?
… former President Donald Trump called for a boycott of all companies speaking out, Georgia lawmakers demanded the removal of Coca Cola drinks from their offices and some Congressional Republicans even threatened to target MLB with anti-trust legislation.
Hmm, Trump boycott, check; no coke in Republican Congressional offices (ha! just the drink, here), check; and — targeting individual businesses with legislation? Not everything in Article I is about Congressional powers. Among the thou-shalt-nots in Section 9 is the bit that:
3. No bill of attainder or ex post facto law shall be passed.
Of course, finding a way around “No bill of attainder” is probably pretty easy for someone able to convince the country that “by and with the advice and consent of the Senate” really means “at the sole discretion of the Senate majority leader.” But, still! MM & pals are treating baseball the way you might imagine Goebbels treating IG Farben if it had shut down all of its domestic chemical plants during World War II in protest. The point of corporatism is that corporations are supposed to play along.
The real problem, as Joan McCarter rightly points out in her DK article, is that the new law gives the Georgia state legislature appointment power over county and state electoral bodies that they could exercise at a moment’s notice and without the kind of due process you might think the framers had in mind. It
… replaces the elected secretary of state as the chief election authority with a nominee of the legislature, and expands the state’s power to take over county election boards.
So we start with a lie about election fraud that any politician could make but only one party’s national propaganda outlet, Fox Noise, would amplify. That party uses the lie in swing states to take away its constituents’ voting rights. And then the national party threatens to target private businesses protesting the reduction of its customers’ franchise. Republicans can’t be planning to contest that many more competitive elections even with the help of some of these new voting restrictions.