Within hours of news Tuesday that PayPal had pulled the plug on a 400-job facility in Charlotte because, it said, the state's new law "perpetuates discrimination," the Republican Party started a mad display of Yosemite-Sam style finger pointing.
First, the state's GOP Vice-Chairman Michele Nix questioned whether PayPal was ever even worthy of North Carolina.
So after PayPal was forced to settle after violating economic sanctions on Cuba, Sudan, and Iran, and even processed payments for someone looking to buy nuclear-weapon technology on the black market, the California-based company now has a problem doing business in North Carolina?
Yeah, we didn’t want your nasty 400-job expansion anyway. Hurrumph. Now those are some serious biz-dev skills. Work it, Michele!
My, how times have changed. Just a couple weeks ago, McCrory was singing PayPal's praises:
“North Carolina is the ideal destination for innovation-based, worldwide companies like PayPal,” said Governor McCrory. “Today’s announcement means that we can add another prominent name to the state’s growing list of technology businesses with major operations here.”
Shortly after Nix's meltdown, the GOP leaders of the state House and Senate, Speaker Tim Moore and Leader Phil Berger, went full-on delusional, blaming the PayPal loss on Charlotte’s mayor for passing the pro-LGBT ordinance state lawmakers overturned with their new statewide law.
"When Charlotte Mayor Jennifer Roberts teamed up with a convicted child sexual predator to pass a radical bathroom policy allowing men to use girls' locker rooms and bathrooms, the Governor warned her the legislature would take immediate action to protect North Carolina families. If Jennifer Roberts, [Attorney General] Roy Cooper and the far-left Political Correctness Mob she's unleashed really care about the economic future of her city, they'll stop the misinformation campaign immediately and start telling the truth about this commonsense bathroom safety law before more damage is done to the city she was elected to lead and the state Cooper was elected to protect."
Really, that's just such a jaw-dropping hornet's nest of lies all folded into one release that it's hard to know where to begin. But here's the main thing to know: Charlotte passed its pro-LGBTQ nondiscrimination ordinance on February 22; on March 18, PayPal announced its new 400-job facility would be coming to Charlotte; Gov. Pat McCrory signed the GOP's anti-LGBTQ hate bill repealing Charlotte's ordinance on March 24. And today, two weeks later, PayPal scrapped the expansion.
Oh, IDK, what's your sense of the causal relationship? If it's still the head-scratcher for you that it is for the North Carolina GOP, here's another hint from PayPal CEO Dan Schulman.
“We have been deliberating this decision for the past week or so,” Dan Schulman told the [Charlotte] Observer. “But with the passage of the bill, it really goes against the values of our company and we just couldn’t proceed forward.” [...] “We hope that the governor will reconsider and repeal HB2, and if he does so that Charlotte is obviously a community that we were looking forward to becoming an employer in,” he said.
Hmm... no mention of Mayor Roberts.
Makes no difference to the GOP bubble heads (yes, I’m coining a new phrase). Republican Lt. Gov. Dan Forest and Gov. McCrory also jumped into the finger-pointing parade. Forest charged that PayPal didn’t “see the worth of our children,” while McCrory blamed his Democratic rival for governor, Attorney General Roy Cooper.
Honestly, it's hard to fathom that the North Carolina Republican Party would expose just how unsophisticated it is in such a short amount of time, but it is literally unraveling before our very eyes and in spectacular fashion. The state's GOP leaders—who are supposedly pro-business—have now sent the message loud and clear that their pre-Enlightenment view of "family values" trumps any 21st-Century business ethic. Oh, and if you don't agree with them, they'll tar and feather you publicly.