The Right Way to Fight Back Against Georgia’s Voter-Suppression Law

Goldie Taylor has been working in and around Georgia politics for decades. So she knows firsthand the kind of stunt Republicans are trying to pull with this new voter-suppression law.

“What [Gov.] Brian Kemp will tell you, what other state GOP office holders will tell you, is that they’ve done this to restore confidence in the ballot. Poppycock. They have done it to keep people who don’t look like them, church like them, live like them, away from the voting booth,” Taylor tells Molly Jong-Fast on the latest edition of The New Abnormal.

Taylor knows a lot of her out-of-state friends are outraged, too. But their calls to boycott Georgia over this law? They’re just wrong, she says.

“Sometimes being an ally means shutting up,” Taylor continues. “As soon as this began to happen, we heard people, especially people in Hollywood, say, ‘Oh, we’re going to boycott Georgia until they stop this.’ Right. And both me and Dr. Bernice King stood up and immediately said, ‘No, you want to put the very people that you aim to help out of work in the middle of a pandemic. You’re going to make it so that they can’t recover in an effort to pay back a governor who won’t feel it.’”

“Sometimes you have to take on a whole state or a whole county or a whole country. I do believe in that,” she added. “In this case, that’s not where the leverage lies. In this case, the leverage lies in the direct contributions, the financial pipeline that greases the pockets of state house Republicans. Dry it up.

“How do you dry it up? You target their donors, big corporations: Coca-Cola, UPS, Home Depot, AT&T—all these companies who have huge footprints here in Georgia who are pouring money into our state house. You put pressure on them specifically. But what you don’t do is tell Major League Baseball to take a game out of the city, because who gets hurt? The people who are selling the popcorn, who parked the cars. People who scan your tickets. The people who can least likely afford it.”

Then! Punchbowl News co-founder Jake Sherman discusses why even people on the left need to take Jim Jordan seriously. And Talking Points Memo founder Josh Marshall talks about why “Washington is a town that is really wired for Republican governance.”

Listen to The New Abnormal on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and Amazon.