Where's the Outrage?

William Trachman makes a trenchant observation at The Federalist. He notes that in the wake of new voter integrity laws promulgated this year in both Georgia and Texas there was much virtue preening by our corporate CEOs and outrage from the left over what they characterized as even worse, in the words of President Biden, than the historical racial segregation in the deep South, commonly referred to as Jim Crow.

Trachman notes that,

Democrats and leaders of global corporations ... struck back, even convincing Major League Baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred to take away the All-Star game from Atlanta. Biden unequivocally supported moving the game out of Georgia. The move sadly cost businesses in Atlanta millions of dollars in revenue. For Major League Baseball, though, that price wasn’t too high to pay in order to make their point.

When Georgia passed its voter reforms last March failed Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams even called for a boycott of her state, and there was a great deal of indignation expressed by our corporate big wigs:

Corporations based in Atlanta, like Delta, Coca-Cola, and ViacomCBS, publicly opposed the bill. A large virtual meeting was attended by more than 100 corporate CEOs, some of whom were coincidentally in Georgia for the Masters golf tournament which carried on as usual.

Evidently, the CEOs weren't going to allow something like moral punctilio to interfere with their golf outing.

Similarly, in Texas, Democrat state legislators fled the state to try to stop the state’s voting bill; the method temporarily succeeded by depriving the legislature of a quorum.

The legislators instead fled to Washington, D.C., by private jet to lobby for the passage of sweeping federalization of voting laws — embodied in a bill commonly referred to as H.R.1 — which would have required every Democratic senator to vote to end the filibuster. They failed.

But now, as it happens, both Texas and Georgia have teams playing in the World Series and it seems someone must've pulled the plug on the outrage machine. There are no calls to boycott the series or to have the games played elsewhere. No corporate CEOs are threatening to move their headquarters to other states. Delta isn't blustering about cancelling flights to Houston or Atlanta.

It's as if all of the indignation over the allegedly atrocious voter integrity laws simply evaporated like a fad that consumes the popular interest for a moment and then suddenly disappears.

Trachman raises the relevant questions:

And where does that leave President Biden and all the other critics of Georgia and Texas? If the state-based voter integrity laws are truly worse than racial segregation ... it hardly makes sense for critics to stay silent as these teams host the World Series. Why should a boycott stop at the All-Star game, for instance, if the dire warnings of voter suppression and racial discrimination were accurate?

The question is whether Biden, Abrams, and Manfred have the courage of their convictions. Why didn’t they call for the World Series to be moved to a location outside of either Georgia or Texas?

Why hasn’t Manfred boycotted the games? Instead, he’s been attending them in person.

The answer, of course, is that they knew all along that their dire warnings were mere partisan rhetoric.

"Partisan rhetoric," we may suppose, is intended by Trachman as a euphemism for contemptible dishonesty.