Michelle Goldberg on Marco Rubio:
Senator Marco Rubio is extremely mad at corporations for “bending a knee to woke progressive craziness,” and he’s going to do, well, something about it.
On Sunday, in a fulminating New York Post opinion article, Rubio wrote that “corporate America eagerly dumps woke, toxic nonsense into our culture, and it’s only gotten more destructive with time. These campaigns will be met with the same strength that any other polluter should expect.”
This analogy is slightly confusing, because usually corporate polluters should expect no pushback whatsoever from Republicans. But Rubio wants us to assume that his party thinks dumping toxic waste is bad. Big business, in Rubio’s telling, used to be patriotic, but now these companies offshore jobs — a trend that well predates Rubio’s sudden anti-corporate anger — and protest restrictions on voting rights, which Rubio describes as parroting “woke talking points.” That means Republicans should no longer offer corporations reflexive deference.
“Lawmakers who have been asleep at the wheel for too long, especially within my own party, need to wake up,” wrote Rubio.
And then what? Rubio doesn’t say.
If Republicans actually wanted to scare corporations into quiescence on social issues, they have a bunch of policy options. They could, for example, support President Biden’s plan to increase the corporate tax rate to 28 percent, from 21 percent, to help fund infrastructure. (It was 35 percent before Donald Trump’s tax cuts.) But Rubio’s not going to do that: He described Biden’s corporate tax proposal as part of “a radical agenda full of left-wing priorities.” When Senate Republicans unveiled their counterproposal on infrastructure, it called for “protecting against any corporate or international tax increases.”
Read the rest here.
