I thought about jumping into editorializing right away but the news story speaks for itself, or at least it should. In what CBS assures us was a “First-of-its-kind-meeting” (methinks the lady doth protest too much, yes, I’m already editorializing a little):

More than 100 of the nation’s top corporate leaders met virtually on Saturday to discuss ways for companies to continue responding to the passage of more restrictive voting laws across the country, a signal that the nation’s premier businesses are preparing a far more robust, organized response to the ongoing debate. 

With some CEOs chiming in from Augusta National Golf Club, site of the Masters golf tournament, attendees on the high-level Zoom call included leaders from the health care, media and transportation sectors and some of the nation’s leading law and investment firms.

Representing hundreds of billions, if not trillions of dollars (Georgia’s tax revenues in 2020 were $23.7 billion), this little cabal should remind us that combinations and trusts emerging in the private sector do not stay in the much-vaunted, semi-mythic private sector. Collusion will protect itself in whatever domains it deems necessary, and states can be made an example of.

Those who recall the treatment of Indiana in 2015 over RFRA legislation should not be surprised by this massed-money mobilization in reaction to an attempt at underwhelming electoral reform. To put recalcitrant red states back in their place, corporate muscle has been flexed before. They still got uppity enough to elect Donald Trump, however, and it was too close for comfort the second time. It seems there was need for a reminder.

Much like the security state’s pivot from funding and fighting terrorism abroad to funding and fighting purported terrorists at home, it’s back to the neoconservative playbook, but this time, domestically. Jonah Goldberg, drumming up support for the disaster in Iraq in 2002, coined what he called the “Ledeen Doctrine” to encapsulate our insane relationship to the idea of credibility; it states, “Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business.” Lately it has been business’s turn, on a more condensed timeline, to occasionally pick up some small crappy little conservative state and throw it against the wall, just to show the world they mean it, too. This tends to be bad for state self-government, but because Republican politicians are, as a rule, both spineless and brainless, they tend to survive the blunt-force trauma just fine (Indiana’s governor even became the vice president). If politics ever stops working out for them perhaps they can be crash test dummies. 

Hope springs eternal in the human breast and all that, though, so there’s a chance a few are alright, but I’m not yet certain. Senator Josh Hawley introduced a bill yesterday called the “Trust-Busting For the 21st Century Act.” The proposed legislation would ban mergers and acquisitions by companies with more than $100 billion market cap. It would also empower the FTC to prohibit Big Tech from buying out up-and-coming competition, and would force corporations that lose antitrust lawsuits to forfeit money made with monopoly. 

Explicitly drawing the connection between economic power and political power, as well as economic collusion and political collusion, Hawley called out the 100 tyrants, too. CBS quotes the Missouri senator as saying of the corporate Zoom meeting (all that money and still using Zoom?):

Their efforts to influence or outright stop voting laws in various states, this is indicative I think of the kind of very significant and growing political power that the largest concentrated corporations the mega corporations have in this country and are willing to use today.

Hawley, who once wrote a biography of Theodore Roosevelt, appears to have realized the sort of soft speech allowed by a tone-policing bipartisan establishment requires Republican lawmakers to find a big stick of their own. It’s bust or be busted.