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

  • Oops!
    Something went wrong.
    Please try again later.
  • Oops!
    Something went wrong.
    Please try again later.
The Daily Beast
·2 min read
  • Oops!
    Something went wrong.
    Please try again later.
  • Oops!
    Something went wrong.
    Please try again later.
Photo Illustration by The Daily Beast/Getty
Photo Illustration by The Daily Beast/Getty

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.”

Listen to Bonus Episodes of The New Abnormal Podcast

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.

Read more at The Daily Beast.

Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!

Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.

Recommended Stories

  • Growing calls for boycott of Georgia-based businesses over voting law

    Critics of Georgia’s restrictive voting law are putting pressure on businesses based in the state to publicly oppose the law.

  • Syrian who fled to Germany drops out of race for parliament

    A Syrian man who came to Germany as an asylum-seeker in 2015 and was running for a seat in parliament in his new country's September election said Tuesday that he is withdrawing his candidacy. Tareq Alaows, who joined the Green party last year and was running as its candidate in a constituency in western Germany in the Sept. 26 vote, said in a statement that he made his decision for personal reasons. “The high threat level for me but especially for people close to me is the most important reason for withdrawing my candidacy,” Alaows wrote, without elaborating.

  • Kemp hits back at the left threatening to boycott Georgia

    Georgia governor explains new voting law creating controversy among Democrats on 'Fox News Primetime'

  • Auto industry urges Biden to back 'comprehensive' EV plan

    Major automakers, parts companies and the United Auto Workers (UAW) union urged U.S. President Joe Biden to support a "comprehensive plan" on electric vehicles and called for hefty government tax credits and numerous other financial incentives. The requests, made in a six-page letter dated March 29, come as Biden is set to unveil on Wednesday a $3 trillion or more infrastructure proposal that could include significant support for manufacturing and charging electric vehicles (EVs). The letter from the UAW and two major auto industry trade groups noted there are currently only 1.5 million EVs out of 278 million registered passenger U.S. vehicles.

  • ‘Obi-Wan Kenobi’ Starts Filming in April with Benny Safdie and 9 More Actors Joining the Cast

    Joel Edgerton and Bonnie Piesse are set to reprise their "Star Wars" roles of Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru.

  • Americans want the government to buy U.S.-made goods, even if they cost more

    Yet a large majority think the government should do so. A new Reuters-Ipsos poll found 63% of Americans want U.S. agencies to buy American-made products in general, even if they cost significantly more, and 62% think the government should strictly buy U.S.-made vaccines. It also underscores a challenge facing the Biden administration, which has vowed to bolster manufacturers of crucial safety goods and pharmaceuticals as part of its larger push to revive the U.S. factory sector.

  • Biden: Georgia voting restriction law is 'atrocity'

    The president criticises new voting restrictions, saying they resemble past racist laws of the South.

  • UN: Increase in child migrants through dangerous Darien Gap

    The number of child migrants passing through the perilous Darien Gap between Colombia and Panama has risen dramatically, the U.N. child welfare agency said Monday. While underage migrants made up only about 2% of those using the jungle corridor in 2017, in 2020 children comprised 25% of the migrants making the hard trek on foot, UNICEF's report said. “I have seen women coming out of the jungle with babies in their arms after walking for more than seven days without water, food or any type of protection,” said Jean Gough, the UNICEF regional director who made a two-day trip to the zone.

  • EXPLAINER: Pandemic shapes ex-officer's trial in Floyd death

    The trial of former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin in George Floyd 's death is being conducted under special circumstances due to the coronavirus pandemic. The biggest single difference is that the trial is televised, which is common in many states but not in Minnesota. Minnesota allows cameras in court, but only when the prosecution and defense agree — something that hasn't happened before in trials where interest was high enough that cameras were even considered.

  • Corporations, wealthy pay in Biden infrastructure plan, not drivers and riders

    President Joe Biden's plans to spend billions of dollars on the United States' crumbling roads and mass transit include a novel twist - making companies and wealthy households, rather than drivers and riders, pay the cost. Biden will unveil more details about the first stage of his infrastructure plan, which could be worth as much as $4 trillion, in Pittsburgh on Wednesday. Business groups and lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have been pushing Biden to raise U.S. fuel taxes, some of the lowest in the world, for the first time since 1993.

  • Leo Terrell pans Democrats for invoking Jim Crow to push voter laws: 'It's offensive'

    Civil Rights attorney Leo Terrell tells Democrats to stop comparing Georgia voting law to Jim Crow laws.

  • Mafioso on the run caught after showing off Italian cooking skills on YouTube

    Marc Feren Claude Biart led ‘quiet life’ after alleged involvement in ‘Ndrangheta clan’s drug trafficking network

  • In The Loop: Chase Young on Family Feud, Dez Bryant works out at SMU

    Jordan Giorgio keeps you In The Loop with some of the greatest moments going on in the sports world right now.

  • Just keep swimming! Rescued sea turtles swim home after months of rehabilitation

    These cold-stunned Kemp's ridley sea turtles were re-introduced back into the warm Gulf of Mexico after they were rescued by the Houston Zoo back in December.

  • Ukraine says Russian military buildup threatens its security

    Russia is building up armed forces near Ukraine's borders in a threat to the country's security, Ukrainian Commander-in-Chief Ruslan Khomchak said on Tuesday, accusing Moscow of pursuing an "aggressive policy" towards Kyiv. In remarks to parliament, Khomchak also accused pro-Moscow separatists of systematically violating a ceasefire in the conflict in eastern Ukraine agreed in July 2020. Ukraine and Russia have traded blame for a spike in violence in the conflict, which Kyiv says has killed 14,000 people since 2014.

  • German state suspends AstraZeneca vaccine use for under-60s

    The German state of Berlin has again suspended the use of AstraZeneca’s coronavirus vaccine for those aged under 60 due to new reports of unusual blood clots in people who have received the shots, officials said Tuesday. The decision was taken as a precaution ahead of a meeting later Tuesday of representatives from all of Germany’s 16 states and further recommendations expected from national medical regulators, said Berlin’s top health official, Dilek Kalayci. The meeting was called after the country’s medical regulator announced that it had received a total of 31 reports of rare blood clots in people who recently received the vaccine.

  • Miami man arrested after 12-year-old boy raped and shot in face, police say

    A 43-year-old man was arrested Tuesday in connection with the abduction, rape and shooting of a 12-year-old boy in Brownsville, police said.

  • Trump's heir? Pence reemerges, lays groundwork for 2024 run

    When former President Donald Trump was asked to list those he considers the future leaders of the Republican Party, he quickly rattled off names including Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and Sens. Conspicuously absent from the list: Mike Pence. For someone who built a reputation as one of Trump's most steadfast supporters, Pence is now viewed with suspicion among many Republicans for observing his constitutional duty in January to facilitate a peaceful transfer of power to the Biden administration, a decision that still has Trump fuming.

  • Jimmy Kimmel roasts Trump's unbelievably sober 'drunken wedding toast' at Mar-a-Lago

    Jimmy Kimmel joked on Monday's Kimmel Live that he spent his last week off on a very slow cruise through the Suez Canal. "I have to say, after all the fighting and the tooth-gnashing over the last few years, it was nice to see the whole world come together to make fun of a boat," he said. "They say we might have a shortage of coffee and toilet paper. The good news is without one you might not need the other, but still it's crazy that something like this can bring the world of commerce to a halt." "Former members of Donald Trump's pandemic team are speaking out," telling CNN "the death toll could have been much lower if the Trump administration had take the virus more seriously," Kimmel said. "So today Trump responded with a letter" essentially proving their case. "Meanwhile, President Biden today announced that within three weeks, 90 percent of American adults will be eligible to get the vaccine," he said, and "75 percent of Americans — including a majority of Republicans — approve of the way Biden has handled the rollout of the vaccine, which is driving them absolutely nuts in Trumpland." He illustrated this with Eric Trump on Fox News. "Eric loves saying 'my father' — he says 'father' more times in one interview than I did in seven years as an altar boy," Kimmel said. "Will somebody please take that kid fishing already? If they weren't so terrible, this would be the saddest family in the world. And while Eric is pleading for credit on cable TV, Daddy Donny stopped into a wedding at Mar-a-Lago — he rents his house out for weddings," he chuckled, and "had some beautiful words for the bride and groom." "I love this so much," Kimmel said, playing the video of Trump's self-involved toast. "It is a wedding! I used to be a DJ at weddings when I was in college, I've seem some weird toasts, never have I seen one like this. How can you give a drunken wedding toast when you don't even drink?" So that's what Trump "does now: he babbles at weddings, he complains," he said. "Whenever someone plays the song 'YMCA' he magically appears, like Beetlejuice." Kimmel ended with a PSA about how to re-acclimate to society after the pandemic, and you can watch that below. More stories from theweek.comThe case for trailer parksBiden is nominating his 1st slate of federal judges, including a successor to Merrick GarlandHate cancel culture? Stop supporting the GOP.

  • After suing Fox News for $1.6 billion, Dominion says it could file lawsuits against other media outlets and even Trump

    Dominion Voting Systems could sue other media outlets beyond Fox News, as well as individual Fox personalities, its attorney Tom Clare told Axios.