WTH is going on with the new Georgia voting law? Gov. Brian Kemp on the law, Major League Baseball and the Biden agenda Episode #97 | April, 8, 2021 | Danielle Pletka, Marc Thiessen, and Gov. Brian Kemp Danielle Pletka: Hi, I'm Danielle Pletka. Marc Thiessen: And I'm Marc Thiessen. Danielle Pletka: Welcome to our podcast, What the Hell Is Going On? Marc, what the hell is going on? Marc Thiessen: Well, what the hell is going on is that corporate America and the Biden White House, and everybody are piling on the state of Georgia because of the election law they just passed. The Major League Baseball, at Joe Biden's urging, has pulled the All-Star Game out of the state and moved it to Colorado, which is going to cost, not the state of Georgia, but the people of Georgia, small businesses in Georgia, African-American business owners in Georgia, something like a total of $100 million dollars in lost revenue. So they're doing all this over a law that Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler, no conservative, no rabid right-winger said in a fact check that the net effect was to expand opportunities to vote for most Georgians, not limit them. So these people are doing this out of a pinnacle of near perfect ignorance. They are hurting the people of Georgia all as an exercise in virtue signaling. That is just absolutely appalling to me. I don't know, Dany, how do you feel about it? Danielle Pletka: I don't think it's a virtue signal, I actually think it's lying. And look, I'm no elections law specialist. And so in preparation for this podcast, I sat down, like you did Marc, with a lot of articles, research, criticism, praise, fact-checks, interviews with the Governor, look at what other states are doing. And you cite Glenn Kessler from the Washington Post. The person who I looked to was Nate Cohn, who does this often- Marc Thiessen: New York Times. Danielle Pletka: For the New York Times. Now, a fine contrast I should add with the absolutely fervid coverage on both the front page and the New York Times op-ed page. And Nate Cohn says much the same thing that Kessler does. So let me just go over a couple of the points that he makes that I think are really interesting. So he starts it out by saying, "There's nothing unusual about exaggeration in politics." Well, that is possibly the understatement of the year. He suggests that there's absolutely no way that people can know that this suppresses turnout. There's no evidence whatsoever historically that any of these factors either expand or 2 suppress turnout. He says, and I'm just going to quote him, "For decades, reformers have assumed that the way to increase turnout is to make voting easier, yet surprisingly expanding voting options to make it more convenient hasn't seemed to have a huge effect on turnout or electoral outcomes." Danielle Pletka: There's essentially no evidence that the vast expansion of no-excuse absentee mail voting in which anyone can apply for a mail absentee ballot had any discernible effect on turnout in 2020. Okay, guys. So here are some facts. And for me, sorry to sort of rant on about this, but for me, the most important thing to weigh is: Is this an effort to actually suppress turnout or is it merely an effort to regulate voting? And it seems to me the balance falls absolutely on that question of regulation. Marc Thiessen: But it's also, this law expands early voting. It added an extra Saturday vote. Seventeen days of early voting. The drop boxes, people forget drop boxes are a new innovation that started during the pandemic as a health measure. They wouldn't even exist because they were done under an emergency measure, if they didn't pass a law mandating them. And now they've mandated drop boxes and done them in a way that's going to be safe and regulated. One of the big issues with the mail-in ballots was signature matching. Well, signature matching is kind of a subjective thing. You have to look and say, "Does it look like that?" Not everybody's signature is the same every time. So what they said is you have to use some kind of identification. You can put your driver's license number in or something else that's easier to check. Danielle Pletka: Or your utility bill. Marc Thiessen: Well, that's the thing, people say, "That's bad because a lot of people don't have driver's licenses." You can use your utility bill, a bank statement, a government check, a paycheck, another government document with your name and address on it, the last four digits of your social security number. Folks, this is not hard. This is not hard. And I will tell you something, Dany, I know for a fact that if I showed up at National's Park for a baseball game and went up to the will call and said, "I'm Marc Thiessen and I have tickets." You know what they're going to ask me? Show me an ID. Right? tMarc Thiessen: And if I said, "You got to trust me, I'm Marc Thiessen, here's my utility bill." They would say, "Sorry, bud. You're not getting your tickets, because we don't know it s you." And if you need an ID for something as unimportant as a baseball game, how much more so should you have an ID for something as important as the integrity of an election? Danielle Pletka: I actually agree with that and I think most sensible people agree with that. I think part of the problem in addition, Marc, is that we're talking about a group of people that doesn't vote. So who are they focused on? Well, homeless people. They may not have a utility bill. They might not have a driver's license. And the answer is, first of all, you can get a state ID for free in Georgia if you apply for one. But the bigger issue here is we are not talking about a population that has a strong history of voting. This is the challenge here. And it is yet another illustration of our inability to have a balanced, intelligent conversation anymore in American politics. AMERICAN ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE | 1789 Massachusetts Ave, NW, Washington, DC 20036 | 202.862.5800 | aei.org 3 Marc Thiessen: And then here's the other thing that drives me crazy, Dany, is that there are all these corporations, in addition to Major League Baseball that have come out, to criticize the Georgia law. And if you put up a list of the companies that have criticized the Georgia law with the list of sponsors of the Beijing Olympics, there's a big overlap in those two things. So China, which has no free elections, which is busy suppressing the democracy movement in Hong Kong, which is putting millions... We just had Mike Waltz on the podcast, and they're putting millions of Uyghurs in cattle cars and sending them to concentration camps. Oh, but it's okay, we can sponsor the Beijing Olympics. We can put money into the Chinese communist regime, but we should be boycotting the state of Georgia, which just expanded voting access. Explain that to me. Danielle Pletka: Well, I have a little data for you on this, which I think is useful. So we actually, and all thanks to Alexa and to our intern for doing this, we scrubbed the list of 200 companies that sent a letter protesting Georgia's new election laws. And 42 of those companies, so almost a quarter of those companies, do business with China. Let's go even further, that paragon of virtue, Major League Baseball, just expanded its agreement with Tencent Corporation, the owner of WeChat, those guys who are aiding and abetting the Chinese government's efforts to censor people. This is just- Marc Thiessen: The same week! They signed the deal with Tencent the same week that they pulled the All Star Game out of Georgia. It's literality simultaneous. Danielle Pletka: So here's the tough question from my standpoint, and then I want to get to our guest. But I think one of the tough questions that we have to ask is, as policy makers sitting in Washington, trying to think about what sensible measures our government should engage in, what our companies should be doing. The question for me is what should the conservative reaction to this be? Mitch McConnell is frothing at the mouth. Marco Rubio, Dan Crenshaw, they've all come out. They've condemned Major League Baseball, they've condemned their hypocrisy. The Wall Street Journal editorial page has taken them to task. What's the right response for people who are outraged by this? It's a hard question. Marc Thiessen: So, I think Mitch McConnell's response was pretty straightforward, which is stay out of politics. These people should not be weighing in on laws that they don't understand and don't know what they're talking about, in an effort of virtue signaling. The other thing I think corporate America needs to be careful, because the reality is the Republican Party has changed a lot. It's no longer the party of big business. It's the party of the working class and small business.