Newsweek: General Motors, Best Buy, PayPal Talk Up Voting Rights, Then Fund Effort to Restrict Them

Major corporations won praise in the weeks after the January 6 Capital riot by expressing support for voting rights and promising to suspend their political action committee donations to Republican lawmakers who had tried to overturn the election. Corporate America would be a vanguard in the defense of democracy, some headlines suggested.

Breaking up with the Chamber

In the wake of the January 6 Capitol insurrection and in the face of ongoing Republican efforts to restrict voting rights, political watchdog Accountable.US has started a new campaign asking companies, including Microsoft, Target, and Salesforce, to disaffiliate from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the nation’s preeminent business lobbying group, on the grounds that the Chamber has been bankrolling the GOP’s anti-democratic agenda.

The Chamber’s long history of complicity and enablement of Republican assaults on voting rights is documented in a recent report from Accountable.US. The report notes that in 2010, the Chamber, joined by Republican strategists, “hatched” and funded REDMAP, the notorious GOP redistricting project focused on flipping state legislatures ahead of the 2010 census.