Party Hopping

As they lose sway among Texas Republicans, big businesses should try something radical: an alliance with Democrats.

The accusations started flying in December. The Texas Legislature was about to convene its eighty-fifth session, and those darn liberals were once again obstructing progress, or so conservatives claimed. On December 13, the right-wing advocates at Empower Texans posted a piece on their website titled “Just Another Liberal Lobby Group” in which they wrote with typical restraint, “One prominent Austin lobby group has been in the tank for bigger government for a long time, but their vanity is now taking them even deeper down the drain.” A week earlier, socially conservative state representative Matt Shaheen, of Plano, had written an op-ed for the Texas Tribune attacking the same group for “partnering with liberal anti-traditional family groups, opposing religious freedom, and supporting ordinances that prosecute citizens for believing in traditional marriage.” Who were these wild-eyed leftists? The ACLU? MoveOn.org? Hollywood Liberals for a Blue Texas? No, no, and no (in fact, that last one doesn’t actually exist). Turns out, the group in question was the Texas Association of Business.

The TAB, as it’s commonly known, is Texas’s largest business organization, serving the role of chamber of commerce for the state. It represents more than 4,300 employers of varying sizes, though it’s often seen as fronting the interests of big business. Ordinarily, you wouldn’t think of a business association as “liberal” or “in the tank for bigger government.” In fact, the TAB has long lobbied for lower taxes and less regulation and was essential for the Republican takeover of Texas. But with the GOP drifting rightward, the association has increasingly found itself at odds with Republican orthodoxy on education (well-funded schools boost the economy and attract skilled workers), immigration (undocumented immigrants provide cheap labor), and civil rights issues (equality is now a corporate priority).

The most recent source of acrimony—and the reason for the barbs from Empower Texans and Shaheen—is the business lobby’s opposition to the so-called bathroom bill, which would require transgender Texans to use bathrooms in public buildings that correspond to their gender at birth, not the gender that they identify as. There was a time when big businesses wouldn’t have cared about such an issue, but those days are long gone. Most corporations want to be seen as progressive and inclusive, and legislation that singles out a minority doesn’t jibe with that image. Or, as TAB president Chris Wallace put it in a statement opposing the bill, “Discriminatory legislation is bad for business.”

Indeed it is. North Carolina enacted a similar measure in 2016, and the blowback has been severe: the state lost sporting events, concerts, and conferences, and PayPal canceled plans for an operations center in Charlotte. An analysis by the Associated Press found that the law could have cost North Carolina $3.7 billion in business investment in the next decade. All of which led lawmakers to recently vote to partially repeal it.

Read more: http://www.texasmonthly.com/politics/party-hopping/