The new bill comes after Andrew Bailey vowed to investigate companies pulling business from X, formerly Twitter over hate speech.
The new bill comes after Andrew Bailey vowed to investigate companies pulling business from X, formerly Twitter over hate speech.
This bill doesn’t do that. It just says that if you engage in “economic boycott” (which about a third of the bill is spent defining, but doesn’t include refusing to deal with a company for “vocally supporting nazism” unless you are using very nonstandard definitions of “vocally supporting” and “nazism”), the State of Missouri cannot use you as a vendor.
I’ll grant you the bill does not restrict economic boycott against nazism per se. It does restrict vendor economic boycott against use of fossil fuels, deforestation, strip mining, anything to do with firearms, failing to meet greenhouse gas emissions standards, refusing to provide employees with insurance that covers abortion or gender reaffirming care, grossly underpays their employees, refuses to put non-whites on the board or their employee payroll, etc. If your company decides to switch providers of a good or service, end advertisement deals, or no longer sell to a company, the decision to do so better not involve those things at all, or you lose the ability to gain or keep state government contracts.
Notably, all these disqualifying boycotts are things that a left-leaning company might engage in. They do not disqualify company’s that boycott for right-leaning reason though. Like companies that provide abortion or gender affirming care to their employees, companies with diversity requirements on their staff/boards, companies that scale the lowest wages to the board’s wages, companies that are unionized or employee owned, companies that advocate against or provide alternatives to fossil fuels, companies that advocate against deforestation, fracking, or firearms.
The bill would allow them to using vendors that boycott Planned Parenthood over abortion services but disallow them to use vendors that boycott BP over anothet major oil spill. Feel free to punish the left for practicing their values and continue to practice your own right leaning values without worrying about losing your government contracts. Apparently it’s okay to disqualify left-leaning boycotts, but not right-leaning boycotts. You do see how blatantly biased and anti-1st amendment that is, right?
The rest are also terrible, but this is a big blow to companies trying to reduce their Scope 2 and 3 emissions. I wonder how many companies that rely on government contracts will have to just give up on their emissions reporting, and therefore also end up divested/boycotted by companies who do not rely on government contracts and are continuing their emissions reporting (including Scope 2/3)? This would split the economy into “government-reliant companies who are not trying to reduce emissions”, and “everyone else”, with neither side including the other in their supply chain.
What’s crazy is how none of our current reps could come up with this and it was written by billionaires to protect billionaires
It IS blatantly biased and anti-1st Amendment, no question about it. However Missouri isn’t the first to do it and I can provide several examples of Blue States engaging in this same tactic, starting prior to the pandemic.
California for instance has a politically motivated Travel Ban to numerous other States, including Florida, that’s founded in who the State will spend money with. Los Angeles once declared that it wouldn’t hire vendors who donated to the NRA and tried to force them disclose that. It’s not just California either, New York has several similar laws.
It’s all politicians flexing their authority over State spending in pursuit of causes that their citizens care about.