Rubio faults Delta on China after CEO critiques Georgia law

Republican Senator Marco Rubio urged Delta Air Lines to speak out on China’s “ongoing genocide,” after the company’s CEO Ed Bastian said in a note to employees that Georgia’s new voting law “does not match Delta’s values.”

“You are business partners with the Communist Party of #China,” Rubio said in a tweet early Thursday addressed to Delta. “When can we expect your letter saying that their ongoing genocide in #Xinjiang is ‘unacceptable and does not match Delta’s values’???”

Rubio added the hashtag “#WokeCorporateHypocrites.”

A representative for Delta didn’t immediately comment on Rubio’s tweet.

The Republican senator’s tweet comes after Bastian wrote employees of Atlanta-based Delta to say the airline and other companies had some success in eliminating the new Georgia voting law’s “most suppressive tactics,” even as the final version of the measure remained unacceptable.

“The entire rationale for this bill was based on a lie” about widespread voter fraud in Georgia elections in 2020, Bastian said.

Since the Nov. 3 presidential election, Georgia has been the center of the broader nationwide debate over voting processes in the U.S., a debate with stark partisan undertones.

Apple CEO Tim Cook also joined other corporate leaders in condemning the Georgia law, Axios reported early Thursday.

“Apple believes that, thanks in part to the power of technology, it ought to be easier than ever for every eligible citizen to exercise their right to vote,” Cook said in statement obtained by Axios. “We support efforts to ensure that our democracy’s future is more hopeful and inclusive than its past.”

The state’s elections chief was sued last week by a group of nonprofit civic organizations that claim the new voting law signed March 25 by the state’s Republican Governor Brian Kemp will make it harder for minorities to cast ballots.

The lawsuit is one of the first challenges to a wave of voting restrictions taking shape in state legislatures across the country.

Republican lawmakers say Georgia’s new restrictions are necessary because of voter fraud during the 2020 election, an argument the GOP is making in a number of states to push for tighter rules on voting. Critics of that argument point out that dozens of federal judges and William Barr, then the U.S. attorney general, found no evidence of widespread voter fraud, and contend that the rules are meant to suppress the minority vote. It was a pair of runoff elections in Georgia that gave the Democrats control of the Senate.