Things aren’t going as planned for Republican AG Greg Abbott, who is running for governor of Texas against national champion for women’s rights and State Senator Wendy Davis. PolitiFact has named Davis’ ad charging him of siding with a corporation over a rape victim as “Mostly True”. This is the ad that Abbott’s campaign tried to bluff their way out of by labeling it “gutter politics“. So, “gutter politics” are “mostly true” about Abbott.
Abbott has been claiming that he loves women, after all he married one and has a daughter, for as long as Davis has been using his record as a Republican AG to prove otherwise. But last Thursday she launched an ad against him charging that as a Supreme Court justice, he sided with a vacuum cleaner manufacturer against a woman raped by a salesman in her home.
Watch the ad here:
In his 1998 dissent, Abbott found that a company selling vacuum cleaners door-to-door “had no responsibility” in the hiring of a salesman who raped a customer. The ad got national attention.
Sounds like Abbott sided with a company over a rape victim, which is not exactly proving that he is not engaged in a war on women. The bad news is that PolitiFact found this charge “Mostly True”.
Our ruling:
Davis said that Abbott held that a company whose vacuum cleaners are sold door to door “had no responsibility” in the hiring of a salesman who raped a customer in her home.
Indeed, then-Justice Abbott said in 1998 the manufacturer had no legal responsibility over whom its contractors hired to give demonstrations in customers’ homes. But this claim fails to include the substantive detail that Abbott, unlike the court majority, considered most significant an existing agreement between the manufacturer and its distributors explicitly giving full responsibility for such hiring to the distributors.
We rate this claim Mostly True.
Even the caveat proves the point. Of course Abbott considered that the agreement between the manufacturer and its distributors got Kirby out of being responsible to vet their in home demonstrators. (The Court ruled that they had a duty to take reasonable care in hiring. Too much to ask?) Citing a “business contract” as a get out of jail card is absurd — an entity could write any kind of lawless contract to which a distributor would agree because it benefited both parties.
This is the modern day Republican thinking: The company is always right even when they are wrong, because the rights of a company to do business any way they choose are sacred. Whereas, the body and soul of a rape victim is not sacred, and is held beneath even a bad business contract. These are values choices, not imminent decisions.
A business contract is not an act of God. It is a contract agreed to by two entities for whom profit is the number one goal. It is the job of our legislators and courts to force these entities to bear some human responsibility for the consequences of their profit seeking, because just like people, corporations come in all kinds. Some care about their impact on people and the environment and some do not.
Contrast Abbott’s dissent against the majority on the court with Democrat Wendy Davis, whose office announced that she would use this morning to highlight her record “of cracking down on rapists and empowering rape survivors, including the law she wrote to ensure more DNA testing of rape kits, addressing the backlog of 18,500 untested kits.”
Republicans seem to be in office only to give “business” a free ride with taxpayer subsidies while they gun for less regulations amounting to zero accountability.
Plenty of responsible business owners manage to make a profit while also being accountable – in fact, back in the old days, a business’s reputation was part of its assets, and being accountable to the community was part of that. Thus, a business would do a background check on men it was sending into the homes of women who were likely to be alone just because it was the right thing to do for their own sake.
A responsible “pro-business” politician understands that forcing companies to veer away from being predators is good for everyone, the business included. But these days Republicans are the Donald Trumps of the business world – forever predators, declaring bankruptcy on the taxpayers’ dime and coming back to the trough to grift again, with no responsibility and no accountability. They reliably choose companies over people too much of the time.
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