Excellent all-in-one-place piece on ALEC in ProPublica:
This week, both the Los Angeles Times and The Nation put the spotlight on a little-known but influential conservative nonprofit that creates “model” state legislation that often make its way into law. The organization has helped craft some of the most controversial—and industry-friendly—legislation of recent years.
The American Legislative Exchange Council,ALEC, crafted a model resolution for states calling the EPA’s attempts to regulate greenhouse gasses a “trainwreck” and asking Congress to slow or stop the regulations, the Times reported. A press release on ALEC’s site says that at least 13 other states have passed resolutions
It calls itself a “policy making program that unites members of the public and private sectors in a dynamic partnership” based on “Jeffersonian principles.” Critics say it has devolved into a pay-for-play operation, where state legislators and their families get to go on industry-funded junkets and major corporations get to ghostwrite model laws and pass them on to receptive politicians.
I know the information on ALEC has been floating around for months on liberal sites, so it’s heartening to see that news outlets (LA Times, NPR) are now picking it up.
Here’s where you can find the ALEC-drafted bill your state legislator is introducing as his or her own work, “word for word”, in the case of the recent Arizona immigration law:
The Center for Media and Democracy has obtained copies of more than 800 model bills approved by corporations through ALEC meetings, after one of the thousands of people with access shared them, and a whistleblower provided a copy to the Center. We have analyzed and marked-up those bills and made them available at ALEC Exposed.
Looking at the categories, it’s easy to understand why monied interests are drafting this legislation and introducing it in state legislatures all over the country. The profit incentives are clear when they are privatizing public schools and destroying unions, or limiting the right of individual citizens to hold a wrongdoer responsible for money damages suffered, or gutting environmental regulations, or rewriting a state tax code. Those are obvious. What’s interesting is the voter ID bill. That really sticks out. No profit incentive there, so what’s that all about, I wonder?
arguingwithsignposts
The real question is what can be done about it? Karoli at C&L said “shining sunlight on them” will help, but how much, really?
ETA: the voter supression bills are all about getting the right votes counted (in every sense of the word), which helps insure their legislative agenda continues apace.
Bobby Thomson
Hookers and blow.
General Stuck
On about every front, the republicans are engaged in a political insurrection in this country. From the local level, through the state level, on up to the national stage, even threatening economic devastation, lest they get the fundamental change they seek to purge all progressivism from the republic.
There will be blowback on them, for this tunnel vision run for the endzone, like with the union busting, and xenophobic frothing we will see later on when dems reintroduce the immigration reform bills before the election.
They just don’t seem to care, and are behaving like people who are backed into a corner, and have made some grave decisions about their further participation in a democracy.
So far, there is recent slippage in poll internals concerning overall reactions from the populace, but not as much as there should be. Most non minority voters just don’t care about things like voter suppression lawmaking, and unfortunately, environmental worries are very NIMBY oriented.
But some stuff, does, or at some point, will effect them. And many of these anti democratic initiatives will serve to motivate minorities more to go vote, as the hatefulness and white supremacy behavior gets ratcheted up toward the election.
Whether it is enough for enough whites beyond the 27 percenters to turn away from the GOP, remains to be seen. We live in weird times, and the only certainty is that they will get weirder.
Good morning Kay, and terrific post:-)
kay
I don’t know.
So few people pay attention to their state legislature, and I’m as guilty of that as anyone else. The big federal stuff is much more dramatic, and it’s national news. Which really makes no sense, because states write most of the law that actually affects people, directly and immediately. We’ve pretty much ceded the whole field to profit-seeking psychopaths with no interest in or patience for anything “in the public interest”.
There was so much coverage of that Arizona law. No one noticed it was word for word ALEC-drafted ? Amazing.
kay
Hi Stuck. I planted bee balm and it’s going crazy growing, so I’m expecting a bunch of hummingbirds. I’ll hold you responsible if they don’t show :)
El Cid
I agree that it is a hideous threat to democracy how ACORN is dictating all the legislation everywhere.
cathyx
@kay:
Also expect it to take over your garden.
Ash Can
Sure, there’s profit incentive there. The fewer Dem voters, the more Republicans in office, and the easier it is to feed corporation-friendly legislation through them into law. (Or did I miss your snark in my current caffeine-deprived state?)
kay
Right. Thanks. I noticed that when I was handling it. Square stem, which means it’s a mint, right? I’ll mow it, eventually, which is what I do with the out-of-control mint family :)
OzarkHillbilly
coming up with ideas for raping, pillaging and plundering what is left of the middle class
SiubhanDuinne
kay – July 16, 2011 | 9:39 am · Link
Think you could do the same with the Jim DeMint family?
Southern Beale
I wrote about ALEC last year, when Tennessee was adopting an Arizona-style immigration bill. It’s no accident that Tennessee-based private prison company CCA loves these bills. Someone has to operate the detention facility for all of these detained “illegals” right?
pluege
What’s interesting is the voter ID bill. That really sticks out. No profit incentive there, so what’s that all about, I wonder?
republicans must be easier to manipulate (i.e., cheaper) for their corporatist/plutocratic agenda than democrats.
Roger Moore
Interns.
R. Porrofatto
Imagine just for a second the immensity of the shitstorm that would result were this the American Liberal Legislative Exchange Council. Glenn Beck would have grist for a whole new media mill.
Davis X. Machina
What do they do all day? They’re not in session in many states for all but a small part of the year, or even the biennium. And in many states, they are part-timers, paid per diem, and badly paid at that. The myth of the citizen-legislator, a yeoman farmer returning to his plow after a few weeks of legislating, dies hard. Staff become more important in this environment, especially if you also have term limits.
All of which strengthens the hands of anyone like ALEC who can come up to your part-time, inexperienced, job-juggling state legislator and hand you something and say ‘here, pass this — it’s just what you want.’
nancydarling
Kay, I was able to find out who my two state chairmen of ALEC are, but unable to find a complete membership list. Do you know if that info is available?
Here is the web page where state legislator/chairmen are listed:
http://www.alec.org/AM/Template.cfm?Section=State_Chairmen&Template=/CM/HTMLDisplay.cfm&ContentID=15802
Also, too, I don’t know if you are going for bees as well as hummers, but bees love Lambs Ear.
jo6pac
Elected conservatives outsource all their work to corporations, leaving me wondering what they do all day.
WOW that’s great news, they are just like their masters who outsourced Amerikas jobs.
There nothing to see here, please just move along.
Dave N.
Why voter ID bills? There is no using seeding the nation with photocopied legislation if there is no chance it gets signed into law. Suppress as many votes as possible to get sympathetic politicians into statehouses and governors offices, and the rest takes care of itself.
For profit schools, for profit prisons, for profit National Guard! What could go wrong? Its not as if recent history has proven that adding a profit motive to the prison system adds motive to put more and more people into prison.
BBA
@15: The “liberal” version of ALEC is the NCCUSL. (Actually centrist-technocratic, not liberal, but the Tea Party can’t be bothered with such distinctions.)
Fox News Braintrust
They raise money for reelection. And plot their route to the big show in DC.
All day. Every day
dww44
Another reason that I watch Rachel Maddow every weeknight. Moreso than her other progressive counterparts, she’s actually focused on policy over personality, and this week she’s done pieces on both ALEC and last night she did an informative piece on the voter suppression laws enacted in 40 states this year. This does not bode well for next year’s elections. O/T am I the only person who has a hard time comprehending Jesse Jackson? She had him on to address the voter suppression stuff and I truly got lost trying to follow him.
Last year’s elections were even more damaging at the state level than at the federal level. We Democrats don’t protect our rear flank against these attacks from the right.
But then, it’s all about the money and one party has far more of it to use for nefarious purposes than does the other.
And people like my brother, who deep down does know better, believe every facet of it, right down to his statement yesterday that “we should default on our debt because nothing untoward will happen. The democrats are just fear mongering”. Unbelievable.
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
The profit incentive of voter ID bills is long term – suppress the vote for the less easily bought candidates and it becomes that much cheaper to enact your preferred legislation.
Hummingbirds like daylilies too; they adore any plant with a tubular blossom. Expect an annual throwdown between the monarda (indeed in that family) and the regular mint. At my place, the spearmint has won ~3-2; YMMV.
James E. Powell
When I worked in the Ohio House, way back in the late 70s, nearly every bill was drafted by some organization then presented to a sympathetic representative. The major exception was the budget which was generated by the state agencies themselves.
RalfW
Maybe.
Or we could be in for 2, 4, 8 more years of the public learning it’s lesson the really, really hard way before blowback forms.
Or the masses will just keep their heads down. There’s plenty of world history to suggest that the populace has to get really, really unhappy before a real turnover happens.
RalfW
James @23
I work on progressive issues at the state legislature (uhuh, fun!) on behalf of my denomination. It is true that we are, from time to time, asked to draft a bill or part of a bill on something, say like minority hiring reporting in state contracts.
And in my neighborhood organizing, our community council did look at L.A.’s first ever community benefits agreement as the source text for a lot of what we drafted (and got signed by a developer!…who later went bust…)
But the instances of the left having a national policy shop that not only drafts policy but pays to fly in scads of legislators and wonks for a coordinated 40-state assault on liberty? Nuh uh. None.
.
Roger Moore
@Davis X. Machina:
This is about what I’ve said about term limits. Legislating is a very tough job that demands people who know what they’re doing. Term limits and systems designed to ensure you have “citizen legislators” weaken the legislature; that’s what they’re designed to do. But instead of strengthening the hand of the people, it just winds up giving more control to bureaucrats and lobbyists.
gbear
I just got a call from the ACLU asking me to renew my membership and I talked with the caller for quite a while. One of the questions she asked me is if I’d heard of ALEC, which she’d just heard about on Democracy Now. I let her know about this posting and the original story at ProPublica. She was really happy that this story was getting some traction.
gbear
[email protected]: I lost it trying to follow Jesse Jackson too. It was as if someone had cut up his sentences, thrown them into the air, and reassembled them randomly. It wasn’t just you.
debbie
This reminds me of that Gulf drilling safety plan that turned out to be identical for each of the companies operating there. The one where they all referenced a dead guy for an emergency contact and where they all promised to keep the area safe for Gulf walruses. I wonder if there’s a connection?
pkdz
Professor William Cronon, UW-Madison, wrote about ALEC in March, in the midst of the protests. This blog entry led to a open records request by the Wisconsin Republican Party. Here’s Cronon’s write up: http://scholarcitizen.williamcronon.net/2011/03/15/alec/
Harvey
right, just limit the vote to the “good”/Republican white voter, and everything will be fine. after 40 years of demonizing the LEFT, what could be easier. Limit who votes and thing will be just fine!!!
nothing to see here, move on please!!
watching the “only Republicans can vote” drive succeed in state after state shows how deep the Republican control and stop the “other” vote is.
and do Democrat raise a stink about this. Do i have to ask the question. lol
Democrats helped to destroy ACORN, instead of fighting like hell.
and Your Question was?????
Nancy Irving
“after one of the thousands of people with access shared them” –
Never underestimate the power of the mis-treated low-level employee.