No, not Alec Baldwin.
ALEC is the acronym for the semi-secretive American Legislative Executive Council. This self-styled “nonpartisan membership association for conservative state lawmakers who share a common belief in limited government, free markets, federalism, and individual liberty” was founded in 1973 by Henry Hyde (you know his infamous amendment), conservative activist Paul Weyrich (founder of the Heritage Foundation), and Lou Barnett, a veteran of the 1968 Reagan presidential campaign. Its purpose is, in effect, to implement Grover Norquist’s goal of reducing the size of the government “to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.” ALEC is funded, in part, by the trusts associated with the controversial Koch family, that includes David Koch, a billionaire and one of the leaders of one of the richest privately held corporations in the world, Koch Industries. Various large corporations are also ALEC contributors.
Since its inception, ALEC’s goal has been to draft “model bills” that conservative legislators can introduce in the 50 states. The group’s website claims that in each legislative cycle, its members take this work and introduce 1000 pieces of legislation into state capitols across the United States. ALEC claims that roughly 18% of these bills are enacted into law. In 2009 ALEC was responsible for 826 bills being introduced into state houses across the country, of which 115 were enacted into law, and in 2010, one of the results of ALEC’s work was the controversial 2010 anti-immigrant law that was passed and signed by the governor in Arizona.
The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) boasts “During the 1999-2000 legislative cycle, ALEC legislators introduced more than 3100 pieces of legislation based on our models, and more than 450 of these were enacted. . . . In the legislative Sessions of 2000, there were more than 2150 introductions promoting ALEC Policy.”
So why haven’t we ever heard of this group?
Because corporate America doesn’t want us to know. Close scrutiny reveals that ALEC is little more than a screen for hundreds of big corporations and trade associations to advance their legislative agendas in state capitals from coast to coast. – ALECWatch
ALEC drafts bills that comport with the ideological and corporate agenda of the Kochs and its allied funders. These bills favor corporations and include proposals to weaken the rights of employees and the ability to secure a healthy environment, which it shares with state and local politicians. The National Resources Defense Council and Defenders of Wildlife has called ALEC “corrosive, secretive and highly influential” and a “tax-exempt screen for major U.S. corporations and trade associations that use it to influence legislative activities at the state level.”
The same NRDC report states that companies “like Enron, Amoco, Chevron, Shell, Texaco, Coors, Koch Industries, Nationwide Insurance, Pfizer, National Energy Group, Philip Morris, and R. J. Reynolds pay for essentially all of ALEC’s expenses.” Corporate membership fees are reported to range between $5,000 and $50,000 with additional fees of $1,500 to $5,000 a year to participate in ALEC’s various task forces. However, corporations spend more than that. For example, Exxon has donated far more than a million including funding set aside for specific projects like “global climate change” and “energy and climate.” The total from Koch stands at $408,000 according to Greenpeace.
For more detail, see ALEC: Ghostwriting the Law for Corporate America, by the American Association for Justice (aka The Association of Trial Lawyers of America).
Earlier this month, historian William Cronon, the Frederick Jackson Turner and Vilas research professor of history, geography and environmental studies at the University of Wisconsin, and the recently-elected president of the American Historical Association, was asked to write an Op-Ed for the New York Times on the historical context of Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s effort to strip public-employee unions of bargaining rights. In the course of doing research for that article, Prof. Cronon posted a blog containing several critical observations about the powerful network of conservatives working to undermine union rights and disenfranchise Democratic voters in many states.
Prof. Cronon’s blog, Who’s Really Behind Recent Republican Legislation in Wisconsin and Elsewhere? (Hint: It Didn’t Start Here) named names – particularly ALEC:
The most important group, I’m pretty sure, is the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), which was founded in 1973 by Henry Hyde, Lou Barnett, and (surprise, surprise) Paul Weyrich. Its goal for the past forty years has been to draft “model bills” that conservative legislators can introduce in the 50 states. Its website claims that in each legislative cycle, its members introduce 1000 pieces of legislation based on its work, and claims that roughly 18% of these bills are enacted into law. (Among them was the controversial 2010 anti-immigrant law in Arizona.)
If you’re as impressed by these numbers as I am, I’m hoping you’ll agree with me that it may be time to start paying more attention to ALEC and the bills its seeks to promote.
You can start by studying ALEC’s own website. Begin with its home page at
http://www.alec.org [Diarist’s note: If you can’t reach that web site – as I was writing this diary, I got repeated “Server error” pages – you can always use the WayBackMachine. The Internet really does make information live forever.]
First visit the “About” menu to get a sense of the organization’s history and its current members and funders. But the meat of the site is the “model legislation” page, which is the gateway to the hundreds of bills that ALEC has drafted for the benefit of its conservative members.
http://www.alec.org/...
You’ll of course be eager to look these over…but you won’t be able to, because you’re not a member.
Becoming a Member of ALEC: Not So Easy to Do
How do you become a member? Simple. Two ways. You can be an elected Republican legislator who, after being individually vetted, pays a token fee of roughly $100 per biennium to join. Here’s the membership brochure to use if you meet this criterion:
http://www.alec.org/...
What if you’re not a Republican elected official? Not to worry. You can apply to join ALEC as a “private sector” member by paying at least a few thousand dollars depending on which legislative domains most interest you. Here’s the membership brochure if you meet this criterion:
http://www.alec.org/...
Then again, even if most of us had this kind of money to contribute to ALEC, I have a feeling that membership might not necessarily be open to just anyone who is willing to pay the fee. But maybe I’m being cynical here.
Cronon ended his blog post with the following comments:
ALEC’s efforts to disenfranchise voters likely to vote Democratic, for instance, and its efforts to destroy public-sector unions because they also tend to favor Democrats, strike me as objectionable and anti-democratic (as opposed to anti-Democratic) on their face. As a pragmatic centrist in my own politics, I very strongly favor seeking the public good from both sides of the partisan aisle, and it’s not at all clear to me that recent legislation in Wisconsin or elsewhere can be defended as doing this. Shining a bright light on ALEC’s activities (and on other groups as well, across the political spectrum) thus seems to me a valuable thing to do whether or not one favors its political goals.
This is especially true when politicians at the state and local level promote legislation drafted at the national level that may not actually best serve the interests of their home districts and states. ALEC strategists may think they’re serving the national conservative cause by promoting legislation like the bills recently passed in Wisconsin–but I see my state being ripped apart by the resulting controversies, and it’s hard to believe that Wisconsin is better off as a result. This is not the way citizens or politicians have historically behaved toward each other in this state, and I for one am not happy with the changes in our political culture that seem to be unfolding right now. I’m hoping that many of my fellow Wisconsinites, whether they lean left or right, agree with me that it’s time to take a long hard look at what has been happening and try to find our bearings again.
So what do you imagine happened? Did Prof. Cronon get a good citizenship medal? Nope. He got investigated. Two days after his Op-Ed was published, the Wisconsin state Republican Party filed a freedom-of-information request with Prof. Cronon’s employer, the University of Wisconsin, demanding all of his e-mails containing the words “Republican,” “Scott Walker,” “union,” “rally,” and other such incendiary terms. According to the Times,
The party refuses to say why it wants the messages; Mr. Cronon believes it is hoping to find that he is supporting the recall of Republican state senators, which would be against university policy and which he denies. This is a clear attempt to punish a critic and make other academics think twice before using the freedom of the American university to conduct legitimate research.
The Times’ comments above were part of an Editorial published last Friday, March 25 titled, A Shabby Crusade in Wisconsin. The Editorial begins:
The latest technique used by conservatives to silence liberal academics is to demand copies of e-mails and other documents. Attorney General Kenneth Cuccinelli of Virginia tried it last year with a climate-change scientist, and now the Wisconsin Republican Party is doing it to a distinguished historian who dared to criticize the state’s new union-busting law. These demands not only abuse academic freedom, but make the instigators look like petty and medieval inquisitors.
The Times Editorial concludes that the FOIA request “makes the Republican Party appear both vengeful and ridiculous.” I disagree. The Republican Party is both vengeful and ridiculous.