Arizona State Sen. Republican Debbie Lesko is running in the special election on April 24, for the vacant seat of Republican scandal-resigner Trent Franks’s seat, against Democrat Hiral Tipirneni. She is favored to win the red seat back for the Republicans in a race that’s shown all of the sociopathic hallmarks of the Republican balancing act of pretending they both support and are not complicit in their current leadership. And as the Intercept reports, Lesko is the perfect Republican candidate with a long history of copying and pasting conservative lobbyist private interests directly into the bills she has written.
LESKO’S WORK THROUGH ALEC has helped her produce a steady stream of other interest group-authored bills. ALEC, for instance, has worked closely with for-profit charter schools to develop a range of model bills to help channel taxpayer money from public schools into proprietary charters schools. The largest names in the for-profit primary education industry, such as “virtual charter school” operators K12 Inc. and Connections Academy, have sponsored ALEC conferences and helped to author these charter-expansion bills.
The Intercept provides side-by-side comparisons of State Sen. Lesko’s “bill,” and ALEC’s sponsorship proposals. It’s like reading the worst plagiarized high school book report where one term—in this case using “handbook” instead of “catalogue”—is supposed to throw us off the scent of corruption. This is just one example of the numerous times state Sen. Lesko proposed legislation that simply changes the stationary on which the lobbyist wrote the original proposal. The Health Care Compact was an attempt by ALEC to undermine the Affordable Care Act, by pulling Medicare away from the federal government and into the hands of the state. Lesko proposed HB2509—the same thing.
Not only is Lesko an ALEC board member and frequent speaker at the group’s events, but she was also recognized as ALEC’s lawmaker of the year in 2016. She appeared on television once to defend the organization from critics who said the group provides a backdoor channel for special interests to exercise influence over legislators.
This is the definition of the swamp.