ALEC Comes to San Diego
What is the American Legislative Exchange Council and Why Should Progressives Know About It?
By Jim Miller
On the list of things for progressives not to be thankful for in San Diego, a visit from the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) is at the top of the list. Next to an appearance by the Omicron variant, it’s hard to imagine a guest with a more malignant purpose. But, alas, just in time for the holiday season, they’ve gifted us with their presence.
As the San Diego Union Tribune reported yesterday:
San Diego will host hundreds of lawmakers, most of them Republicans, when the American Legislative Exchange Council holds its annual policy summit next month at the Manchester Grand Hyatt downtown . . .
The three-day 2021 States & Nation Policy Summit is scheduled to begin Wednesday and end Friday. The event typically draws state legislators, including new ALEC members and recently-elected lawmakers, national leaders and policy experts to share knowledge and experience in discussions of what organizers described as “critical issues facing the states and nation.”
But this bland description of what the article calls “one of the most influential conservative groups in the country” fails to note that ALEC is essentially, as the Center for Media and Democracy explains it, a political and legislative machine for global corporations and the super-rich. They are front and center in the effort to undermine American democracy and promote an agenda underwritten by the global corporate elite.
Funded by the Charles Koch Foundation, fossil fuel interests, Big Pharma, and a host of other moneyed interests far too long to list here, ALEC creates “model bills” that then become bad legislation in state houses across the United States.
Recently, ALEC has been very active in working to suppress voting rights, undermine labor unions, privatize public education, fight action on climate change, fuel rightwing anger over “critical race theory,” promote anti-abortion, and anti-trans bills. As the Center for Media and Democracy site ALEC Exposed observes:
ALEC is not a lobby; it is not a front group. It is much more powerful than that. Through the secretive meetings of the American Legislative Exchange Council, corporate lobbyists and state legislators vote as equals on “model bills” to change our rights that often benefit the corporations’ bottom line at public expense. ALEC is a pay-to-play operation where corporations buy a seat and a vote on ‘task forces’ to advance their legislative wish lists and can get a tax break for donations, effectively passing these lobbying costs on to taxpayers.
Along with legislators, corporations have membership in ALEC. Corporations sit on ALEC task forces and vote with legislators to approve “model” bills. They have their own corporate governing board which meets jointly with the legislative board. (ALEC says that corporations do not vote on the board.) Corporations fund almost all of ALEC's operations.
Participating legislators, overwhelmingly conservative Republicans, then bring those proposals home and introduce them in statehouses across the land as their own brilliant ideas and important public policy innovations—without disclosing that corporations crafted and voted on the bills.
ALEC boasts that it has over 1,000 of these bills in introduced by legislative members every year, with one in every five of them enacted into law. ALEC describes itself as a “unique,” “unparalleled” and “unmatched” organization. We agree. It is as if a state legislature had been reconstituted, yet corporations had pushed the people out the door.
If you follow the link above and scroll through ALEC Exposed, you’ll find a comprehensive catalogue of how nearly every reactionary idea in American politics made its way into the legislative arena. As the agenda for the San Diego ALEC event notes, education is a particular interest for the group and much of the “parent’s rights” rhetoric coming from Republicans is prepackaged for the demagogues by the good folks at ALEC.
As Grist reported last April, one of ALEC’s central goals in the Biden Administration has been to undermine any efforts at climate action:
Leah Stokes, a political science professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, said that it was predictable that ALEC’s new federalism working group would be laser-focused on climate policy . . . “It’s not surprising to see the fossil fuel industry try to push back and weaken progress because they don’t want us to get off fossil fuels,” she said. “They want to keep making profit and imperil the climate stability and the health of people all across the United States. That’s how they make money.”
And it’s not just at the state level or in the Republican Party where ALEC wields influence. As the New Yorker documented this October, corporate Democrat Joe Manchin is not only a fossil fuel baron himself but a former member of ALEC who still shares their ideological leanings:
Since Biden took office, Manchin has continued to take positions that align with ALEC’s ideology. He opposed both an effort to raise the minimum wage to fifteen dollars an hour and the Senate’s For the People Act, which, among other provisions, would have eliminated partisan gerrymandering, a primary reason Republicans have an ironclad hold on many state legislatures. As the Build Back Better bill gets whittled down, Manchin has reiterated his philosophical opposition to it. “I don't believe that we should turn our society into an entitlement society,” he said. “I think we should still be a compassionate, rewarding society.”
Thus, as unpleasant as the exercise is, it behooves progressives to pay attention to the stealth operations of the right as what happens in ALEC conference rooms first, later comes back in the form of plutocratic assaults on American Democracy.