ALEC, “Model” Legislation, and Preemption
This blog post was written by Lisa Graves, Executive Director of True North Research and Founder of ALECexposed.org.
Industries and right-wing special interests regularly seek to limit local power and representative democracy through a pay-to-play group called “ALEC,” the American Legislative Exchange Council.
ALEC describes itself as the largest voluntary association of state legislators in the country—at times claiming to have more than 2,000 legislative members¹ — but that framing obscures the true nature of the group. State legislators are the attraction and pay a nominal $100 in annual dues, but the real drivers of ALEC are the private sector members that pay thousands more: the lobbyists representing huge profit-seeking industries, multinational businesses, and right-wing non-profit groups fueled by billionaires like Charles Koch. ALEC is largely underwritten by Koch Industries and the Koch fortune² as well as by Big Tobacco,³ Big PhRMA, and global corporations.⁴
By connecting such special interests to state legislators, ALEC provides a kind of one-stop shopping or “dating service,”⁵ as Rep. Mark Pocan (D-WI) put it, for global and national corporations and reactionary non-profit groups to get their lobbying agenda into the hands of legislators from almost all 50 states at once.⁶
What some of those corporations and other ALEC funders want is to preempt or prohibit local towns and cities from passing laws that impact profits or offend their anti-regulation ideology.⁷ Local laws that benefit the community and local economies by increasing the prosperity or financial security of workers and protecting our environment impose requirements on corporations that force them to change and consider the public interest. To prevent such rules and associated costs, even though beneficial to society, special interests turn to ALEC to dictate to localities through the domination of state legislatures.
As members, corporate lobbyists and other special interests pay 100 times more in dues than state legislators. For that price, they are granted direct access to state leaders, as well as an “equal voice and vote”⁸ on “model” legislation, ready-to-go bills to be introduced by legislators, the content of which is agreed upon in closed-door sessions.⁹ Those sessions are the held at ALEC’s national meetings, where the bills (which they dub “policies”) are voted on behind closed doors by lobbyists and lawmakers voting as equals, without the press or public present.¹⁰ ALEC functions to connect legislators to donors and even provides electoral aid, as alleged in ethics complaints filed by the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD).¹¹
Although ALEC is technically non-partisan, its “free market” agenda is aligned with the GOP. In 2011, after a whistleblower gave me all of the bills secretly voted on at ALEC meetings to become its legislative agenda, CMD tallied ALEC’s legislative leadership. In all, 103 of its 104 “public sector” task force members or state leaders were Republicans.¹² Today, it’s 100 percent. Each of its state¹³ and issue task forces¹⁴ is co-chaired by a member of the private sector, meaning a corporation, trade group, or other special interest. Together, they partner to change state laws to conform to corporate and right-wing desires.¹⁵ According to one study, ALEC bills were introduced “nearly 2,900 times, in all 50 states and the U.S. Congress, from 2010 to 2018, with more than 600 becoming law….”¹⁶
The public critique of ALEC has grown exponentially in the years since I launched ALECexposed, but the group has been pursuing its free market agenda for 50 years. ALEC was created in 1973 in response to a memo written to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce by Lewis Powell, not yet a Supreme Court Justice, urging businesses and industry groups to become more involved in government.¹⁷ The memo was written in response to the federal government’s efforts to regulate the makers of cancer-causing cigarettes (one of Powell’s major clients) and other industries who products or practices harm public health and our environment.¹⁸
“This year, as ALEC marks its 50th anniversary, national groups representing hundreds of thousands of Americans are coming together to make sure more Americans understand just how harmful ALEC’s legacy has been and how toxic its agenda really is for our communities, our democracy, and our planet. ”
In the years that followed, ALEC established deep roots with government officials, often promoting state preemption as a tool to strip away the power of local electeds and ultimately harm their communities and constituents. An early example, quite troubling, is ALEC’s role as tip of the spear in opposing local divestment of public funds from businesses working in or with South Africa during racial Apartheid. It failed to stop apartheid-related local divestment,¹ but later converted its opposition into a resolution against socially responsible investing,¹⁹ a campaign that continues today as ALEC is working to prevent the divestment of state pension plans from fossil fuels, one of many ways it tries to limit the ability of our democracy to mitigate the devastating climate changes that are underway.²⁰
To that end, right now, state treasurers are being pressured to punish companies that divest from fossil fuels by barring them from doing business with their states or handling their state’s pension investments.²¹ ALEC has also spearheaded efforts to preempt cities from setting their own minimum wages, adopting common sense gun laws, or addressing worker rights and workplace conditions, as well as preempting local zoning laws, environmental policies, anti-discrimination laws, public health authority, and many other areas that most Americans would consider to be local matters for local rule-making.²²
Since I launched ALECexposed in 2011, ALEC has faced intense scrutiny and criticism. Hundreds of reporters have covered ALEC’s effects, many thousands of concerned citizens have spoken out against ALEC’s agenda, and millions of Americans have seen how ALEC’s funders and legislators have changed the rules for voting and maps in our democratic Republic to consolidate power, spread disinformation, and even generate hate by adopting extreme positions on a range of cultural issues.²³ Public interest groups like the Center for Media and Democracy, Common Cause, Color for Change, People for the American Way, True North Research, Greenpeace, and national, state, and local labor unions have banded together on an array of campaigns to expose ALEC’s agenda over the past decade. This exposure caused more than 100 corporations to dump ALEC, a loss of revenue that was offset in some ways by funding from Charles Koch’s political empire²⁴ and right-wing foundations created by the Bradley, DeVos, and Coors fortunes²⁵ as well as some right-leaning industries like the tobacco and weapons industries.²⁶
ALEC’s plunge further to the right can be tracked in part to Lisa Nelson, a former top staffer for Newt Gingrich, who became ALEC’s CEO in 2014. As Donald Trump spread the “Big Lie” about election fraud, Nelson promoted claims of Trump allies like Hans von Spakovsky and Cleta Mitchell. She also began effectively outsourcing some of ALEC’s work on election laws to groups like the so-called “Honest Elections Project,” which is tied to Leonard Leo, who co-chairs the right-wing Federalist Society, whose largest donor is anonymous, and which is known for its ties to the current Supreme Court majority.
Leo sits at the center of a massive billion-dollar trust fund and he uses dark money conduits to funnel money into influencing who becomes a state or federal judge, state attorneys general, and other key posts. Leo has played a leading role in packing the U.S. Supreme Court with right-wing activists who share his agenda²⁷ – which includes limiting access to abortion²⁸ and reversing the right to same-sex marriage, limiting the power of the courts to guard against unfair maps, and making it harder to regulate corporations in the public interest²⁹ – which is aligned with some of ALEC’s key funders.³⁰ Leo handpicked the Supreme Court candidate Trump chose from when he appointed Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court,³¹ all of whom ALEC backed; notably, Leo’s personal wealth has increased substantially since he thus ensured that Roe v. Wade and other legal precedents would be overturned.³²
This year, as ALEC marks its 50th anniversary, national groups representing hundreds of thousands of Americans are coming together to make sure more Americans understand just how harmful ALEC’s legacy has been and how toxic its agenda really is for our communities, our democracy, and our planet.
Editor’s note: This local divestment campaign was initiated in reaction to the Reagan administration’s refusal to sanction South Africa. The administration opted instead for a policy of “constructive engagement,” which included continued financial support of the South African regime and blocking UN sanctions. In opposition, local leaders divested their own public funds. Their efforts gained momentum, ultimately pressuring the US government to sanction the Apartheid regime, which it finally did toward the end of Reagan’s second term. By that time, 23 states had joined 14 counties and more than 70 cities to divest approximately $19.6 billion from companies in any way associated with South Africa.