Earth Day, conservatives have been known to complain,always brings out the weirdos. This year's celebration was no exception. "Absentfrom the debate [on global warming] is the discussion of human ingenuity and ourability to adapt to our environment; when the temperature increases, we turn onthe air conditioner," ran one line of thinking that went out over the fax linesin late April. "More people die from cold temperatures than heat: '... globalwarming could actually save lives.'"
Thus spake ALEC, a driven 29-year-old who is quite conservative andrather rich. With friends in high places, ALEC throws big parties, likes to getaround, and is full of ideas. Never heard of the American Legislative ExchangeCouncil? That's just the way ALEC likes it. As obscure as it is influential, thecouncil bills itself as the "nation's largest bipartisan, individual membershipassociation of state legislators." The press, too, tends to describe theorganization in those terms. But in point of fact, ALEC represents corporateinterests, and it has an impressive stake in a high-stakes game. This year,approximately 150,000 bills will be considered by the 50 state legislatures, andabout 25 percent of them will become law -- more than 75 times the number enactedby Congress. Collectively, these laws will profoundly affect the lives of tens ofmillions of Americans.
Special-interest groups have always known this and are already heavilyinvested in state politics. According to a new report by the Center for PublicIntegrity, the number of state lobbyists dwarfs the number of state legislatorssix-to-one. What's more, these lobbyists spent more than $565 million in 2000alone. So it should be no surprise that big corporations, which havetraditionally plowed their money and muscle into the federal arena, haveincreasingly realized that they too must play ball at the state level. ALEC istheir pinch hitter.
How does ALEC work? The council connects corporations to statelegislatures via conferences and forums. Under the aegis of "legislativeexchange," these gatherings allow corporations access and influence for whichthey'd otherwise be publicly scrutinized. ALEC also produces reams of modellegislation -- drafts that meet the needs of ALEC's corporate allies and thatlegislators can send to their statehouse floors, with or without amendment.
The organization's reach is impressive: More than one-third of statelegislators are ALEC members, and about 100 hold senior leadership positions.Nine sitting governors and more than 80 members of Congress either pay dues orare alumni, including Republicans Dennis Hastert of Illinois, Tom DeLay of Texas,and Don Nickles of Oklahoma. ALEC doesn't publicly release its membership listbut, according to spokesman Bob Adams, about 65 percent of its members areRepublicans and 35 percent Democrats. ALEC's $6 million budget -- which pays for 30staffers in prime Washington office space -- is mostly provided by largecorporations (Enron included) and right-wing foundations, the Lynde and HarryBradley Foundation and the John M. Olin Foundation among them.
ALEC specializes in nothing if not the intertwining of private and publicpower: Each of its issue-based "task forces" is co-chaired by a "public-sectorchair" (a state legislator) and a "private-sector chair" (a corporate executive);similarly, the council has a "national board" of elected officials and a "privateenterprise board" of business leaders. But the organization's real ingenuity isits exploitation of a deep vulnerability in the nation's political system: Statelegislatures tend to function only part time. Only seven states have full-timestate legislatures; in six states the legislature convenes just every other year;and in 38 states, legislators have no paid staff.
If you're a politician looking to sponsor a bill, but your time and resourcesare limited and you only meet with your colleagues once every few months, ALECprovides one-stop shopping. As Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompsonsaid of his days attending ALEC conferences in the 1970s, "Myself, I always lovedgoing to these meetings because I always found new ideas and then I'd take themback to Wisconsin, disguise them a little bit, and declare that it's mine."Legislators who might otherwise gain little or no national distinction are ableto do so within ALEC. It connects them to VIPs and strokes their egos by handingout "Legislator of the Year" awards.
Alec didn't begin life as a corporate-interest group. Launchedin 1973 by conservative activists and politicians such as Paul Weyrich, JesseHelms, Jack Kemp, and Henry Hyde, ALEC began as an organ of the New Right.Liberal activists, its founders believed, had built a network of idea mills atthe state level; conservatives had to do the same. ("I always look at what theenemy is doing," Weyrich said at the time, "and if they're winning, copy it.")ALEC was -- and, according to its literature, still is -- to be guided byJeffersonian principles of devolution. For its first two decades, however, socialissues such as abortion dominated most of its work. It wasn't until the 1990sthat ALEC was almost entirely transformed into a corporate ramrod.
Today, however, ALEC channels most of its firepower into theantiregulatory, anti-environmental fight. There's its model Economic LibertyResolution, which calls for the creation of a "Joint Legislative Committee onEconomic Freedom for the purpose of identifying legal and regulatory barriers toprivate investment and entrepreneurship, and proposing legislation on such otheractions as may be necessary to remove such barriers." The Prevailing Wage RepealAct proposes the elimination of "all laws which require administrativelydetermined employee compensation rates, including wages, salaries and benefits."Another model bill would "oppose the federal government's setting aside of fundsin order to acquire more land." And a measure deceptively titled the Civil RightsAct would void "all set-aside contracts and affirmative action programs" targetedat "any individual or group on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, ornational origin."
Perhaps the McDonald's Corporation's Ed Conklin, who is private-sector chairof the Commerce and Economic Development Task Force, has convinced a fewlegislators of the merits of the Workplace Responsibility Act, which "requiresthat employees show that their drug and alcohol use did not cause a workplaceaccident" -- as opposed to the typical requirement, which ALEC deems an "impossibleburden," that employers prove such use did cause an accident. (That, after all, assumes the employee innocent until proven guilty.)
ALEC may be nominally devoted to Jeffersonian devolution, but principleapparently has its limits. In its analysis of the "living-wage" laws, forinstance, ALEC declares that "state legislatures need the power to preempt localgovernments from enacting their own wage laws." And ALEC's model Kyoto ClimateChange Protocol Act "prohibits the proposal or promulgation of state regulationsintended to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases" prior to U.S. ratification ofKyoto. So much for states' rights.
These are not just debating points whose inconsistencies might be of passinginterest. Rather, a good number of ALEC's deeply flawed "models" are becoming law.ALEC claims that state assemblies enacted more than 450 pieces of its "modellegislation" in the 1999 and 2000 legislative sessions. And as the pace of statelegislating continues to quicken, so too will legislators' needs for precookedbills. "State battles are more difficult to fight but in a way more essential,"asserts Andy Gussert, national director of the State Environmental ResourceCenter. "Major activity at the state level has significantly increased in the last10 to 15 years."
Success does have a tendency to go to one's head, and ALEC's caseis no exception. In the last year or so, the organization has involved itself farmore aggressively in partisan politics. Last September, ALEC's executivedirector, Duane Parde, sent letters to members of North Carolina's statelegislature urging them not to raise taxes. "The people of North Carolina arealready overtaxed," Parde wrote. "In this time of economic uncertainty, reasonand justice demand that you not add to the people's burden." In May, Pardeblasted Democratic Senators Patrick Leahy and Tom Daschle for moving too slowlyon President George W. Bush's judicial nominees. And in its strangest spasm ofall, ALEC weighed in on the presidential election showdown in Florida. "ALECOffers 'Hats Off' to Florida's Courageous State Legislature," the press releasetrumpeted after that state body slid its 25 electoral college votes into Bush'scolumn.
Is this kind of activity legitimate for a nonprofit organization thatdidn't check the lobbying clause on its most recent tax forms? It's hard to say,because almost all of what ALEC does is craft and promote legislation and providespaces for corporations to press political flesh. Some nonprofits, if they elect todo so, can spend a portion of their resources backing and attacking legislation.ALEC claims it doesn't -- but then what was Parde doing attacking a tax-increasebill in North Carolina? Although ALEC seems due for closer scrutiny by theInternal Revenue Service (as well as state ethics boards), lobbying disclosurelaws dramatically vary at the state level, and it's incumbent on politiciansthemselves to classify gifts and expenses. It's impossible to generalize whetheror not ALEC members do so appropriately. But one thing's for certain: If thepoliticians who attend ALEC conferences couldn't travel to them on publicdollars -- that is, if its conferences and forums were considered lobbyingevents -- key ALEC functions would be wiped out. As someone familiar with theorganization said, "The totality of what they do is lobby. It's a self-sustainingcon game."
ALEC denies the charge. "We don't lobby," Adams insists. "We don't introducelegislation at the state level. We just don't do that. We educate people andinform ideas. ... We are a tool for state legislators."
One wonders who the tools really are in ALEC's questionable game.
