SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
alec
Climate Protesters Are Under Attack; a Trump Win Would Make It Worse
On both sides of the Atlantic, volleys of laws threatening long-term imprisonment for nonviolent dissent are being put on the books to cow the climate movement into silence. Trump promises to go further.
Oct 27, 2024
In August, climate activist and cellist John Mark Rozendaal was arrested and charged with criminal contempt for playing a few minutes of Bach outside Citibank’s headquarters in New York City. Rozendaal, 63, was prominent in the “Summer of Heat on Wall Street” campaign that targeted Citibank for its prolific financing of fossil-fuel projects. He and a co-defendant now face up to seven years imprisonment if convicted.
Meanwhile in Atlanta, more than 50 justice and environmental activists are awaiting trial on domestic terrorism and other charges arising from their years-long defense of the city’s South River Forest against the construction of an 85-acre police training center there. They are being prosecuted under Georgia’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization (RICO) law. Any of them found guilty of “racketeering” would have five to 20 years of imprisonment added to their sentences for the alleged underlying crimes.
Such situations are symptomatic of a grim trend in both the United States and Europe. Nonviolent, nondestructive climate protest is increasingly being subjected to criminal prosecution, while punishments are being ratcheted up to levels befitting violent and far more serious crimes.
The state abuses described in this article should be considered a preview of what is almost guaranteed to be even worse to come if Donald Trump does indeed retake the White House and the Republicans win majorities in the House and Senate.
Across the Global South, such environmental protests are all too often being met by corporate and state forces with extreme extrajudicial violence, especially in Indigenous communities. Here in the Global North, however, the clampdown on protest has largely been through legal action, at least so far. But that might—especially in an America with Donald Trump as its president again—only be a prelude to more violent kinds of suppression as global warming accelerates.
For embattled American climate activists, this trend further raises the stakes of the November 5 election. The crackdowns on climate protest are so far being carried out by state and local governments. But the state abuses described in this article should be considered a preview of what is almost guaranteed to be even worse to come if Donald Trump does indeed retake the White House and the Republicans win majorities in the House and Senate. As recently as October 13, in fact, Trump insisted that, once back in the White House, he’d call in the military to quash domestic dissent of any sort.
In addition, a Trumpian Congress would be likely to pass laws gutting federal climate policies and imposing extreme penalties on future climate protesters. Both prospects also feature prominently in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, produced in part by a gaggle of former Trump officials. That now-infamous blueprint for his possible second administration calls explicitly for—as the Center for American Progress describes it—“suppressing dissent and fomenting political violence.” Among other things, Project 2025 suggests that a future President Trump could invoke the Insurrection Act of 1807, which would indeed allow him to use the military to punish lawful nonviolent protest. And count on it, he’s almost certain to exploit that act if he does indeed become president again.
Gas, Oil, and Cars Over People
Since 2016, 21 states have passed a total of 56 laws criminalizing protest or dramatically increasing the penalties for engaging in it. To be sure, John Mark Rozendaal was arrested in New York, a city located in a blue state, but all the states that have adopted new anti-protest laws are governed by Republican-majority legislatures. And the specific activity most frequently targeted for prosecution is protesting the construction or existence of oil and gas pipelines. (Note that all state laws mentioned below are described in detail in a recent report by the International Center for Not-For-Profit Law, or ICNL.)
The state of Alabama, for example, can now punish a person who simply enters an area containing “critical infrastructure,” including such pipelines, with up to a year in jail and a fine of up to $6,000. If you go near a pipeline in Arkansas, you’re at significantly higher risk: imprisonment of up to six years and a $10,000 fine. Impeding access to a pipeline or a pipeline construction site in Mississippi carries a sentence of up to seven years. Do that in North Carolina as a member of a group and you’ve got even bigger problems. As the ICNL reports, “[A] group of people protesting the construction of a fossil fuel pipeline could face more than 15 years in prison and a mandatory $250,000 fine if they impede or impair the construction of a pipeline.”
Even as protest is being criminalized, assaulting protesters by car is, in effect, being decriminalized.
Many such sentences for protesting are wildly disproportionate to the severity of the act committed. In Florida, trespassing on property that contains pipelines can result in up to five years imprisonment, compared to only 60 days for trespassing just about anywhere else. Enter a pipeline facility in Ohio with the intention of tampering with it in any way and face a potential ten-year sentence. Simply spraying graffiti on an Ohio pipeline installation can carry a six-year sentence, while anyone who “conspires” with the person creating such graffiti could be fined an eye-popping $100,000.
Many climate marches or demonstrations involve walking or standing in roadways. Politicians have been exploiting the fact that “automobile supremacy is inscribed in law by every branch of government and at every level of authority” (in the words of law professor Gregory Shill) to pass highly punitive measures against street protests with little fear of having them overturned. In effect, the laws privilege fossil-fueled vehicles over the human beings who speak out against them.
In May, the Tennessee legislature passed a law that mandates a prison sentence of 2 to 12 years for protesters convicted of knowingly obstructing roadways. In Florida, groups of 25 or more protesters impeding traffic can be charged with “rioting” and face up to 15 years imprisonment. Anyone in Louisiana who does no more than help plan a protest that would impede traffic can be charged with conspiracy or with “aiding and abetting,” even if the protest ends up not hindering traffic or not occurring at all.
In Iowa, being on the street or sidewalk during a vociferous but nonviolent protest can cost you five years in prison, yet (believe it or not) a driver who runs into you during a protest, causing injury, is immune from civil liability if that driver can convince authorities that he or she had taken “due care.”
Laws that permit drivers to run into or over pedestrians engaged in protest have been passed in four states. Three of those laws hit the books in 2021 in the midst of a 16-month period during which American drivers deliberately rammed into groups of protesters a whopping 139 times, according to a Boston Globe analysis. Three victims were killed and at least 100 injured. Drivers were criminally charged in fewer than half of the ramming incidents and in only four was a driver actually convicted of a felony. In other words, even as protest is being criminalized, assaulting protesters by car is, in effect, being decriminalized.
Finally, Louisiana can file RICO charges against people who, as part of a “tumultuous” demonstration, block roads or damage oil or gas pipelines. And protesters beware, since that state’s RICO law carries the possibility of 50 years in prison at hard labor and a $1 million fine. (And yes, you read that right!)
Fresh Legislation, Ready in Minutes!
Many laws that impose severe penalties for protest were passed in the wake of the Indigenous-led campaign against the Dakota Access oil pipeline in 2016-2017. Hundreds of people were arrested in that struggle. More than 700 protesters with the Indigenous Environment Network have been criminalized for their untiring efforts to impede or halt pipeline projects across North America.
If the dozens of state anti-protest laws display many suspicious similarities, that’s no coincidence. In response to pipeline protests, oil and gas companies teamed up with the American Legislative Exchange Council, which draws up “model legislation” for Republicans in statehouses across the country to use as templates for bills that push various corporate and hard-right priorities. Once this genre of legislation was directed toward on-site pipeline protests and passed in state after state, it was also seized upon to criminalize street marches and demonstrations, including those against racist violence, fossil fuels, and other ills—all with “traffic safety” as a pretext.
Following the lead of their kindred state legislators, Republicans in Congress have proposed their own raft of bills criminalizing protest. Fortunately, they haven’t succeeded in getting any of them passed—yet. Many of the bills were prompted by campus protests against U.S.-supported genocide in Gaza or over climate policy and against the fossil-fuel industry.
Some of the congressional bills amounted to less-than-serious grandstanding. One, for instance, would have required a person convicted of “unlawful activity” on a university campus at any time since last October 7 to perform six months of “community service” in Gaza. But there were also dead-serious bills like the one prescribing a prison sentence of up to 15 years for inhibiting traffic on an interstate highway. Other proposed bills would have withheld federal funding (in one case, even pandemic aid) from states that refused to prosecute people who took part in protests on public roadways.
Smashing Human Rights in Europe
Punitive measures against climate protest are reaching new extremes in Europe, too. Since the British Parliament passed harsh new anti-protest laws in 2022, more than 3,000 activists associated with the Just Stop Oil movement have been arrested. According to CNN, “Most of those arrests have been for planning or carrying out direct actions, including slow marching,” which impedes traffic.
In response to such repression, Michel Forst, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Environmental Defenders, wrote that under the Aarhus Convention (a 1998 agreement most European countries have signed but not the United States), “Whether intended or not, any disruptions that [environmental] actions may cause, such as traffic jams or disturbances to normal economic activity, does not remove the protection for the exercise of fundamental rights during such action under international human rights law.”
In defiance of that principle, the new British laws prescribe a sentence of up to 10 years imprisonment for those convicted of planning protests judged to be a “public nuisance” (which often means disrupting traffic). Such prison terms, noted CNN, are comparable to those for aggravated robbery or rape under British law.
When the climate change group Extinction Rebellion announced an action near The Hague in September 2023, more than 10,000 people of all ages showed up. They’d come to protest the more than $40 billion in subsidies that the Netherlands government gives fossil fuel companies annually. The police blasted the crowd with water cannons, then arrested and hauled away 2,400 protesters, including children.
The group Climate Rights International (CRI) reports that “some democratic countries are even taking measures designed to stop peaceful climate protests before they start.” In June 2023, for instance, German police detained an activist before he could even leave his home to join a climate protest. Five months earlier, a Dutch activist was held in custody for two days to keep him from an action by Extinction Rebellion. He ended up being convicted of sedition (yes, sedition!) for encouraging others to attend the protest. None of that sounds like something “democratic countries,” as CRI called them, should be doing.
Protest as Necessity
People charged with nonviolent protest often invoke the “necessity defense,” declaring that they committed a minor law violation to stop a far greater crime. Unfortunately, that defense almost never succeeds and judges often forbid defendants from even explaining their motives during a trial.
That’s what happened to members of the group Insulate Britain who stood trial this year for a climate protest that disrupted traffic by nonviolently occupying streets and climbing onto overpasses along a major London ring road in 2022. The judge presiding over their trials ordered the defendants not to mention climate change in court. Several of the activists defied that order, citing the climate emergency as their motivation, so the judge promptly held them in contempt of court and sent two of them to jail for seven weeks.
One of the protesters cited for contempt, Nick Till, told CRI that, while trying to bar him and the others from explaining the purpose of their actions, the judge allowed the prosecutors to depict the defendants as threats to society. “There’s an attempt to insinuate we’re a ‘cell,’” Till said, “which is language that implies some kind of revolutionary group. They had an expert in counterterrorism testify. They tried to portray us as dangerous extremists.”
Though also being threatened with increasing penalties under state laws, Americans have somewhat stronger protections under the First Amendment.
In July, four people who planned the London protests were convicted and sentenced to a draconian four years in prison. A fifth defendant, Roger Hallam, one of the most prominent British climate activists, was sentenced to five years even though, bizarrely enough, he was neither a planner of the protest nor a participant. He was charged instead for a speech he gave regarding civil disobedience as an effective form of climate action in a Zoom call with that protest’s planners.
In their trial, the five defendants represented themselves. Over the course of four days, with the judge repeatedly trying and failing to silence them, they presented what could be the most extensive and compelling version of the necessity defense ever heard in a courtroom. (Later, in his prison cell, Hallam wrote up an account of the trial. It’s well worth reading.)
On both sides of the Atlantic, volleys of laws threatening long-term imprisonment for nonviolent dissent are being put on the books to cow the climate movement into silence. So far, European protesters who dare to resist are getting hit hardest with convictions and sentences. Though also being threatened with increasing penalties under state laws, Americans have somewhat stronger protections under the First Amendment. But how long will dissent continue to enjoy such protections in this country? That largely depends on how we all vote between now and November 5.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Be Afraid: Here’s What ALEC Is Cooking Up at Its 51st Annual Meeting
State lawmakers, right-wing operatives, and corporate lobbyists are descending on the Rocky Mountain state to vote on model policies and resolutions that impact the environment, education, elections, fundamental human rights, and more.
Jul 26, 2024
The American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC, is holding its 51st Annual Meeting in Denver this week at the four-star Hyatt Regency Denver at Colorado Convention Center. ALEC state lawmakers, right-wing operatives, and corporate lobbyists are descending on the Rocky Mountain state to hear presentations and vote on model policies and resolutions that impact the environment, education, elections, fundamental human rights, and more.
Colorado Gov. Jared Polis (D), Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds (R), Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt (R), Liberty Energy CEO Chris Wright, and GOP pollster Scott Rasmussen are slated to speak at the conference. Polis is the first high-profile Democrat to speak to the ALEC faithful in recent years.
The annual meeting officially kicked off Tuesday night with an anti-abortion “late night dessert and coffee reception” with national abortion ban proponent Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, and “pre-recorded remarks” from pollster Kellyanne Conway, former U.S. President Donald Trump’s former senior counselor, to coach legislators on “how to communicate” about abortion during this fall’s campaign season. ALEC plotted its post-Dobbs strategy at its annual meeting last summer, and at least 684 state lawmakers affiliated with the group have voted to prohibit abortion access, a Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) analysis found.
Tuesday morning, the “Christian ALEC” (officially the National Association of Christian Lawmakers)—which circulates anti-abortion model legislation among its members—hosted a prayer breakfast for attendees.
ALEC Ramps Up Its Election Work
In June 2021, ALEC CEO Lisa Nelson wrote in Real Clear Politics, “ALEC doesn’t have ‘template legislation’ on voting because ALEC doesn’t work on voting issues.” CMD exposed that claim as a lie, revealing a Council for National Policy meeting video where she described the work ALEC was doing on the issue in targeted states and admitted to outsourcing model voting legislation to the Honest Elections Project (HEP).
ALEC has held at least three voter suppression summits with HEP, a voter suppression project of Leonard Leo’s 85 Fund, and last summer passed a model bill pushed by HEP banning ranked choice voting, the process by which voters rank candidates in order of preference on their ballots rather than simply voting in favor of a single candidate.
This week, ALEC members will consider model policies that align with HEP priorities laid out in its 2024 “Safeguarding Our Elections” report: the Citizen Only Voting Amendment and Only Citizens Vote Model Policy. While the voting amendment is targeted at prohibiting municipalities from allowing noncitizens to vote in local elections, the model policy covers state and federal elections—even though it is already illegal for noncitizens to vote in either. That push is part of what The New York Timesdescribes as a wider GOP campaign designed to promote Trump’s baseless claims of widespread voter fraud and “echoes the racist ‘great replacement’ conspiracy theory.”
In January, the ostensibly “nonpartisan” ALEC announced that it is joining forces with Run GenZ to try to draw young voters to the GOP.
“In recent months, the specter of immigrants voting illegally in the U.S. has erupted into a leading election-year talking point for Republicans,” Politicoreported. Republican-controlled legislatures in Iowa, Kentucky, Missouri, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Wisconsin have placed constitutional amendments to ban noncitizen voting on the ballot this November as a way of driving GOP turnout.
ALEC is also offering a workshop on the nonissue of noncitizens voting, called “States Must Do: Protecting the Vote.” The description of the training claims “the threat of noncitizen participation in our U.S. elections is real.”
ALEC may claim this, but the facts prove otherwise. “Every legitimate study ever done on the question shows that voting by noncitizens in state and federal elections is vanishingly rare,” the Brennan Center reported. As the Brennan Center points out, even the Charles Koch-founded and funded Cato Institute determined that “noncitizens don’t illegally vote in detectable numbers.”
Meeting attendees will also debate on whether to approve The School Board Election Date Act, which would politicize school board elections across the country by requiring candidates to indicate a “political party designation” beginning in 2026 and mandating that they coincide with November elections every four years. In its Safeguarding Our Elections report, HEP recommends consolidating school board election dates with general elections in November.
Another workshop, called “Foreign Influence in American Campaigns,” will consider “options” state lawmakers have to “prevent foreign influence on state campaigns.” In the same report, HEP advises lawmakers to “ban foreign influence in ballot measure campaigns.”
In January, the ostensibly “nonpartisan” ALEC announced that it is joining forces with Run GenZ to try to draw young voters to the GOP. At the meeting, ALEC members can attend a “Boomer to Zoomer: Run GenZ Informational Meeting” to learn more about the right-wing youth candidate training partnership.
ALEC Steps Up Attacks on Strategies to Address Unfolding Climate Emergency
Meeting attendees will once again consider a number of pro-fossil fuel and climate-harming policies at the meeting this week.
Since the summer of 2021, CMD has repeatedly documented ALEC’s consideration and promotion of multiple model bills punishing companies and public entities that embrace environmental, social, and governance factors (ESG) in their business and investing practices.
Consumers’ Research Executive Director Will Hild, an anti-ESG zealot, has become a regular speaker at ALEC meetings since it became a major sponsor, and ALEC has, in turn, promoted his attacks. Hild is again scheduled to speak at this week’s meeting and is likely the sponsor of the workshop, “America Runs on Energy: ESG and Grid Sustainability.” The description of the training claims that “activism in investing is far from new, but the push to give outsized importance to ESG scores has a deleterious effect on our nation’s power grid.” Of course, it mentions nothing about the unfolding climate crisis and its impact on the grid.
One bill, the Act to Define Clean Energy, would replace references to “renewable energy” with “clean energy,” so that “power generation supplied by nuclear fuel” can be promoted in green energy policies.
Model legislation up for a vote at the conference relates to the power grid. The Equitable Escalation of Electricity Demand Act, for example, blames rising electrical costs on electric vehicles (EVs) and Big Tech, and seeks to pass the increased costs on to EV owners and technology companies that manage large data centers.
Another model bill, the Electric Ratepayers Affordability and Reliability Advocacy Act, claims that consumer utility boards have been co-opted by “green energy” advocates and proposes the creation of a new statewide position, a “Ratepayer Affordability and Reliability Advocate” with the “singular mission” of advocating for “the most reliable, [lowest] cost form of electricity in a service area.”
ALEC members will also vote on a related bill, the Electricity Trajectory Management Act, which would stop the decommissioning of power plants that use coal, natural gas, water, or nuclear for energy generation and require building new ones in order to meet the increasing power demands EVs and data centers place on the grid.
Under ALEC’s draft Resolution Urging States to Not Allow the Use of IRIS Assessments to Inform its Rulemakings, state regulators would not be allowed to use the Environmental Protection Agency’s Integrated Risk Information System (IRIS) “as the basis of hazard assessment or risk assessment decisions or as the basis to establish air, water or waste rulemaking.”
The Natural Asset Company Prohibition Act would ban this type of corporation. In 2023, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) floated the idea of including “Natural Asset Companies” (NACs) on the New York Stock Exchange, but then backtracked. NACs are a new type of corporation that put a market value on ecosystems and natural resources and are organized to “actively manage, maintain, restore (as applicable), and grow the value of natural assets and their production.”
The State Financial Officers Foundation (SFOF), the ALEC-tied group of Republican state treasurers, auditors, CFOs, and others weaponized to fight “woke capitalism” and ESG, and American Stewards of Liberty, the group tasked with upending Biden’s 30×30 executive order to help tackle the climate crisis, worked together to drum up opposition to NACs.
ALEC is also seeking to redefine terms used to promote sustainable energy to include traditional methods. One bill, the Act to Define Clean Energy, would replace references to “renewable energy” with “clean energy,” so that “power generation supplied by nuclear fuel” can be promoted in green energy policies. A related model up for consideration, The Affordable, Reliable and Clean Energy Security Act, would include natural gas and nuclear in the definition of “green energy.”
Smoothing the Way for States to Overturn Regulations after Chevron
Last month, the Supreme Court rejected 40 years of precedent and overturned the 1984 decision in Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council, summarily curtailing the power of federal agencies to interpret laws they administer and giving that power to the courts. The monumental decision provides an opening for lawyers to overturn regulations that address everything from the ongoing climate emergency to the healthcare crisis and workplace safety.
ALEC meeting attendees will hear a presentation titled, “After Relentless: What Will Chevron’s Revised Status Mean for State Officials?” and vote on model legislation to Establish the Office of Regulatory Management in the states. “This Office aims to enhance and utilize transparency to reduce unnecessary regulatory burdens and ensure that new regulations are evidence-based and cost-effective,” the ALEC description reads.
Once an office is up and running, it is clear that the regulatory “transparency” created will be used by anti-regulation zealots and corporations to challenge regulations that conflict with their ideology or impact their profit models.
Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI)
Partisan legislative attacks on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts from the right ramped up in 2023 and 2024, so it isn’t surprising that ALEC would provide model bills related to this to aid their members.
The Freedom from Indoctrination Act introduced this week prohibits universities and colleges from requiring DEI courses and prevents them from requiring first-year students to participate in DEI orientation activities. The model policy was first circulated by the right-wing Goldwater Institute and Speech First in April of 2023.
“During the 2023 legislative session alone, anti-diversity, equity, and inclusion bills were introduced in various states 40 separate times, and all of them addressed a combination of the same four objectives: ending mandatory DEI training, preventing the use of diversity statements in job applications and promotion materials, prohibiting hiring practices designed to increase diversity, and/or ending state funding for DEI offices and personnel altogether,” as CMD reported earlier this month.
Following the Supreme Court’s decision in Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College, ALEC is circulating the SCOTUS Anti-Discrimination Implementation Act to officially ban affirmative action programs designed to increase diversity on campuses or make places of higher education reflective of local demographics.
ALEC is also asking its members to vote on the First Amendment Preservation Act, which would prevent any state agency—including universities—from contracting with “media monitoring organizations” or advertisers or marketing companies that work with these organizations.
The bill defines media monitoring organizations as groups that “rate or rank news and information sources for the factual accuracy of their content,” or “provide ratings or rankings of news sources based on misinformation, bias, adherence to journalistic standards, or ethics, including, but not limited to, organizations that claim to engage in fact checking or determining overall news accuracy.”
In other words, this bill seeks to protect those engaged in hate speech or the peddling of mis/disinformation by making it harder for state governments to assess the accuracy of information and by punishing private companies that work with fact checkers to prevent the spread of disinformation.
Education Privatization, Attacks on Free Speech, and AI Gun Detection in Schools
On January 30, ALEC launched the Education Freedom Alliance in partnership with the Committee to Unleash Prosperity and the Job Creators Network to further privatize K–12 education through Education Savings Accounts (ESA), or universal, tax-funded school vouchers.
The ALEC-led coalition set “its goal of expanding universal education freedom to 25 states by 2025,” but will struggle to reach that target after only passing three ESA bills—in Alabama, Louisiana, and Missouri—so far this year, bringing the total to 12. ALEC and Charles Koch’s yes. every kid advocacy group will promote ESAs to ALEC attendees in a two-part workshop titled “The New Frontier: ESAs and Beyond.”
ALEC is also asking members to vote on the Microschool Education Act, which would give home-based or micro-school entities of 100 or fewer students the same rights as private and charter schools. Koch and the Walton Family Foundation are major backers of this latest school privatization effort.
Opponents fear that since this definition includes any criticism of Israel, relying on it will expose anti-war and pro-Palestinian activists to prosecution or hate crime charges for simply speaking out against Israel’s war in Gaza or occupation of Palestine.
ALEC’s American City County Exchange project will vote on the ACCE Model County Code Ordinance, which would streamline zoning for microschools.
In direct attacks on the First Amendment rights of students, ALEC meeting attendees will consider an Act to Prohibit Antisemitism in State K–20 Educational Institutions and an Act to Adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) Working Definition of Antisemitism.
The first bill appears to be positive on the surface, but within the text it states that, “The Working Definition of Antisemitism adopted by the International Holocaust Alliance (IHRA) that contains contemporary examples of antisemitism may also be used to identify antisemitism.”
Opponents fear that since this definition includes any criticism of Israel, relying on it will expose anti-war and pro-Palestinian activists to prosecution or hate crime charges for simply speaking out against Israel’s war in Gaza or occupation of Palestine, as Truthoutreported in an article tying ALEC to the effort to codify the weaponized definition of antisemitism.
The second model bill would officially adopt the IHRA definition. ALEC, along with representatives from the Israeli government and the Heritage Foundation, has been pushing state lawmakers to adopt the IHRA definition since as early as 2021.
Lastly, in a bizarre attempt to address the public health crisis of gun violence in our nation’s schools, ALEC is promoting the Use of AI Firearm Detection Software in Schools. The model bill would allow state departments of education to use taxpayer money to buy AI gun detection software.
For many years, ALEC worked with the National Rifle Association (NRA) and Gun Owners of America to develop legislation to loosen gun regulations, promote stand-your-ground laws, allow concealed handguns on college campuses, and prevent cities from suing gun manufacturers, and many others.
Redefining States’ Rights
ALEC may be spoiling for a fight in the U.S. Supreme Court to radically curtail federal powers. Up for consideration at this week’s annual meeting are two bills that would do just that.
The Presumption of State Jurisdiction Amendments, based on legislation in Utah according to the text, declares state sovereignty and jurisdiction over “natural resources; water resources and water rights; agriculture; education; and energy resources,” unless the federal government can show that “jurisdiction over the subject matter in question is specifically enumerated to the federal government under the Constitution.”
Earlier this year, Utah passed the Utah Constitutional Sovereignty Act, which empowers its legislature to “prohibit a government officer from enforcing or assisting in the enforcement of a federal directive within the state if the Legislature determines the federal directive violates the principles of state sovereignty.”
Now ALEC members are asking to vote on the same model. University of Utah Law Professor Robert Keiter toldCNN after the bill passed there that“if the legislature actually passes a concurrent resolution and overrules a federal regulation, then it will likely be overturned due to the Supremacy Clause.”
Banning Squatting
ALEC members will have the opportunity to debate and vote on a couple of models related to squatting, or the occupying of property by anyone who doesn’t own it or have permission to live in it.
The Stop Squatters Act prohibits anyone from the unauthorized entry or occupation of residential or commercial properties, creates a process for having law enforcement remove squatters, and enacts penalties of a misdemeanor if damages are less than $1,000 or a felony if they exceed $1,000. The bill mirrors a model circulated by the right-wing litigation center Pacific Legal Foundation. ALEC is also circulating a Statement of Principles on Illegal Possession of Private Property on the issue.
Squatting data is sparse, and Juan Pablo Garnham, a researcher and communications manager at Princeton University’s Eviction Lab, toldThe Washington Post in April that “squatting is ‘an extremely rare issue’” in the U.S.
Another Attack on Public Sector Unions
ALEC has long loathed public sector unions and circulated model policies weakening their power. The new so-called Public Employees’ Bill of Rights in front of its membership this week seeks to do the same by mandating that non-dues-paying members be given “equal rights” within a union.
The model bill also allows public employees to sue their unions and obtain a “full accounting” of union activities and dues.
ALEC publishes an anti-union playbook that was recently updated to include bills that target independent contractors and occupational licensing, CMD reported.
Other Drafts up for Consideration
- Act Establishing Foreign Wire Transfer Fees
- ALEC Statement of Principles for Teen Use of Social Media
- An Act Relating to the Creation of an Environmental Restoration Accelerator
- An Act to Identify and Report Certain Foreign-Related Transactions to the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS)
- Birth Freedom Act
- Charitable Organizations Privacy Protection Act
- Chronic Absenteeism Model Policy
- Dental Therapists Act
- Expanding Physician Access Act
- Family Rights in Medical Investigations Act
- Housing Opportunities Made Easier (HOME) Act
- Increasing Light-Touch Density Housing Act
- Joint and Several Liability Act
- Memorandum of Understanding on Economic Cooperation and Trade Relations between this State and the United Kingdom
- Model Policy to Protect Select US Land from Ownership by America’s Foreign Adversaries
- Model State Artificial Intelligence Act
- Military Spouse Licensure Act
- Pacific Conflict Stress Test Act
- Patient and Pharmacy Protection Act
- Prohibiting Cell Phones in K-12 Classrooms
- Reaffirmation of the US Commitment to Taiwan on the 45th Anniversary of the Taiwan Relations Act
- Recall of Elected Civic Leaders and Integrity Measures (RECLAIM) Act
- Resolution on the Importance of Pursuing Comprehensive Trade Agreements with Trusted Trading Partners
- Resolution Opposing the Imposition or Expansion of Digital Trade Barriers
- Resolution Reaffirming Support for the U.S. State-Based System of Title Insurance Regulation in Response to Growing Federal Encroachment
- Resolution To Adopt The “Think Differently” Initiative To Assist Individuals With Special Needs And Their Families
- Resolution to Create a County Employee Recognition Program
- Safeguarding American Families Everywhere (SAFE) Act
- Sexual Offenses Against Children Act
- Short-Term Rental Tax Policy
- The “Only Pay for What You Get” Ensuring Reliable and Affordable Electricity Act
- Truth in Electricity Generation Labeling Act
- Unlawful Release of a Minor’s Identifying Information
- Victim and Witness Address Confidentiality Act
- Victim Impact Statement Act
- Workforce Housing Tax Incentives Program
Keep ReadingShow Less
Right-Wing ALEC Bolsters Destructive For-Profit Bail Industry
"Restricting the operations of charitable bail organizations is like closing down a food pantry and claiming you’re curing hunger."
Mar 19, 2024
The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) is helping the for-profit bail industry push legislation in four states to restrict or outright eliminate charitable bail funds, which provide those unable to afford bail with enough cash to avoid being imprisoned while awaiting their day in court.
Led by the American Bail Coalition (ABC), the commercial bail industry sees the growth of charitable bail funds as a threat. The national trade group, which opposes bail reform efforts across the country, is also one of ALEC’s key corporate members. Last fall, ABC provided platinum-level sponsorship of ALEC’s ritzy 50th anniversary gala; its chairman, Bill Carmichael, is the vice chair of ALEC’s private sector board of directors; and an ABC representative sits on ALEC’s Criminal Justice Task Force. Since joining the pay-to-play legislative bill mill in the early 1990s, “ABC has written 12 model bills fortifying the commercial bail industry,” the group claimed in a 2010 newsletter.
Charitable bail funds post bail to secure pretrial release for people who couldn’t otherwise afford it. Many groups, such as the Atlanta Solidarity Fund, also operate with the specific purpose of assisting activists who often face arrest for public protests and end up in jail when unable to pay steep cash bail amounts.
Model policy developed by the ABC cautions that “in the past few years, the [charitable bail] funds have nationalized, and are now operating in [a] fashion to destabilize the bail system.”
The bills targeting charitable bail funds — which are currently being considered by lawmakers in Georgia, Kentucky, Washington, and Virginia — call for imposing general reporting and registration requirements, setting a maximum amount of bail that a fund can cover, and/or limiting the number of times a charity can post bail to just three per year, which would effectively shutter its operations.
“Restricting the operations of charitable bail organizations is like closing down a food pantry and claiming you’re curing hunger,” says Jeremy Cherson of the Bail Project, a national nonprofit that advocates for the elimination of cash bail while also providing bail and support services.
Instead of investing in support services, “lawmakers in these states have pursued shortsighted solutions that stick with the status quo of cash bail,” he points out. That, in turn, “leads to unnecessary incarceration and all its attendant consequences like job loss, family separation, and housing instability, which only makes cities and states less safe.”
Critics of the cash bail system repeatedly warn that curtailing the operations of bail funds disproportionately impacts poor and working-class Black and brown people.
The for-profit bail bond industry generates as much as $2.4 billion in annual revenue, according to U.S. industry estimates, with more than 2 million people entering into contracts with private bail bondsmen every year. The top six bail insurers control 76% of the market, according to reporting by Reuters.
The U.S. and the Philippines are the only countries in the world with commercial bail industries. Bail bond agents charge people who can’t afford bail a non-refundable fee — usually 10% of the set amount — to ensure that bail will be paid in full if the defendant doesn’t show up in court. Defendants frequently borrow money from bail bondsmen at predatory interest rates to cover their fees. The profits from these exorbitant rates are split between the bail bondsman and the insurers that provide the financial backing.
The heightened focus on charitable bail organizations comes amidst other corporate-funded assaults on the right to protest and ongoing threats from 2024 presidential candidate Donald Trump to deploy the military against civilian protesters.
A Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) analysis of current and recent bills that seek to curtail the operations of charitable bail funds found that the ABC has likely used its ALEC connections with state lawmakers to advance these pieces of legislation.
The Bail Industry’s Playbook
The number of bills seeking to regulate or restrict the operations of charitable bail organizations skyrocketed in 2020 after nationwide protests in the wake of George Floyd’s murder in June of that year. When donations poured in to bail funds across the country, some of the accompanying media attention focused on certain funds that had bailed out individuals accused of committing violent crimes.
By the end of the year, the ABC had published a briefing document calling for the regulation of charitable bail funds. “During 2020, these funds grew in popularity due in large part to celebrity and political endorsements aimed at posting bail for those arrested during the violent protests across the country which began after the George Floyd incident,” the document states. “With a warchest perhaps as high as $200 million nationally, these funds are now a major issue in bail and pretrial release,” and are being used “to destabilize the bail and criminal justice system.”
Critics of the commercial bail industry counter that the for-profit business is far more detrimental.
“The payment plans, the 10% fees, the collateral bail bonds agents extract — those are the types of disruptions that take people years to recover from,” the Bail Project’s Cherson told CMD.
The ABC, which has an annual revenue of $2.3 million according to its most recent tax filings, consists of five surety insurance companies that pay steep membership dues.
In late 2021, the coalition published a model policy on how to regulate the charitable bail industry. The aim of the model bill was to hamstring charitable bail funds by putting into place preliminary reporting and regulatory requirements. It was based on a bill that passed in New York — the first state to enact restrictive legislation — along with legislation introduced in Texas and Indiana.
ABC has gone so far as to suggest that charitable bail funds may not be legal because they leave “the defendant [with] zero financial incentive to show up in court.”
The coalition spent more than $1 million on lobbying in 2022, according to its most recent tax filings, nearly double what it spent in 2020. A Reuters investigation found that in 2020 insurance companies spent $17 million “to defeat proposals to weaken or abolish the for-profit bail industry in the United States” — an industry that “brings insurers $15 billion in business a year.”
Georgia’s Crackdown
Georgia’s SB 63, which has been passed in both legislative chambers, would prevent charitable funds from posting more than three cash bonds per year and require them to have their application approved by a local sheriff’s department. It would also dramatically expand the number of bail-restricted violations — including unlawful assembly, which is often used as a dragnet to include peaceful protest. A previous, less expansive version of the bill was proposed in 2022, but failed to pass.
A spokesman for Governor Kemp’s office said that the legislation is “undergoing a thorough review process.”
In a recent statement about the bill, Tiffany Williams Roberts, public policy director of the Southern Center for Human Rights, notes that “given the history of bail funds in many civil and human rights movements in Atlanta, SB 63 represents another violent attack on the right to political dissent, which, unfortunately aligns with Atlanta’s current repression of social movements that challenge the criminal legal system.”
Two of the bill sponsors, Republican senators Frank Ginn and Stephen Gooch, are members of ALEC, with Gooch serving as an ALEC state chair. Its House co-sponsor, Rep. Houston Gaines (R), is also an ALEC member who has delivered on other ALEC priorities such as preempting local democratic control over law enforcement budgets.
Speaking on the House floor earlier this month, Gaines repeatedly referred to defendants — regardless of what they were charged with — as criminals who are “not showing back up for court, and staying on the streets,” framing his attack with rhetoric that echoes the industry’s talking points.
According to a recent ABC statement, “Georgia has come up with what is really a very simple floor for these dangerous criminals — they aren’t getting out of jail free without some assurance that they will show up for court and answer for the charges.”
Charitable bail funds are “unaccountable,” Gaines said in claiming that these organizations are responsible for releasing “violent criminals on our streets.”
The ACLU of Georgia has said that it will sue the state if Kemp signs the bill.
Other States with Pending Legislation
Kentucky
In Kentucky, a sweeping piece of legislation called the Safer Kentucky Act, which rewrites and expands much of the state’s criminal code, has widespread support among Republican lawmakers. It would limit bail payments by charitable bail organizations to a maximum of $5,000 and prevent those organizations from posting bail for people accused of certain violent crimes. The component targeting charitable bail organizations has been recycled from a previous bill first proposed in 2022.
Washington
In Washington, state Senator Mike Padden (R) reintroduced SB 5116, which would impose registration and reporting requirements on charitable bail funds. Padden, who is also a founding member of the state’s conservative Freedom Caucus, has served as a member of ALEC’s Criminal Justice Task Force. When he was a state representative in the 1990s, he served on ALEC’s board of directors.
In the early 2000s, Padden used his influence to secure $7.5 million in fees and interest payments via favorable county contracts and special interest legislation for his former employer, a debt collection agency. This session, the senator has also sponsored bills to repeal a state ban on contracting with private prison companies and authorize the use of chokeholds by police.
Virginia
Virginia’s HB 846, introduced by conservative delegate Wren Williams, would similarly regulate charitable bail funds by implementing steep registration fees and other requirements. The bill also prevents bail funds from assisting anyone previously convicted of a violent crime.
Legislative Successes
Beyond New York, Indiana is the only state to have put in place significant restrictions on charitable bail organizations with the passage of HB 1300 in 2022. The law requires charitable bail organizations to be certified by the state, prevents them from receiving state funding, and prohibits them from bailing out any defendant who has been charged with a violent crime or a felony, or has a prior conviction for a crime of violence. The Indy Starreported how a misinformation campaign that misrepresented the number of reoffenders bailed out by bail funds helped propel the proposed legislation into law.
In the wake of its passage, the Bail Project teamed up with the Indiana ACLU to sue the state over what it argued was unjust targeting of its organization. The Bail Project came under intense media scrutiny in Indiana after three of the individuals it bailed out committed violent crimes on pretrial release, making it the industry’s strawman for arguing in favor of maintaining the status quo.
Although neither the bill’s author, Rep. Peggy Mayfield (R), nor its coauthor, Rep. Donna Schaibley (R), are known to be ALEC members, reporting by CNN found that Mayfield had contact with the ABC while drafting the legislation. In addition, the three Senate sponsors of the bill are all affiliated with ALEC.
“Unlike licensed bail agents, bail funds do not have the ability to recover defendants who skip court, and their involvement should be limited to cases that don’t impose a significant risk to the public’s health and safety,” ABC Executive Director Jeffrey J. Clayton wrote in an op-ed when a previous version of the legislation was under consideration.
Cherson disagrees, telling CMD that “charitable bail organizations make a small but meaningful impact on the incredible devastation wrought by this system. And the more legislatures pursue these types of restrictions, the more broken these systems become.”
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular