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Progressives Denounce '50 Years of Harm' by ALEC at Anniversary Gala
The American Legislative Exchange Council, which funnels right-wing model legislation to state houses, has "a really regressive agenda for our nation," one campaigner said.
Oct 05, 2023
As the American Legislative Exchange Council celebrated its 50th anniversary Wednesday night, a coalition of public interest groups gathered to wish them "a happy unbirthday," in the words of one critic opposed to the shadowy right-wing organization.
ALEC is a pay-to-play network of legislators and private sector operators who have spent the last half a century drafting pro-corporate legislation that members then push to state houses across the country. The advocacy organizations opposed to ALEC—including Common Cause, Greenpeace, the Union of Concerned Scientists, and True North Research—gathered to say that 50 years is "more than enough."
"ALEC's anniversary is nothing to celebrate because it has played such a fundamental role in undermining the American dream," Lisa Graves, executive director of True North Research and an expert on the group's activities, told Common Dreams.
"Fifty years of harm is absolutely enough."
ALEC has been the driving force behind a plethora of state laws that demonstrate "a really regressive agenda for our nation," Graves said. These include right-to-work laws, voter ID laws, laws criminalizing climate protests, and, in recent years, laws barring the use of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) criteria in investing.
The groups are hoping to use ALEC's 50th anniversary to draw attention to its past activities as well as solidify as well as solidify opposition to its anti-democratic operations going forward.
"We want to make sure that every American knows that, if Americans are behind bars in your state, in a private prison, you can thank ALEC for that," Svante Myrick, president and CEO of People for the American Way, said in a press briefing ahead of Wednesday's rally. "If there are laws in your state that make it harder for Black people and brown people to vote, you can thank ALEC for that. If there are laws that make it a crime to protest against polluters and climate change in your state, you can thank ALEC for that."
Looking ahead, the coalition aims to pressure the corporations and even nonprofits that associate with ALEC to disengage, with a new petition launching Thursday.
Outside the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday evening, the groups held a rally to coincide with the ALEC gala event and confronted the attendees.
"It was a good action with a lot of the core groups represented there to make sure that these ALEC legislators and their sponsors arriving in their tuxedos and their formal gowns were greeted by representatives of a lot of people across the country who object to the type of corruption that ALEC represents," Graves said.
In 2011, when Graves received a trove of ALEC draft legislation from a whistleblower while she was executive director of the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD), a coalition of groups launched a pressure campaign that persuaded more than 120 corporations to drop their ALEC memberships, including ExxonMobil, Dow, and Coca-Cola.
Since then, however, "they've gotten a little sneakier about it," Viki Harrison, the director of Common Cause's Constitutional Convention and Protecting Dissent programs, said during the press briefing.
Instead of joining ALEC as a member outright, corporations will sponsor a cigar bar or whiskey night at an ALEC gathering, for example. The new petition, therefore, will be sent to the presidents, CEOs, and members of the board of any corporation who is still attending conferences or hosted events.
"Anybody who is still involved, we say dump ALEC," Harrison said. "Fifty years of harm is absolutely enough."
The new round of targets will include the hosts and host committee members of Wednesday's gala, who include usual suspects like Newt Gingrich, Mike Pence, and Philip Morris; major companies like Guarantee Trust Life Insurance and the United Parcel Service; but also, surprisingly, the Humane Society of the United States, according to a list obtained by CMD.
The Humane Society's participation was particularly shocking, Graves said, because one of the model ALEC bills she covered in 2011 made it harder for pet owners to sue if their pets died because of corporate wrongdoing.
Another notable name on Wednesday's list, Graves said, was Leonard Leo right-hand man William Hild, who leads Consumers' Research, Consumers' Research, a right-wing front group that promotes itself as a consumer advocacy group while promoting corporate interests. This reflects the strengthening relationship between ALEC and Leo, the Federalist Society co-chair and architect of the current far-right Supreme Court. When Leo received a $1.6 billion donation from billionaire Barre Seid in 2021, he funneled $200,000 of it to ALEC, and in exchange ALEC pushed voter suppression legislation nationwide.
"Because ALEC is a pay-to-play operation, it goes where the money is, and the money is with Leo," Graves said.
ALEC has also taken up Leo's so-called "anti-woke agenda" and opposition to ESG investment guidelines in particular, Graves said. Both Texas and Arkansas have passed ALEC-drafted legislation barring their state governments from doing business with companies that have guidelines against investing in fossil fuels or firearms, Alan Leveritt, founder and publisher of the Arkansas Times, explained during Wednesday's press briefing. Leveritt said this had cost Arkansas an additional $30 million and Texas $300 to $500 million as the states had to move pension funds from larger firms like BlackRock to smaller companies with higher management fees.
"They have essentially raised taxes on the consumers and the retirees in the state of Arkansas and all these other states," Leveritt said.
Harrison said the anti-ESG push was especially alarming because it went against the conservative principle of allowing financial actors to make their own decisions without government interference.
"It's the antithesis of what the republican party has always said they are," she told Common Dreams.
In addition, Graves noted, ALEC bills tend to single out restrictions on fossil fuel investments and even limit investments in renewable energy "at a time when our climate is demonstrably growing worse due to the burning of fossil fuels."
In response, groups like Common Cause, CMD, People for the American Way, and Greenpeace are increasing their collaboration to shine the light on ALEC's activities. Because ALEC pushes legislation covering almost every major issue, "they feel we can't keep an eye on everything," Harrison said.
She and her coalition partners want to make sure that "activists in each state don't feel like they're seeing that bill by themselves."
Concerned citizens can help by researching the issues they care about, seeing if there is ALEC-backed legislation in place that targets them, and speaking to their state legislators about where the bills came from and how to challenge them.
‘We have to ask ourselves," Myrick said during the briefing, "will the next 50 years belong to ALEC, or will it belong to us?"
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ALEC Is Launching a New Attack on Unions
The proposed new policy ALEC’s economic development task force is expected to endorse essentially blacklists any employer that voluntarily recognizes a union from receiving state economic development incentives.
Jul 24, 2023
When the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC, holds its annual meeting in Orlando this week, GOP state legislators and corporate lobbyists will likely embrace model legislation that creates new barriers to union organizing efforts across the country.
The proposal is a replica of Tennessee’s Employee Free Choice and Privacy Act (SB 0650 / HB 1342), which passed earlier this year and was signed into law by GOP Gov. Bill Lee. Backed by five ALEC-affiliated state legislators, the bill is a direct counterpunch to Ford Motor Company’s decision to voluntarily recognize a union in Tennessee after the state awarded it $884 million in tax and other incentives in 2021 to build a new lithium battery plant there, which is expected to employ 5,600 workers.
Since the United Auto Workers (UAW) has what is known as a “neutrality agreement” with Ford, the company has agreed to voluntarily accept a union once a majority of workers at the new plant sign union membership cards.
ALEC’s new proposal is an attempt to further weaken unions and dilute their political power.
That decision angered right-wing groups and legislators who take great pride in Tennessee being an anti-union state. The new law that passed this spring, however, will not affect Ford, as it only applies to subsidies received (or unions recognized) after it took effect on July 1.
The Tennessee bill that serves as the ALEC model was sponsored by two members of the ALEC task force who serve in the Tennessee House: Republican Reps. Dennis Powers and Dan Powell. Three of the bill’s five Senate sponsors are also ALEC members.
ALEC is a pay-to-play operation in which state legislators and corporate lobbyists meet behind closed doors to write model legislation that advances a radical right-wing, pro-corporate, and pro-Republican agenda on everything from suppressing voter access and denying climate change to opposing unions and undermining public education. Ford dropped its ALEC membership in 2016 due to growing concerns about the group’s refusal to recognize the climate crisis.
Less than 1% of ALEC’s budget comes from legislators’ dues. Instead, the group relies on right-wing donors and corporations for virtually all of its funding. In reviewing tax returns for the Charles Koch Foundation and Koch’s Stand Together Fellowships from 2014-19, the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) identified $2.7 million in Koch funding for ALEC, which also benefits from strong support from other ultra-conservatives such as the Bradley, Coors, and Searle foundations.
ALEC has long championed anti-labor legislation—including so-called “right-to-work” laws that grant all employees the benefits of union membership even if they don’t join the union or pay dues. ALEC’s new proposal is an attempt to further weaken unions and dilute their political power.
The proposed new policy ALEC’s economic development task force is expected to endorse during the July 26-28 meeting is called the Taxpayer Dollars Protect Workers Act. It essentially blacklists any employer that voluntarily recognizes a union from receiving state economic development incentives like those Tennessee gave Ford and prohibits unions from enrolling members and creating a bargaining unit unless a secret ballot election is held through the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). Violators of that ban would be forced to repay any state economic development grants they received.
Although studies show that a majority of workers would join a union if given the chance, unions often lose NLRB elections even if a majority of workers have signed union cards. The reasons are complicated, but roadblocks to establishing new unions through the NLRB election process include everything from employers intimidating workers with threats to hire replacements to firing employees who support unionization and threatening to close the business.
“And under current law, employers are allowed to legally lobby workers against forming a union—including in very coercive ways—from the moment a worker is hired,” according to the AFL-CIO and Economic Policy Institute. “In addition, the employer [can actively] prohibit union representatives from talking with workers inside the workplace.”
How Neutrality Helps
A neutrality or voluntary agreement between an employer and a union avoids these roadblocks by allowing union representatives access to workers in return for agreeing to certain terms, such as not striking during contract negotiations.
Employers agree to accept union authorization cards signed by a majority of eligible employees as a means of union endorsement from both sides. The process, which saves everyone time and money, is called a “card check” and allows the parties to avoid some of the lengthy deliberations and acrimony associated with an NLRB election.
Though the employer grants union representatives access to workers, beyond that it neither opposes nor supports the unionization effort. While stopping short of endorsing the union, Ford announced that it would let workers decide for themselves whether or not to accept the UAW as their bargaining representative.
Forever Energy announced that it had reached a neutrality agreement with the UAW for the company’s forthcoming EV-related battery plant in Shreveport, Louisiana, noting that the agreement “captures the company and union’s commitment to mutual respect and open communication.”
A number of major employers have recently adopted neutrality agreements. In January, Microsoft recognized the Communication Workers of America as the bargaining representative for 300 video game testers at a subsidiary, its first voluntary union recognition in the U.S. In September 2022, Major League Baseball owners agreed to allow minor league players to join the MLB Players Association.
The same month, Forever Energy announced that it had reached a neutrality agreement with the UAW for the company’s forthcoming EV-related battery plant in Shreveport, Louisiana, noting that the agreement “captures the company and union’s commitment to mutual respect and open communication.”
Similar to Tennessee, Kentucky is providing Ford with a performance-based loan of up to $250 million, along with a building site and other funds for workforce development so that the company will build a similar plant there.
Even with the neutrality agreement as part of Ford’s contract with the UAW, both Kentucky and Tennessee are right-to-work states, so workers who refuse to pay union dues still benefit from union-negotiated contracts.
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How Wolf-PAC Is Helping ALEC Rewrite the Constitution Along Right-Wing Lines
The group, formed during Occupy Wall Street with the goal of overturning Citizens United, is collaborating with ALEC in its push for a constitutional convention.
May 25, 2023
In spearheading far-right efforts to rewrite the U.S. Constitution, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) is increasingly counting on an unexpected ally: a campaign finance reform group founded during the Occupy Wall Street protests more than a decade ago.
ALEC, a pay-to-play operation in which state legislators and corporate lobbyists meet behind closed doors to advance a right-wing agenda, has long advocated for an Article V constitutional convention in order to win a balanced budget amendment and radically curtail federal powers.
Given ALEC’s blunt efforts to restrict voting rights, quash organized labor, gut environmental regulations, and promote the Big Lie of 2020 election fraud, association with the organization is considered politically radioactive for liberal Democrats, let alone those further to the Left.
“We want an army to fight for an amendment to declare corporations are not people.”
Yet one progressive organization seems to have missed the memo.
Wolf-PAC, a group focused on overturning the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision that opened the door to unlimited corporate spending on elections, has been pressing for a constitutional convention since its founding in 2011. And although the group’s sole goal is curtailing corporate political spending, in recent years it has joined ALEC’s Article V gatherings, collaborated with ALEC allies on delegate selection issues, and testified alongside right-wing groups seeking a constitutional convention at state legislative hearings.
“We want an army to fight for an amendment to declare corporations are not people,” founder Cenk Uygur announced in establishing Wolf-PAC during the 2011 Occupy Wall Street protests at New York’s Zuccotti Park.
Instead, Wolf-PAC has chosen to team up with the nation’s biggest corporate lobby group to pursue its goal—and is helping to advance ALEC’s right-wing plans for revising the Constitution in the process.
The Road to a Convention is Paved with Fuzzy Math
Despite their disparate goals, ALEC and Wolf-PAC are pursuing the same agenda, attempting to get 34 states to submit convention resolutions in order to trigger an Article V constitutional convention.
Although all 27 constitutional amendments passed since the document was first ratified in 1788 have been initiated by Congress, Article V of the Constitution lays out an alternate procedure for proposing amendments: convening a constitutional convention, which requires two-thirds of state legislatures (currently 34) to pass convention resolutions. Both methods, whether initiated by Congress or through the states, require amendments to be ratified by three-fourths of the states before becoming part of the Constitution.
The push to get 34 states to request a constitutional convention has been slow going for Wolf-PAC. Only California, Illinois, New Jersey, Rhode Island, and Vermont have passed its resolutions so far, and the group hasn’t scored any new victories since 2016. Two of those states have since walked back their Wolf-PAC resolutions—New Jersey in December 2021 and Illinois in April 2022—when their legislatures voted to rescind all past state calls for a constitutional convention (a setback Wolf-PAC only partially acknowledges on its progress map).
Conservative proponents of a convention have proposed increasingly more eccentric accounting methods to accelerate states’ calls for a convention.
It’s not just Wolf-PAC that has faced defeat on this front. David Super, a Georgetown legal scholar who closely follows the issue, points out that “the momentum is in the other direction: Over the past few years, five [additional] states (Colorado, Delaware, Maryland, Nevada, and New Mexico) have rescinded Article V applications submitted decades earlier.”
In response, conservative proponents of a convention have proposed increasingly more eccentric accounting methods to accelerate states’ calls for a convention.
In the summer of 2020, constitutional convention advocates led by anti-labor firebrand and former Republican governor of Wisconsin Scott Walker and conservative activist David Biddulph, co-founder of ALEC’s Balanced Budget Amendment Task Force, embraced a new legal strategy aimed at forcing a convention by counting a half dozen historic “plenary” (or generic) convention resolutions in order to reach the 34 states needed.
Critics such as the progressive group Common Cause refer to this as the “fuzzy math theory,” pointing out that this accounting method incorporates arcane resolutions that have remained on the books even though the issues in question have become moot—such as New York State’s call from 1789 that sought a convention in order to draft a Bill of Rights.
Despite Wolf-PAC denying that it favors aggregating convention calls in this way, right-wing groups are happily lining up its proposed campaign finance reform resolutions alongside ones proposed by the right-wing group Convention of States Action (COSA), founded by Tea Party organizer Mark Meckler.
Path to Reform, an ALEC-affiliated coalition that organizes pro-convention gatherings called Academy of States, specifically counts Wolf-PAC’s three remaining convention resolutions in a handful of scenarios that they say could help them reach the 34-state threshold. At an Academy presentation last July, Path to Reform’s Director of Education Vickie Deppe argued that Wolf-PAC’s three convention resolutions can be counted with 19 COSA resolutions because they all address issues of money in politics.
“The Convention of States Project application includes fiscal controls and placing limits on the federal government,” Deppe said in a related video called Fact Check: Article V Convention in less than 24 months? “These are concepts that could certainly be brought to bear on the problem of money in politics.” By adding together Wolf-PAC and COSA applications, along with a handful of generic resolutions, Deppe claims that Wolf-PAC already has convention calls from 30 states.
Strange Bedfellows
This unusual partnership between Wolf-PAC and right-wing groups has only strengthened since December 2021, when the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) first revealed that the group was participating in one of ALEC’s Academy sessions.
At the July 2022 session— known as Academy 3.0 and held in Denver—Wolf-PAC’s National Counsel Samuel Fieldman presented on possible procedures for convention delegate selection, an issue ALEC is also trying to address through state legislation.
“Feedback on the presentations was overwhelmingly positive,” according to a recap email from Path to Reform and the State Legislators Article V Caucus, “thanks to the efforts [of] Sam Fieldman of Wolf-PAC,” among others.
In addition to attending the ALEC-sponsored Academies, Wolf-PAC members have been teaming up with a former COSA staffer to push convention legislation in various states.
In his presentation, Fieldman cited ALEC’s 2011 Article V Handbook by Rob Natelson—a conservative constitutional theorist whose work underpins the fuzzy-math theory of convention applications—though later in the session he noted that he doesn’t agree with everything Natelson argues.
Wolf-PAC’s inclusion in the Academy of States infuriated the far-right leaders of COSA, as CMD has previously reported. Meckler, who believes Citizens United was “one of the greatest free-speech decisions in American history,” considers collaborating with Wolf-PAC to be “extraordinarily dangerous” and refused to engage in a previous Academy presentation due to their presence along with other “leftists.”
Yet distinctions between the groups are becoming increasingly muddled. In addition to attending the ALEC-sponsored Academies, Wolf-PAC members have been teaming up with a former COSA staffer to push convention legislation in various states.
In New Hampshire, former Wolf-PAC volunteer-turned-state Representative Jodi Newell (D-4) has introduced a procedural bill (HB 392) specifying that, should a constitutional convention ever be called, delegates would be elected by popular vote, not appointed by the state legislature. Both Fieldman from Wolf-PAC and Ken Quinn, a former regional director for the Convention of States effort and current regional director of U.S. Term Limits, testified in favor of the bill.
And although Wolf-PAC testified as neutral in a New Hampshire hearing on COSA’s convention application, the testimony had the effect of normalizing the work and claims of Michael Farris, one of the original founders of the Convention of States Project and former president of Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative Christian hate group.
Wolf-PAC built upon Farris’s testimony, which proffered the “theoretical tools” that would limit a convention, by offering the “practical tools” that would work hand-in-hand with them.
U.S. Term Limits (USTL), which advocates for term limits at all levels of government, was founded by Eric O’Keefe, a right-wing operative with deep ties to the Koch political network who also co-founded Citizens for Self Governance (CSG), the parent group of COSA, where he sits on the board.
Wolf-PAC currently has applications for a constitutional convention pending in three states: Oregon (HJM 1), Washington (SJM 8002), and Maine (SJR 705). Only the Maine resolution—a joint product of Wolf-PAC and USTL that advocates for amendments addressing congressional term limits as well as political spending—specifies that the application “may not be aggregated with any other applications on any other subject.” The wording of the Oregon resolution indicates that the application only “intends” to be aggregated with those on a similar subject.
Big Picture
Legal experts note that there is nothing in the Constitution that limits the scope of a constitutional convention once called. They warn that a runaway convention could generate major changes to the balance of power between states and the federal government, and may end up undermining many rights and protections currently afforded under federal law. Scores of progressive and good-government organizations, including CMD, have joined together to oppose an Article V convention on those grounds.
After ALEC and its allies spent more than a decade arguing that fears of a runaway convention are baseless, it adopted a model No Runaway Article V Conventions Act in December 2021 to try to quell those fears. Wolf-PAC’s Fieldman teamed up with ALEC’s Biddulph at the Academy 2.0 that month to present on the bill, which would limit the types of amendments delegates could introduce at a convention to those that were included in its initial application.
Either way, any constitutional convention under the rules envisioned by ALEC and COSA would make it virtually impossible for Wolf-PAC’s anti-Citizens United amendment to succeed.
“We have the opportunity as a result of that to have a supermajority, even though…we may not even be in an absolute majority when it comes to the people who agree with us.”
Most of the constitutional convention measures passed in recent years specify that each state would give legislative leaders the power to handpick its delegates and would get one vote, regardless of size, according to CMD’s research report titled Convention of State Politicians. Under those rules, Republicans would have “control over a nearly three-fifths supermajority of state delegations, enabling red states representing only a third of the U.S. population to determine what amendments get sent out to the states for ratification,” the report found.
Audio obtained by CMD confirms that this is the Right’s strategy. At an ALEC event, former Pennsylvania senator and current COS Senior Advisor Rick Santorum stated that, “We have the opportunity as a result of that to have a supermajority, even though…we may not even be in an absolute majority when it comes to the people who agree with us.”
“I think we are on the cusp of a supermajority moment,” Meckler added. To emphasize that progressives will have no say at a contemporary constitutional convention, Meckler pointed out that Tories had no role in the crafting of the Constitution and that Confederates had no choice in the adoption of post-Civil War amendments.
Wittingly or unwittingly, Wolf-PAC’s collaboration with ALEC helps right-wing dark money groups move closer to that objective. According to internal ALEC documents obtained by CMD, the organization is pushing for a constitutional convention as soon as summer 2024.
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