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Starting Wednesday this week, the right-wing American Legislative
Exchange Council, or "ALEC," will bring together hundreds of corporate
lobbyists with state and local politicians at a posh hotel in San Diego
for the group's annual meeting.
Republican presidential candidate and
ALEC alum Scott Walker,
who has signed over 20 ALEC bills into law, will address this month's
meeting, as well as 2016 GOP presidential hopefuls Mike Huckabee and Ted
Cruz, who participated in ALEC meetings before he joined the U.S.
Senate.
Protesters are planning on bringing a little transparency to the proceedings,
by welcoming the candidates and ALEC participants on July 22.
ALEC, which drafts and markets model bills for legislators, has had a mixed year. Over a dozen companies, including tech giants
Google and Facebook,
stopped funding the group over its role in promoting climate change
denial, yet after the 2014 elections gave Republicans control of 68 out
of 98 state legislative bodies, some states have had few impediments to
the corporate-friendly legislation that ALEC peddles.
For example, in just the first half of 2015,
Wisconsin became a "right to work" state
and repealed the prevailing wage, another pro-union law; Michigan
blocked local control over minimum wage and paid sick days; and Texas
banned cities from regulating fracking.
A look at the San Diego
ALEC agenda tells us more about what ALEC has planned for 2015 and
beyond. Here are seven major initiatives that the right-wing group seeks
to impose on America.
1. Attack Federal Efforts to Rein in Carbon Pollution
Even though California is suffering from a historic drought, the
climate change deniers on the Environment and Agriculture Task Force will be working on new ways to stymie action addressing carbon emissions.
In recent years, ALEC has targeted the Environmental Protection Agency's "Clean Power Plan," which is a set of rules
limiting carbon dioxide pollution
from coal plants. At the behest of its funders like Koch Industries,
Peabody Energy, and American Electric Power, ALEC has been organizing a
state-level campaign against the rules: the group organized legislators
to press their state attorneys general into joining
litigation backed by the energy industry that challenges the regulations, adopted a
model resolution attacking the plan, and last December adopted a model bill that would create new hurdles for the Plan's implementation.
At
this month's meeting, the Energy, Environment, and Agriculture Task
Force--which is chaired by American Electric Power-- will consider a
"State Power Accountability and Reliability Charter (SPARC)," which
seeks to undermine the Clean Power Plan by declaring that state agencies
cannot implement it. And, the task force's "Energy Subcommittee" will
hold a discussion on "State Responses to EPA’s Proposed Clean Power
Plan."
Another model bill on the ALEC agenda is the "Environmental
Impact Litigation Act," which effectively allows corporate interests to
hire a state's Department of Justice as their own private attorneys.
The bill creates a corporate-backed fund for states to sue over federal
environmental laws--such as the EPA's Clean Power Plan--guided by an
"environmental impact litigation advisory committee" made up of
political appointees and representatives of "individuals representing
agriculture and energy trade commissions."
2. Undermining Renewable Energy
ALEC will also double-down on its attacks on rooftop solar and renewable energy.
For
the last few years, ALEC and funders like Edison Electric Energy have
promoted bills to repeal state Renewable Portfolio Standards, which
require utilities to provide some power from renewable sources. Despite
support from the Kochs' Americans for Prosperity, ALEC has had limited
success in pushing these bills into law, so the group is looking for new
ways to undermine renewable standards.
The latest effort is
called an "Act Providing Incentives for Carbon Reduction Investments."
The industry-friendly bill would free utilities from the requirement
that they produce more energy from renewable sources, as long as they
claim to make "carbon reduction investments"--which includes
controversial programs like carbon sequestration, or campaigns to
encourage consumers to reduce energy use. This would undermine the
purpose of the renewable standards, which is to promote a shift to
renewable energy.
3. Thwart Rooftop Solar
Solar will also be on the agenda. ALEC has
tried in a
variety of
ways to reduce incentives for individuals and businesses to build rooftop solar panels by raising the costs.
Over the last few years,
ALEC and its utility industry funders have promoted bills to eliminate
"net metering," which gives solar users a credit for excess energy they
feed back into the grid, and have been behind efforts to impose a
surcharge on rooftop solar users. With few exceptions, these efforts
have failed, thanks to strong support for solar from conservatives who
like the self-sufficiency that rooftop solar provides, and the fact that
in many states the solar industry is creating manufacturing and
construction jobs.
In San Diego, ALEC will consider a proposal
called a "Resolution Concerning Special Markets for Direct Solar Power
Sales" that aims to prop-up the monopolies enjoyed by traditional
utilities and oppose direct-to-consumer solar sales. It will be coupled
with a presentation called "Consumer Protection Concerns Surround
Rooftop Solar Model Policy." In many states, solar developers are
allowed to install panels on a customer's home or business for free,
then sell the power directly to the consumer, rather than through a
monopoly utility provider like Peabody Energy.
Direct-to-consumer
energy sales that bypass heavily-regulated monopoly utilities might be
viewed as the sort of "market disruption" that free market adherents
claim to support. After all, ALEC has celebrated the emergence of
ride-sharing companies like Uber because they disrupt taxi monopolies
and allow direct-to-consumer ride sales.
The key difference is
that ALEC is bankrolled by utility companies. ALEC funders like Peabody
Energy, Duke Energy, and Murray Energy are not pleased about the threat
to profits posed by direct-to-consumer solar, so therefore it must be
crushed, free market principles be damned. Incredibly, the "Resolution
Concerning Special Markets for Direct Solar Power Sales" declares that
direct-to-consumer solar is "antithetical to free markets."
The proposal
appears to come from the climate change deniers at the Heartland Institute.
4."Beepocalypse Not"
At
this meeting, ALEC is denying more than climate change. It also is
apparently denying the mass die-off of bees, which threatens food
supplies--
two-thirds of crops require bee pollination--and which
scientists have linked to type of insecticide
produced by ALEC member Bayer and other companies. Until recently,
Bayer had a representative on ALEC's corporate board and has been listed
as the ALEC corporate co-chair in states like Massachusetts, Nevada,
Pennsylvania, South Dakota, and Texas.
Bayer has been actively pushing back on the notion that its products contribute to a bee colony collapse. According to a
report
from Friends of the Earth, Bayer recently launched a "Bee Care Tour” as
well as a children’s book "in which a friendly neighborhood beekeeper
tells young Toby that the bees are getting sick, but 'not to worry' it's
just a problem with mites, and there is special medicine to make bees
healthy"--medicine that Bayer produces, of course.
At this month's
ALEC meeting, bee die-off denialists took a clumsy stab at being
clever: in an apparent reference to "Apocalypse Now" (or perhaps Wayne's
World), they titled their presentation, "'Beepocalypse Not."
5. Preemption Hypocrisy
ALEC's new offshoot focused on local government, the
American City County Exchange (ACCE), will also meet in San Diego.
Local
democracy has led to some significant policy wins in recent years, with
cities like Philadelphia guaranteeing workers paid sick days, and
places like Denton, Texas banning fracking. ALEC's response to cities
and counties acting as laboratories of democracy has traditionally been
to crush it,
through state "preemption" laws that prohibit local governments from raising the minimum wage, or regulating GMOs, or building municipal broadband.
With
ACCE, ALEC and its corporate backers are taking the fight directly to
the local level, urging city and county officials on the one hand to
give up their authority to protect the health and economic well-being of
their constituents, and on the other to push policy measures to advance
corporate interests.
The biggest proactive ACCE initiative is a
push for local right to work laws. In the months following a local right
to work workshop at ACCE’s meeting last December, twelve Kentucky
counties have enacted the anti-union measures, and similar proposals
have been floated in states like Illinois and Pennsylvania. But enacting
right to work on the local level likely violates federal law, so groups
like the Koch-backed Americans for Prosperity and the state Chamber of
Commerce are bankrolling the legal defense of counties that get sued.
Local
right to work is again on the ACCE agenda for this month's meeting,
with the group expected to officially adopt a Local Right to Work model
bill.
It will also hold a workshop aimed a propping up another
ACCE funder, the payday loan industry: the presentation is titled
"Payday Loans; 'Local Free Market Solutions for a Difficult Policy
Problem.'”
Besides pushing policy measures that advance the
interests of ACCE's funders, ACCE is also urging local electeds to
accept state preemption laws.
In
a workshop titled “Understanding State Preemption Laws," ALEC and ACCE
will pitch local officials on why they should let state legislatures
steamroll their authority to protect the health and economic well-being
of their constituents. The workshop will be moderated by Libby Szabo, a
former Colorado state legislator and ALEC state chair who is now a local
official: she resigned from the state legislature just two months after
winning reelection to take a county commissioner appointment, leading
to charges from the editorial board of the conservative
Denver Post that she was "thumbing her nose at voters."
The
lesson here is that ALEC supports local control when it advances the
interests of its funders, yet actively works to undermine local
democracy when it threatens corporate profits.
ALEC's hypocrisy
around the idea "government that is closest to the people governs best"
isn't just limited to city-state relations. Even though ALEC has fought
federal policies like healthcare reform and the Environmental Protection
Agency’s regulation of carbon emissions under the guise of “state’s
rights,” at this month's meeting it will push policies that run contrary
even to that notion. Here again, corporate profits trump anything
resembling principles.
ALEC will hold a workshop telling state
legislators that they should embrace federal preemption of state
chemical regulation, which happens to benefit ALEC funders like the
American Chemistry Council. The "Environmental Health and Regulation
Subcommittee" will hold a presentation titled "Supporting Chemical
Regulation Preemption Supports Manufacturing," where legislators will
apparently be told it is just swell that the federal Toxic Substances
Control Act will prohibit states from enacting tougher chemical
regulations.
And, the Tax and Fiscal Policy Task Force will
consider a proposed "Resolution Urging Congress to Eliminate
Discriminatory State and Local Taxes on Automobile Renters," which calls
on Congress to preempt discriminatory state and local taxes on car
rentals. It is hard to imagine a more blatant piece of
corporate-friendly legislation, yet ALEC continues to insist that only
legislators can propose model bills at its meetings.
5. Amend the Constitution
In
recent years, one of ALEC's top priorities has been to add a balanced
budget amendment to the U.S. Constitution. And it will be a major focus
of this month's meeting.
A balanced budget amendment is an idea
that has been bouncing around for decades--even though it would cripple
the federal government's ability to spend on earned benefit programs
like Social Security, and block Congress from responding to economic
downturns or natural disasters--but what is unique about ALEC's push is
that they are trying to do it via an Article V Constitutional
Convention.
Article V of the U.S. Constitution provides that
thirty-four states (two-thirds) can trigger a convention to propose an
amendment, which must then be ratified by 38 states (three-fourths).
Although this seems like a tall order, in the past year over a dozen
states have passed resolutions calling for an Article V convention,
adding to at least twelve other states that enacted resolutions years
ago. The proposal has been supported by Koch-backed groups like
Americans for Prosperity and the National Federation of Independent
Business (NFIB).
Key to the Article V push has been the "Jeffersonian Project," the 501(c)(4) group that ALEC
formed
in 2013 amidst complaints from Common Cause and CMD that ALEC was
violating its 501(c)(3) charitable status by engaging in excessive
lobbying. In order to deflect allegations of lobbying, the "Jeffersonian
Project" is now used to urge legislators to pass ALEC model
legislation, an activity that ALEC used to do directly.
This year, the Article V strategy dominates the
agenda of ALEC's Task Force on Federalism and International Relations,
with five presentations and two pieces of draft legislation. The task
force's private sector chair is a representative of Americans for Tax
Reform, the anti-tax group founded by Grover Norquist. And, there will
be two separate ALEC-wide policy workshops on the Article V effort, as
well as a reception and dinner titled "States Constitutionally Saving
“The American Dream” Summit Via Balanced Budget Amendment Convention."
Throughout
U.S. history, the Constitution has only been amended through a
two-thirds majority vote in both houses of Congress on a specific
amendment, which is then ratified by two-thirds of state legislatures.
In contrast, the Article V strategy triggers a full constitutional
convention, and it is unclear whether the delegates could be confined to
only passing one amendment. This fear of a "runaway convention" has led
critics on both the right and left to oppose the Article V strategy.
ALEC has tried to quell these fears through a
companion bill
declaring that delegates to a convention may not vote on other issues
besides a balanced budget amendment. Yet, at least some amendment
supporters want to open up the Article V process and amendment the
constitution to address an array of issues, like limiting the Commerce
Clause, banning international law in the U.S., and placing term limits
on the Supreme Court, among other items from a right-wing wishlist.
The
key driver of the broader Article V amendment effort is Citizens for
Self-Governance (CSG), a group led by Tea Party Patriots co-founder Mark
Meckler, and whose board includes Wisconsinite Eric O'Keefe. CSG, which
receives most of its funding
through foundations such as DonorsTrust that cloak their donors'
identities, has also backed multiple lawsuits related to the "John Doe"
investigation into coordination between Governor Walker's campaign and
Wisconsin Club for Growth, where O'Keefe is a director.
CSG's Convention of States effort has been
endorsed by Mike Huckabee (who will be addressing the ALEC conference) and also attracted
support
from the likes of Glenn Beck. CSG's "Compact for America" appears on
the ALEC agenda with both a presentation and a model bill, and Meckler
will also address the conference on July 24.
Another group pushing
an Article V amendment is Compact for America, a Texas-based group
advised by Nick Dranias, formerly of the Goldwater Institute, and
chaired by former Goldwater chair Thomas C. Patterson. This group also
is promoting a model bill at the ALEC meeting, and will hold a full
breakout session on July 23.
Wisconsin State Rep. Chris Taylor
attended a session on ALEC's Article V plans at the group's 2013
conference. When she expressed hesitation that the public would support
the effort, she was told, "You really don’t need people to do this. You
just need control over the legislature and you need money, and we have
both."
6. Continue Fighting "Obamacare"
ALEC
has long tried to undermine the 2010 federal Affordable Care Act. It
produced the "State Legislators' Guide to Repealing Obamacare," and has
promoted bills to try blocking the individual mandate in states, and to
prohibit insurers from providing subsidies to low-income residents, and to
reject the insurance “exchanges” where individuals can buy insurance (which would have had
serious repercussions if the U.S. Supreme Court ruled differently in
King v. Burwell).
Despite
repeated failures to overturn the Affordable Care Act through Congress
and the courts, ALEC is continuing to fight the law through the states.
At
this month's meeting, the Health and Human Services Task Force will
consider a bill to limit expansion of Medicaid benefits within the
state, and the Tax and Fiscal Policy Task Force will have a resolution
on the purported negative impact of Medicaid expansion under the
healthcare law. The task force will also consider a resolution opposing
federal "maintenance of effort" requirements, like those in Obamacare
and also with education funding.
7. Fighting to Protect Dark Money
After
spending hundreds of millions of undisclosed funds on state and federal
elections, ALEC's corporate members will also demand that state
legislators preserve their "right" to anonymously spend money on
politics and buy influence in state legislatures.
A July 23
workshop titled "Dark Money Debate: What Lawmakers Need to Know about
the First Amendment and Anonymous Political Speech" will promote the
idea that transparency in elections is a bad thing. David Keating of the
Center for Competitive Politics and Jon Riches of the Goldwater
Institute are listed as presenters.
It is little surprise that corporate interests would peddle secrecy to the hundreds of Republican state legislators at ALEC.
ALEC's
funders, like the billionaire Koch brothers, have spent millions in
"dark money"--electoral spending that evades donor disclosure laws--in
recent years, secret spending which has increased exponentially since
the U.S. Supreme Court's 2010
Citizens United decision.
Disclosure
of electoral spending has widespread support among the public, and it
still has support among many Republican state lawmakers. ALEC, it seems,
is trying to change that.
This isn't ALEC's first foray into this
issue. Its 2010 "Resolution in Support of Citizens United" opposes both
the disclosure and shareholder participation endorsed by the majority
in Citizens United. In 2011, ALEC lobbied legislators in states like New
York urging them to reject a proposal requiring corporations get
shareholder approval for political spending. And at ALEC's meeting last
December, ALEC held a similarly themed workshop called "Playing the
Shame Game: A Campaign that Threatens Corporate Free Speech."
Editor’s note: CMD's Mary Bottari contributed to this article.
Brendan Fischer is general counsel for the Center for Media and Democracy, publisher of PR Watch.
