How ALEC (the American Legislative Exchange Council) turns Disinformation into LawJune 29, 2022 | 11:43 am Elliott Negin, Senior Writer In June 2021, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott signed into law a bill banning the state from contracting with or investing in businesses that divest from coal, oil or natural gas companies. For Texas Railroad Commissioner Wayne Christian—one of the state’s top energy regulators—the message was clear: “Boycott Texas, and we’ll boycott you.” Since the beginning of this year, lawmakers in Indiana, Oklahoma and West Virginia have introduced bills that read a lot like the Texas anti-divestment law, and legislators in a dozen other states have also expressed support for the legislation’s objective. Mere coincidence? Not at all. The template for the bill, titled the Energy Discrimination Elimination Act, was supplied by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a lobby group backed by corporations and right-wing foundations that provides state lawmakers with ready-made, fill-in-the-blank sample legislation drafted by, or on behalf of, ALEC’s private sector members, including tobacco, fossil fuel and electric utility companies. The bills in Indiana, Texas and West
Virginia are near-verbatim copies of ALEC’s draft legislation, while the Oklahoma
bill is a boiled-down version. The Energy Discrimination Elimination Act is just one of the thousands of pieces of legislation ALEC has disseminated nationwide since its formation in 1973. According to a two-year investigation of “copycat” bills published in 2019 by USA Today, the Arizona Republic and the Center for Public Integrity, state lawmakers introduced nearly 2,900 bills based on ALEC templates from 2010 through 2018. More than 600 of them became law. What explains ALEC’s track record? A big piece of the answer lies in the way the group spreads disinformation and hides its activities from the general public. Peddling DisinformationALEC’s disinformation starts with how the group describes itself. Originally called the Conservative Caucus of State Legislators, ALEC falsely claims it is a “nonpartisan” organization that enables private sector members to collaborate with legislators on policies and programs promoting what it calls “Jeffersonian principles of free markets, limited government, federalism, and individual liberty”—a classic libertarian mantra. Nonpartisan? Hardly. Virtually all of the roughly 2,000 state lawmakers, officials and staffers who pay a token fee of $200 for a two-year ALEC membership are Republicans. By “free markets,” ALEC means giving free rein to
corporations by rolling back public health, environmental, consumer and voting
protections; ALEC’s definition of Jeffersonian principles also ignores the fact that
Thomas Jefferson had some harsh words to say about undue corporate
influence. Those benefactors are the real power behind ALEC—a network of nearly
300 companies, trade groups, corporate law firms and private libertarian
foundations that pay annual dues of $12,000
to $25,000, plus as much as $40,000 to
sponsor an ALEC conference session. ALEC’s current corporate
members include Altria Group (formerly Phillip Morris), American Electric
Power, Anheuser-Busch, Chevron, Duke Energy, Eli Lilly, Farmers Insurance,
FedEx, Koch Industries, Marathon Oil, Pfizer and UPS. Step One of ALEC’s Tactics: Orwellian FramingWhen ALEC promotes new legislation, it regularly employs the kind of “up is
down” framing immortalized by George Orwell in his dystopian classic 1984. A good example is the Asbestos
Claims Transparency Act, which lawmakers introduced in
at least 17 states between 2012 and 2018 and was passed into law by at least 11
states. Even when lawmakers do take the time to read bills based on ALEC templates,
ALEC uses draft language that is often purposely “unremarkable or technical” to
obscure their real-world impact, the investigation by
USA Today, the Arizona
Republic and the Center for Public Integrity
found. Step Two: Send in the Corporate DeceiversNext, to indoctrinate—or just mislead—state lawmakers, ALEC provides them access to a multitude of purportedly independent, “neutral” "so-called-experts" who are, in fact, shilling for special interests. For example, according to the three news organizations’ investigation,
Colorado state Sen. Jerry Sonnenberg, who introduced the aforementioned Asbestos
Claims Transparency Act in 2017, relied on outside experts to explain the
bill to his statehouse colleagues. The ALEC-drafted Energy
Discrimination Elimination Act Texas passed last year is yet another example
of the council deceiving state lawmakers. It is no surprise that such a law would appeal to legislators in Oklahoma,
Texas and other states where the fossil fuel industry holds sway, but why
would ALEC lawmakers in other states support it? There has been a scientific
consensus for years that human activity—mainly burning fossil fuels—is the
primary cause of climate change. There is no
debate. At the same time, ALEC—which relentlessly denigrates clean energy solutions—has been flooding state lawmakers with sample legislation designed to
Equally troubling, ALEC’s climate science
disinformation efforts have had a discernible “trickle up” impact on
federal policy. Step Three: Exploit Understaffed LegislatorsDisinformation thrives when legislators are distracted or not paying close attention, and ALEC takes advantage of the fact that state lawmakers have limited time, salaries and resources. “States are prime targets for corporations because it’s easier to get things out of state legislatures than Congress,” explained political scientist Darrell West, the Brookings Institution’s director of governance studies, during a conversation I had with him a few years ago. “The biggest problem is state legislators are understaffed.” Stella Rouse, director of the Center
for Democracy and Civic Engagement at the University of Maryland,
seconded that assessment, noting that the job of researching and drafting bills
can be challenging and time-consuming. The fact that most state legislatures are part-time and consequently don’t pay lawmakers full-time salaries also strengthens the hand of groups such as ALEC, added West. “Many legislators have to have jobs on the side, so they don’t have a lot of time to put into legislating. That makes them dependent on outside sources.” Alex Hertel-Fernandez, an assistant professor at Columbia University’s School
of International and Public Affairs, explains that ALEC’s success hinges on more
than supplying sample legislation.
According to the National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL), a
nonpartisan, professional development organization, only four states—California,
Michigan, New York and Pennsylvania—have what could be
considered a full-time legislature. Step Four: Undermine DemocracyBesides plugging bills to limit consumer rights
and thwart efforts to address the
climate crisis, ALEC also has been playing a
behind-the-scenes role in the voter suppression
movement, another front that serves its funders’ goal to impede voters who might
support candidates and policies that challenge corporate dominance. The organization’s anti-democratic
efforts began at least a decade ago when it promoted a discriminatory voter
ID law—as well as the infamous self-defense
law used to excuse the murder of Trayvon
Martin in Florida in 2012. The organization, however, never completely abandoned its voter suppression
agenda. That constitutional amendment bill didn’t go anywhere—likely because it went too far—but in 2018, ALEC drafted a sample resolution to limit judicial power over redistricting, making it easier for ALEC-dominated legislatures to gerrymander district electoral maps. More recently, ALEC members have been quietly involved in “block the vote” efforts. Likely fearing the possibility of alienating its corporate members again,
ALEC CEO Lisa Nelson has repeatedly
denied that her organization is involved in voting issues, and the
group has not posted any sample voting restriction bills on its website,
according to the Center for Media and Democracy. ALEC veterans on Capitol Hill are also apparently committed to undermining
democracy. Little Public OversightALEC’s success depends not only on the fact that overworked legislators can
be easily manipulated, but also on the fact that the general public pays little
attention to what goes on at statehouses. “Most people say they like their state leaders, and a large majority even
remembers learning about state government in school,” Johns Hopkins University
political scientist Jennifer Bachner, one of the researchers and director of the
school’s Government Analytics program, said in
a press release. Certainly, one major reason for pervasive public ignorance about state
government is the rapid decline of local newspapers,
which historically devoted substantially more resources to covering politics
than broadcast media. The Post also reported that the number of newspaper journalists
dropped by more than half between 2008 and
2020, which has had a significant impact on statehouse coverage. Overall, however, the number of reporters covering statehouses increased 11
percent since 2014, Pew found,
due to a jump in part-time reporters and the establishment of new, nonprofit
news organizations “after years of staff cutbacks in the newspaper
industry.” One such nonprofit, The
Center Square, offers conservative
spin masquerading as news, according to
the Center for Media and Democracy. To make matters worse for bona fide reporters, Republican leaders in
GOP-controlled statehouses in Iowa, Kansas and Utah
recently passed
rules limiting when journalists can report
from the floors of their legislative chambers, making it even
more difficult for them to
ask questions and follow policy deliberations.
Attention and Activism Are Key to Fighting BackGiven ALEC’s stealthy influence on statehouses, especially the 62
state legislative chambers controlled by Republicans, it is imperative that
concerned citizens engage with their legislators and closely monitor ALEC’s
activities in their state. Protests organized by Color
of Change and other racial justice groups against ALEC’s
voter ID and “stand
your ground” laws resulted in several high-profile corporate members
leaving ALEC. ALEC’s scientifically indefensible stance on climate
change also has prompted some of its corporate members to
defect—even in the energy sector—especially
after news organizations and advocacy groups such as Greenpeace and
the Union
of Concerned Scientists (UCS) drew attention to ALEC’s flagrant
lies. Public interest groups are also turning up the heat on ALEC over its
relatively recent voter suppression efforts. As Louis Brandeis famously wrote in
1913, three years before he was appointed to the US Supreme Court, Thanks to efforts to bring ALEC’s disinformation to light, as well as pressure from
shareholders, unions and public interest organizations, more than 100 corporate
and nearly 20 trade
association and foundation members have canceled their memberships since 2012,
and ALEC’s annual
revenue dropped from a high of $10.35
million in 2017 to $7.97
million in 2020.
Author’s Note: The organizations that closely monitor ALEC include the Center
for Constitutional Rights, Center
for Media and Democracy (host
of ALEC
Exposed), Common
Cause, Documented, Stand
Up to ALEC and True
North Research.
This article was produced by Earth | Food | Life, a project of the Independent Media Institute. |