ALEC, A Cancer Growing on Our Democracy

by Ruth A. Sheets

The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) is celebrating its 40^th anniversary.  I suspect that when it was founded, its goals were not as lofty as to limit voting, destroy women’s freedom of reproductive choice, promote guns for all citizens, eliminate the public schools, reduce taxes for wealthy members of society, deregulate just about everything, cancel employee pensions, break unions, criminalize immigrants, privatize the services the government does well.

From the beginning, ALEC certainly had its political agenda, extremely conservative, somewhat racist and androcentric.   It started small with developing ideas to reduce taxes and provide legislative templates for conservatives all over the country.  Just like cancer, however, its actions metastacised over time and spread to envelope legislators all over the country.  ALEC and its ideas are now out of control.

Now, conservative candidates run for office claiming they will work for job creation, education, and other worthy issues of concern to Americans.  But, when they get into office, they pick up ALEC bills and go after everything else.  

If one state legislature succeeds with a restrictive voter I.D. law, everyone else in the network wants to try it in their state.  If one ALEC bill is passed to profile potential undocumented immigrants, the rest of their gang will introduce a nearly identical bill.  It is popular with ALEC to blame unions and public workers, particularly teachers for all financial woes,  so one state after another passes union-busting laws.

Women are not popular with ALEC, so it has helped to introduce a variety of anti-women bills.  The interesting thing here is that each state that picks these bills up tries to make its own law more restrictive than the last.

There no longer even has to be an honest reason for the laws that are proposed.  Voter fraud is almost non-existent, but millions of dollars and thousands of hours have been wasted pushing through a variety of voter suppression laws.  There is little or no evidence that school vouchers or charter schools have improved education or cost the tax-payers less, but this proposal passed in one state, now all the legislatures in the network keep pushing both.

Some courts have been like chemotherapy, trying to stop the cancer.  It is harder and harder, though,  as the US Senate is not filling openings on the courts.  Money interests are invading the judicial system.   In addition, it doesn’t matter what the American people want.  Protests seem irrelevant.

ALEC is not the only organization engaged in corrupting our democracy, but it is one of the most powerful.  Its leader, Grover Norquist, is not elected, yet our politicians give him and his crew more power than elected officials have. They threaten candidates who don’t sign their ridiculous pledge not to raise taxes.  Why do our Republican legislators give away their ability to govern?

We need to wake up and fight the cancer before it is too invasive to be put into remission.