Thom Hartmann - The Crash of 2016

Once the ALEC task force approves legislation, it’s then handed off to the legislators to take back home and introduce in their respective state governments.

Florida State Representative Rachel Burgin didn’t even bother to remove the ALEC mission statement from the top of the “model legislation” that she introduced in the Florida House of Representatives back in February 2012. Right below the header of her bill, “urging Congress to cut the federal corporate tax rate,” were the words “Whereas it is the mission of the American Legislative Exchange Council…” 144

She realized her mistake the next day and immediately withdrew the bill.

ALEC, however, makes no secret of its legislation-writing wing, bragging on its website, “ALEC’s Task Forces have considered, written and approved hundreds of model bills on a wide range of issues, model legislation that will frame the debate today and far into the future. Each year, close to 1,000 bills, based at least in part on ALEC Model Legislation, are introduced in the states. Of these, an average of 20 percent become law.” 145

But in states where Republicans control both chambers of the state legislature as well as the governor’s mansion, such as Wisconsin, the success rate is much higher.

I asked Representative Pocan how much of the legislation he’s seeing introduced in the state legislature in Wisconsin is coming out of ALEC.

“The vast majority,” he said. “All the attacks on collective-bargaining rights, all the changes to pension law, all of the cuts and ‘reforms’ to education, all of these are part and parcel of workshops and task forces that I’ve been to.” 146

Nine different states have passed ALEC-written legislation to reject efforts to bring transparency to our elections by requiring shareholders to approve corporate election spending. Those states include Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio, South Dakota, West Virginia, and Wisconsin.

Coincidentally, ALEC’s leading corporate contributors have funneled more than $16 million into state political campaigns since 2001. 147

The group Common Cause identified several pieces of legislation that are virtual carbon copies of model ALEC legislation (minus the mission statement), introduced by at least nineteen members of the Republican-controlled Minnesota state legislature, giving tax breaks to tobacco companies, striking down greenhouse-gas-emissions regulations, and taking away the rights of people to vote. 148

After the ALEC members in the Minnesota legislature passed four bills that would have given corporations more protections from lawsuits, Democratic governor Mark Dayton vetoed them and then called out his state’s Republican legislators for copying ALEC’s “boot camp manual.”

“I’ve found that Minnesotans do not want their laws written by the lobbyists of big corporations,” he said.

“Since these Republican bills so closely follow ALEC’s instructions on tort reform and since ALEC’s opinion on these subjects are evidently more important to Republican legislators than mine, their fellow DFL legislators or the Minnesota Supreme Court’s, perhaps they would share with us all of the other ALEC boot camp manuals so we can know in advance what to expect from them for the rest of the session.” 149

The democracy-stealing agenda of ALEC is most evident in the spate of voter ID laws that have been passed in Republican-controlled state legislatures around the nation. These new laws, virtual carbon copies of ALEC’s model legislation, will disproportionately affect low-income, minority, elderly, and college-age voters (people who usually vote for Democrats). According to a Brennan Center for Justice study, as many as five million people will be disenfranchised by voter ID laws.

Ironically, ALEC’s founder was conservative strategist Paul Weyrich, who, according to Republican Speaker of the House John Boehner, is a “giant of the Conservative movement.” 150

Weyrich was instrumental in organizing this corporate takeover of our democracy, funding the politically powerful “Moral Majority” as well as the right-wing think tank the Heritage Foundation. In 1980, Weyrich revealed a key conservative strategy and the game plan for ALEC thirty years later, saying in a speech, “I don’t want everybody to vote. Elections are not won by a majority of people. They never have been from the beginning of our country and they are not now. As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections goes up as the voting populace goes down.” 151

Kick more voters off the rolls, and let corporations have more of an influence in who wins them—that’s ALEC’s strategy.

As organized people’s access to democracy disappears, the formal institutions of government devolve into dysfunction.

Lawmakers are no longer listening to their constituencies but instead to the technocrats on Wall Street and the Royalist shadow government manifested in “think tanks” such as the Mackinac Center and ALEC.

The 112th session of Congress (2011–12) earned the lowest approval rating ever. It was the least productive since the 80th “Do-Nothing” Congress (1947–48). Filibustering and obstruction in the Senate reached unprecedented levels.

It’s not a coincidence that this was the first Congress elected post- Citizens United .

All that money that the Supreme Court allowed Royalists to spend elected one of the most corporate-friendly House of Representatives since the Gilded Age.

The members of Congress they owned went to work on Capitol Hill in the 2011 session fiercely defending the interests of America’s superrich, protecting everything from the Bush tax cuts, to taxpayer subsidies for transnational oil corporations, to bonuses and malfeasance on Wall Street.

An early warning came from Standard & Poor’s, when they noted that the effectiveness of Congress is in question.

“The downgrade”—referring to the credit downgrade of the United States from AAA to AA+—the report states, “reflects our view that the effectiveness, stability, and predictability of American policymaking and political institutions have weakened at a time of ongoing fiscal and economic challenges to a degree more than we envisioned when we assigned a negative outlook to the rating on April 18, 2011.”

Yes, America still looks like a democracy. One in which we still vote (or about half of all registered people do), we have big election-night specials on major news networks. We all embrace the idea of American democracy at work. But deep down it’s been rotted by greed and corruption.

On average, a member of the House of Representatives must raise $5,000 a week for his or her campaign. That means that every morning, Monday through Friday, they must wake up not thinking about governing but about fund-raising—how to scrounge up a thousand bucks that day. In the Senate it’s even worse, at an average of $14,000 a week. 152

And those numbers were compiled by PBS before the Citizens United decision—today’s numbers are significantly higher.

No other developed nation in the world ties its democracy to endless fund-raising and unlimited corporate spending like we do in the United States.

Each year, total election spending increases. Curiously, spending on lobbying Congress went down in 2011 for the first time in a decade. 153One reason could be the recession. But more likely, spending on lobbying is down because, since Citizens United , Royalists can now invest in whichever politician they want before an election, so their guy is already bought and paid for by the time he is sworn into office—no need to lobby later.

It’s no wonder that the American people have played into the hands of the Royalists and, as a result, have very little trust in government. After all, there is no reason why they should, because democratic government, as we once knew it, no longer exists—the Royalists stole it.