On 15 May, Common Cause of Minnesota filed complaints with the Minnesota Attorney General and the Minnesota Campaign Finance and Public Disclosure Board alleging the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) — a secretive right-wingnut corporate bill mill — is violating lobbying and charitable activities laws.
The complaint to the attorney general alleges that ALEC “operates as a corporate lobby group masquerading as a public charity.”
[scribd id=93591786]The complaint to the state’s Campaign Finance and Public Disclosure Board alleges ALEC failed to register as a lobbyist in Minnesota. Common Cause provided evidence of email from ALEC to Minnesota legislators “advocating for support of ALEC drafted legislation.”
[scribd id=93591674]The action by Common Cause of Minnesota grew out of a national action by Common Cause when it filed a complaint with the US Internal Revenue Service (IRS). The Common Cause complaint requests an investigation into “ALEC’s lobbying activities, the collection of unpaid taxes, and assessment of appropriate penalties” and is based on more than 4,000 pages of ALEC’s documents.
For more than 40 years, ALEC has consistently maintained that it doesn’t lobby; rather it claims it’s an educational group that sponsors public policy meetings between state legislators and corporate representatives. Corporate members pay dues — ranging from US$7,000 to US$25,000 — to ALEC annually. State legislators pay annual dues of US$50 and receive “scholarships” to cover their attendance at the ALEC educational meetings that mostly take place at luxury resorts and include their families. The state legislators that attend ALEC’s educational meetings are provided with draft legislation that have included support for the castle doctrine and voter identification initiatives.
ALEC’s attorney, Alan Dye, told Minnesota Public Radio’s Catharine Richert, “the group abides by legal lobbying limits, but that the organization is free to communicate with state lawmakers in ways not covered by those definitions, such as sending out research and analysis.”
During the 2012 Minnesota legislative session, Governor Mark Dayton vetoed seven ALEC-authored bills. Five pieces of the proposed legislation would have provided new protections to corporations that were sued by consumers; one was the voter identification initiative; and one would have brought the “shoot first” castle doctrine to Minnesota. Beth Hawkins, writing for MinnPost, notes that “… over the last two years 60 ALEC-generated bills have been introduced in Minnesota, according to a comparison of model and local bills conducted by Common Cause of Minnesota.”
At its 11 May Spring Task Force Summit in Charlotte, ALEC rolled out its current legislative agenda based on information packets sent to its working group members. The information packets include an agenda, minutes, draft model legislation, and membership lists. High on ALEC’s agenda list is the ALEC Attorney General Authority Act (.pdf; 676KB) which would regulate what legal cases state attorney generals would be allowed to bring forward. Quoting from the information packet’s summary:
“Just as a private attorney cannot bring a suit on behalf of a client without the client agreeing and authorizing such action, and then only within the guidelines allowed by the client, so it should be with the attorney general. Rather than an attorney general deciding on his or her own what authority the office may have to bring a lawsuit, the authority should be defined by the state as reflected by the specific decisions of the legislature via statute. The legislature, not the attorney general, is best positioned to balance the competing concerns that go into the decision of whether to allow a cause of action and under what circumstances.”
A third species of ALEC participants are the right-wingnut think tanks that heretofore have gotten very little attention in the information swirling around ALEC’s activities. Paul Abowd, writing for Mother Jones, shines a bright light on this aspect of ALEC. Abowd reports the Arizona-based Goldwater Institute and the Michigan-based Mackinac Center for Public Policy “successfully shepherded five model bills through ALEC’s Commerce, Insurance, and Economic Development Task Force—all targeting public-sector unions” at the Charlotte Task Force Summit. ALEC-authored model legislation would:
- Require public employees to approve their employer’s automatic deduction of union dues each year
- Prohibit public-sector union officials from taking paid leave for union duties
- Require public-sector unions to make public audits of their financial activities
- Require public-sector union members to vote on their union membership every three to five years
- Make it easier for unions — representing both public and private employees — to be decertified
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Common Cause goes after ALEC in Minnesota was originally published by ARTS & FARCES internet on Wednesday, 23 May 2012 at 1:02 PM CDT. Copyright © ARTS & FARCES LLC. All rights reserved. | ISSN: 1535-8119 | OCLC: 48219498 | Digital fingerprint: 974a89ee1284e6e92dd256bbfbef3751 (64.237.45.114)