RSS
Twitter
Facebook
YouTube
Admittedly, I hadn't done much thinking about the wave of "me too" Republican legislation that's been flooding statehouses lately. I guess I sort of chalked it up to copycat syndrome, but apparently I'd fallen victim to a mistaken premise, that being that Republican legislator's cooked up their own ideas and were running with them. According to a pretty well-researched posting by a Wisconsin professor that's not the case, and in fact there's a Republican/Industry "pay for play" policy shop that's pretty much hand feeding their bills into statehouses, not for debate (which ostensibly is what statehouses are for), but for simple passage.
Telling Your State Legislators What to Do:
The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC)The most important group, I’m pretty sure, is the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), which was founded in 1973 by Henry Hyde, Lou Barnett, and (surprise, surprise) Paul Weyrich. Its goal for the past forty years has been to draft “model bills†that conservative legislators can introduce in the 50 states. Its website claims that in each legislative cycle, its members introduce 1000 pieces of legislation based on its work, and claims that roughly 18% of these bills are enacted into law. (Among them was the controversial 2010 anti-immigrant law in Arizona.)
If you’re as impressed by these numbers as I am, I’m hoping you’ll agree with me that it may be time to start paying more attention to ALEC and the bills its seeks to promote.
You can start by studying ALEC’s own website. Begin with its home page at
http://www.alec.org
First visit the “About†menu to get a sense of the organization’s history and its current members and funders. But the meat of the site is the “model legislation†page, which is the gateway to the hundreds of bills that ALEC has drafted for the benefit of its conservative members.
http://www.alec.org/AM/Template.cfm?Section=Model_Legislation1You’ll of course be eager to look these over…but you won’t be able to, because you’re not a member.
Becoming a Member of ALEC: Not So Easy to Do
How do you become a member? Simple. Two ways. You can be an elected Republican legislator who, after being individually vetted, pays a token fee of roughly $100 per biennium to join. Here’s the membership brochure to use if you meet this criterion:
http://www.alec.org/AM/pdf/2011_legislative_brochure.pdf
What if you’re not a Republican elected official? Not to worry. You can apply to join ALEC as a “private sector†member by paying at least a few thousand dollars depending on which legislative domains most interest you. Here’s the membership brochure if you meet this criterion:
http://www.alec.org/am/pdf/Corporate_Brochure.pdf
Then again, even if most of us had this kind of money to contribute to ALEC, I have a feeling that membership might not necessarily be open to just anyone who is willing to pay the fee. But maybe I’m being cynical here.
Which Wisconsin Republican politicians are members of ALEC? Good question. How would we know? ALEC doesn’t provide this information on its website unless you’re able to log in as a member. Maybe we need to ask our representatives. One might think that Republican legislators gathered at a national ALEC meeting could be sufficiently numerous to trigger the “walking quorum rule†that makes it illegal for public officials in Wisconsin to meet unannounced without public notice of their meeting. But they’re able to avoid this rule (which applies to every other public body in Wisconsin) because they’re protected by a loophole in what is otherwise one of the strictest open meetings laws in the nation. The Wisconsin legislature carved out a unique exemption from that law for its own party caucuses, Democrats and Republicans alike. So Wisconsin Republicans are able to hold secret meetings with ALEC to plan their legislative strategies whenever they want, safe in the knowledge that no one will be able to watch while they do so.
(See http://www.doj.state.wi.us/dls/OMPR/2010OMCG-PRO/2010_OML_Compliance_Guide.pdf for a full discussion of Wisconsin’s otherwise very strict Open Meetings Law.)
If it has seemed to you while watching recent debates in the legislature that many Republican members of the Senate and Assembly have already made up their minds about the bills on which they’re voting, and don’t have much interest in listening to arguments being made by anyone else in the room, it’s probably because they did in fact make up their minds about these bills long before they entered the Capitol chambers. You can decide for yourself whether that’s a good expression of the “sifting and winnowing†for which this state long ago became famous.
Who's Really Behind Recent Republican Legislation in Wisconsin
It also never warranted much of my attention that a lot of bills the Republicans are pushing are hugely complex bills on which they seem to want little to no debate. Not that this is an unusual feature of politics in general, but considering the months of healthcare wars, a few weeks for busting most unions under the guise of budget crises (many of their own making) in the nation seems pretty slim.
I do agree, if you read the full post, with the professor that advocacy groups in and of themselves are neither illegal nor undesirable. The difference is their are advocacy groups that are open in their advocacy and that leave governing to legislators and advocacy groups that operate like secret cabals where legislators are simply tools for implementation.
What's further fascinating about this is that the professor went on to write a Op-Ed for the NYT, and subsequently to this post and that Op-Ed, GOP officials in WI have decided to file FOIA requests to force him to turn over all his university correspondence claiming that he's a "government employee" as a professor because they're not happy with the attention he drew to ALEC or Wisconsin legislators.
Bill Cronon Posts His First-Ever Blog EntryLast week was quite a roller coaster for me. I spent the weekend of March 12-13 drafting an op-ed for the New York Times (published on March 22, and available at this link: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/22/opinion/22cronon.html) about the several ways in which I believe that Scott Walker and the current leadership of the Republican Party in Wisconsin have departed not just from the longstanding culture of civility and good government in this state, but in fact from important traditions of their own party. In the course of writing that op-ed, I did some research trying to figure out where the current wave of conservative legislation in Wisconsin and elsewhere might be coming from.
As a result, last Tuesday night, March 15, I launched my first-ever entry for a blog I had long been planning on the theme of “Scholar as Citizen,†about how thoughtful scholarship can contribute to better understandings of issues and debates in the public realm. In my first blog entry, I published a study guide exploring the question “Who’s Really Behind Recent Republican Legislation in Wisconsin and Elsewhere?†I by no means had all the answers to this question, but I thought I had found enough useful leads that it was worth sharing them to help others investigate the American Legislative Exchange Council further. So I posted the link for the blog on Facebook and Twitter, sat back, and hoped that viral communication would bring the blog to people who might find it useful.
My little ALEC study guide succeeded beyond my wildest dreams. Within two days, the blog had received over half a million hits, had been read by tens of thousands of people, had been linked by newspapers all over the United States, and had been visited by people from more than two dozen foreign countries. Many readers expressed considerable interest in the activities of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), and said they were grateful for the guidance I had tried to provide for people wishing to learn more about it. (A smaller number of readers were much more hostile, and you can read their comments on the blog.)
All this was welcome, and I’m greatly heartened by the thought that an organization that has exercised such extraordinary but almost invisible influence over American political life for the past forty years may finally start to receive more of the scrutiny that its far-reaching activities deserve.
The Wisconsin Republican Party Expresses Its Displeasure
What I did not anticipateâ€â€though I guess I should have seen it coming, given everything else that has happened in Wisconsin over the past couple monthsâ€â€was the communication that the University of Wisconsin-Madison received on Thursday afternoon, March 17â€â€less than two days after I posted my blogâ€â€formally requesting under the state’s Open Records Law copies of all emails sent from or received by my University of Wisconsinâ€â€Madison email address pertaining to matters raised in my blog.
...
Dear Mr. Dowling,
Under Wisconsin open records law, we are requesting copies of the following items:
Copies of all emails into and out of Prof. William Cronon’s state email account from January 1, 2011 to present which reference any of the following terms: Republican, Scott Walker, recall, collective bargaining, AFSCME, WEAC, rally, union, Alberta Darling, Randy Hopper, Dan Kapanke, Rob Cowles, Scott Fitzgerald, Sheila Harsdorf, Luther Olsen, Glenn Grothman, Mary Lazich, Jeff Fitzgerald, Marty Beil, or Mary Bell.
We are making this request under Chapter 19.32 of the Wisconsin state statutes, through the Open Records law. Specifically, we would like to cite the following section of Wis. Stat. 19.32 (2) that defines a public record as “anything recorded or preserved that has been created or is being kept by the agency. This includes tapes, films, charts, photographs, computer printouts, etc.â€Â
Thank you for your prompt attention, and please make us aware of any costs in advance of preparation of this request.
Sincerely,
Stephan Thompson
Republican Party of Wisconsin
...
http://scholarcitizen.williamcronon.net/2011/03/24/open-records-attack-on-academic-freedom/
I'd claim that I was shocked by this kind of behavior, but that would be a lie. I just find it remarkable from a political science how effectively the modern Republican party apparatus, official and non-official, has become a kind of policy-Wermacht (the allusion is intentional) for their special interests, murky as they are to the average citizen (I don't remember campaigns promises on union-busting or creationism, do you?).
Only in a fantasy world could the Democratic party be even half as effective...
Launched in August 2010, TheMetropreneur.com is a local online resource devoted to small business development and entrepreneurship. Its aim is to tell the stories of Central Ohio's business community, foster regional economic development and assist entrepreneurs with its resource-heavy focus.