Today Common Cause of Minnesota is filing complaints with two state agencies claiming the secretive right-wing policy incubator the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) is in violation of state laws governing lobbying and charitable activities.
“Common Cause has discovered compelling evidence that ALEC is a corporate lobby masquerading as a charity,” Mike Dean, Common Cause’s local executive director, wrote in a letter to Minnesota Attorney General Lori Swanson. “ALEC’s primary purpose appears to be providing a vehicle for its corporate members to lobby state legislators and to deduct the cost of that activity as charitable contributions.”
ALEC is registered with Swanson’s office, which requires disclosures from certain types of nonprofits and philanthropic concerns, and has described itself as a charity that provides “workshops on current issues with leading experts, public figures, and elected officials.”
Common Cause’s local affiliate today also filed a complaint with the state Board of Campaign Finance and Public Disclosure charging that ALEC has skirted Minnesota law requiring lobbyists to register with the state and disclose their spending.
ALEC has long maintained that it does not engage in lobbying, rather that it sponsors educational meetings where state lawmakers can exchange ideas about public policy with representatives of corporations and think tanks. It bills itself as a membership organization; private sector members pay annual dues ranging from $7,000-$25,000.
Officials pay $50
Elected officials pay just $50 and are given “scholarships” to cover the cost of junkets to luxury resorts — often with their families in tow. They come home with model bills ranging from “reforms” desired by its corporate members to ideological efforts such as voter ID and the so-called Castle Doctrine or “shoot-first” law used to justify the killing of unarmed Florida teen Trayvon Martin.
Nearly 40 years old, until recently ALEC operated largely in secrecy. Much of the evidence submitted by Common Cause’s local chapter comes from a national complaint its parent organization recently filed with the Internal Revenue Service arguing that ALEC has abused its tax-exempt status as a 501 (c) 3 nonprofit, misrepresenting its activities and allowing its corporate members to write off their hefty dues as charitable donations instead of lobbying expenditures.
“The ALEC conferences are nothing more than a forum for tax-subsidized lobbying,” the complaint lodged with the IRS asserts. If the agency failed to act, the complaint continued, “any lobbying organization could simply form a nonprofit arm, invite legislators to join for a nominal membership fee and conduct tax-exempt lobbying without any restrictions.”
Advocates are still combing through the 4,000 documents submitted in association with that complaint for information about ALEC’s members and inner workings. In the wake of the exhibits’ release, a number of high-profile corporations have dropped their memberships.
Several ‘issue alert’ emails in MN
Among the exhibits attached to the Minnesota complaints are several 2011 “issue alert” e-mails (examples here, here, here and here) from ALEC’s policy task forces informing state lawmakers that bills they were scheduled to vote on were based on model legislation created by ALEC and urging approval. During this year’s legislative session, Gov. Mark Dayton vetoed seven ALEC-crafted bills.
Three would have offered new protections to corporations being sued by consumers. In what has become a familiar sequence of events, when MinnPost recently reported on the measures in question, state lawmakers and local lobbyists were quick to insist that the bills had no connection to ALEC.
Common Cause’s local affiliate in January released a report containing side-by-side comparisons of ALEC model laws and a number of Minnesota bills that bear striking similarities. In all, the group estimates that some 60 ALEC-like measures were introduced here from 2011-2012.
Not registered to lobby in Minnesota
ALEC is not registered to lobby in Minnesota, even though it frequently sends lawmakers information on its policy priorities, including “issue alerts” such as the ones attached to the complaints, memos with talking points and other materials. It also tracks “problem bills” its members oppose and urges lawmakers to vote against them.
“ALEC’s bylaws declare that its mission is to ‘formulate legislative action programs’ and to ‘disseminate model legislation and promote the introduction of companion bills in Congress and state legislatures,’ ” Common Cause asserted in its complaints. “ALEC also carefully tracks the progress of its legislation in statehouses across America, producing scorecards to measure its effectiveness in getting its bills enacted.
“While these activities meet any reasonable definition of lobbying, ALEC insists that it does not lobby,” the group added in its letter to Swanson. “In fact, in their registration with the state Attorney General’s Office, ALEC describes their purpose to ‘Provide workshops on current issues with leading experts, public figures, and elected officials.’”
ALEC members met last week in North Carolina to continue discussing next year’s model legislation. Even though the group had tried to quell the corporate exodus and counter negative headlines by announcing it would suspend the task force that dealt with “non-economic” policies, the meeting generated controversy.
Delayed decision on fighting education standards
At the meeting, ALEC’s very active education policy task force voted to put off deciding whether to go forward with a legislative package that would bar states from adopting the Common Core Standards.
Originally an initiative of the National Governors Association, the standards are an effort to reintroduce rigor and relevance into the educational benchmarks many states use to define academic success. In an effort to avoid the sanctions that accompanied failing to show enough students testing as proficient under No Child Left Behind, many states had lowered the bar for passage.
(Minnesota was not one of them, and in fact increased the rigor of its standards during the relevant time period.)
The product of years of work by educators, not testing companies, two years ago the standards appeared headed for near-universal acceptance. A small but vocal number of policymakers have opposed them on ideological grounds, however, arguing that they constitute a federal intrusion into local control of schools and are a first step toward a national curriculum.
Kline opposes the standards
Minnesota’s Rep. John Kline, the Lakeville Republican who heads the U.S. House of Representatives’ powerful Education and the Workforce Committee, opposes the standards. A number of conservative education reformers whose agendas are typically similar to ALEC’s education platforms are in favor of Common Core.
Among the disgruntled groups is the American Principles Project, a nonprofit that advocates for religious liberties, parental rights and a return to the gold standard, among other things.
“ALEC’s delay in endorsing the resolution is troubling and plays into the strategy of the multi-billion dollar private entities that are pushing the Common Core,” it complained in a press release Friday. “The resolution was approved by the ALEC Education Task Force overwhelmingly last December, and ALEC has discussed it at three of its national meetings. The well-financed private entities and the federal government are moving forward with their implementation of the Common Core, and Americans have been cut out of the process.”
Minnesota’s GOP lawmakers last year passed a bill barring state Education Commissioner Brenda Cassellius from implementing Common Core. The provision did not survive the 2011 special session. A similar effort this year was met by a veto.
“Elected officials pay just $50 and are given “scholarships” to cover the cost of junkets to luxury resorts — often with their families in tow.” – This is a stitch! How is this different from EBT card recipients going on vacation?
Alec is a modern evil
Evil because, as with so many orginazations today, you can be whatever you can get people to believe you say you are. ALEC is polluted rot, offering itself as clean water.
It’s not the role of the federal government
Rep. Kline is right to oppose these new attempts at federal standards, regardless of how rigorous they claim to be, because it’s simply not the role of the federal government to be setting such standards.
Conservatives bristled when George Bush, in the name of “bipartisanship,” allowed Ted Kennedy to implement his one-size-fits-all, federal government-imposed No Child Left Behind law. It was a pleasant surprise then when while most republicans were mute or pretended to support it to bolster their new president, it was the teachers unions and other democrats who raised the biggest fuss and did everything they could to make it a failure. Some of us would have made them honorary republicans if they hadn’t arrived at that position for purely selfish reasons, but whatever.
Conservatives would disband the federal department of education tomorrow. And so with this new effort to federalize education standards, it’s a bit disconcerting that the allegedly “right-wing” ALEC is undecided whether or not to oppose them. Democrats should be pleased with ALEC. Maybe they’ll donate.
Great idea
Allow the southern states to set their own education standards. Will the poor and minorities be allowed to go to school. A recipe for more welfare participants. Trusting the south is a waste of time.
Mighty Thin
Having personally been involved in getting a non profit through the process of 501 (c) 3 certification; this article exposes yet another abuse of the tax codes by questionable organizations.
That said, having read the examples given, it would for all intents and purposes to indeed be an intense lobbying effort on the part of ALEC.
As for Rep Kline…his office is more than familiar about my personal stance on his mis-representatiion in Congress.
THANK YOU Gov. Dayton for your VETOES.
Keep beating this drum, MinnPost! We need to know all the details of how ALEC works, who belongs to it, who attends their “educational” workshops, how bills presented by the GOP in Minnesota ressemble the models ALEC puts forth nationally.
The Citizens United opinion by the Supreme Court said that information about who is lobbying and advertising will prevent abuses of the electoral system by big corporations and other Big Money. Only if we can “out” the corporations who back groups like ALEC can we the people have the power to counteract them.
Well-earned publicity
Cockroaches generally don’t like to be brought out into broad daylight where they’re easily visible. I’m pleased to see ALEC finally getting some of the attention that it should have been getting all along.
If ALEC isn’t a lobbying organization, then neither is a union, or the National Association of Manufacturers, or the Chamber of Commerce, or NORML. Not many state legislators would show up at “conferences” if they had to pay $7,500 out of their own pockets to attend, and those that did would have already told voters quite a bit about their own finances and values by doing so on their own dime.
Odd that the same people who object to uniform standards in education don’t seem to mind holding teachers accountable for local standards that can be dramatically different from the district, or even the school, a few miles or a few blocks away. Math is still math, and 3+3 is still six, at least in my world. Maybe a national curriculum would finally do away with treating the Confederacy as a “defender of freedom” in the Civil War, as often happens in southern school districts. Even those of us with an appreciation for irony have some difficulties presenting a defense of slavery in a positive light.
ALEC is a conglomeration of individuals that are intent on controlling power. Their map to is contains quite a few routes and locations. The tactics used are despicable.
If we do not work in union to put the brakes on this monstrosity or to put it out of our misery, the very fabric of our democratic ideals are at danger of weakening to the point of destruction. The laws this organization is writing and getting legislators to use, when aggregated, would deprive masses of Americans of basic civil and human rights, disenfranchise women and people of color, strip women of the ways and means of making money for their families and strip them of the right to make familial decisions and those regarding their own health care choices.
Taxpayers funds are paid to ALEC so that state legislators can attend strategy or other types of meetings engroup where they are presented with legislative agenda and prewritten legislation to take back to their states to perpetrate on their constituencies.
These same legislators are paid by their states to perform the functions of promulgating policy, to debate same with their colleagues and to pass bills to be submitted to their governors. Not to have someone else, some maniacle group do their work.
Please let us work to change this ugly picture.