American Legislative Exchange Council

Based on Wikipedia: American Legislative Exchange Council

The Quiet Machine That Writes America's Laws

Imagine a bill passes in Arizona. A few weeks later, an almost identical bill passes in Wisconsin. Then Michigan. Then Maine. The wording is eerily similar—sometimes word for word. This isn't coincidence. It's the American Legislative Exchange Council at work.

The American Legislative Exchange Council, known as ALEC, operates as one of the most influential political organizations most Americans have never heard of. Each year, roughly 200 pieces of model legislation crafted within its walls become actual laws across the United States. These aren't just minor regulatory tweaks. They're bills that shape voting rights, environmental policy, labor relations, gun laws, and taxation in ways that touch virtually every American's life.

How does an organization do this while remaining largely invisible to the public eye?

The Basic Mechanics

At its core, ALEC functions as a matchmaking service between two groups: conservative state legislators and representatives from the private sector—meaning corporations, trade associations, and foundations. These two groups meet behind closed doors to draft what ALEC calls "model bills." Think of these as legislative templates, ready-made laws that any ALEC member can take home, customize slightly, and introduce in their own state legislature.

The numbers tell the story. As of 2011, ALEC counted more than 2,000 state legislators as members—that's over a quarter of every state legislator in America. Approximately 1,000 bills based on ALEC's language get introduced in state legislatures each year. About one in five of those bills actually becomes law.

This isn't how most people imagine laws get made. The civics textbook version involves a legislator identifying a problem in their community, researching solutions, drafting legislation, debating with colleagues, and eventually passing a bill tailored to their state's specific needs. ALEC offers something faster: pre-written legislation with the research already done, the language already polished, and often the talking points already prepared.

Born from Defeat

To understand ALEC, you need to go back to 1964 and one of the most lopsided presidential elections in American history. Barry Goldwater, the conservative Republican senator from Arizona, lost to Lyndon Johnson in a landslide. Goldwater carried just six states. For conservatives, it felt like a repudiation of their entire worldview.

But some conservatives saw opportunity in defeat. If they couldn't win at the national level, they reasoned, why not build power from the ground up? State legislatures, often overlooked and undercovered by journalists, offered fertile ground.

In 1973, a staffer in the Illinois state house named Mark Rhoads launched what he called the Conservative Caucus of State Legislators. The immediate targets were the newly created Environmental Protection Agency and wage and price controls—policies that conservatives viewed as federal overreach. But there was a branding problem. The word "conservative" didn't poll well with the public at the time.

So they changed the name. The American Legislative Exchange Council sounded neutral, almost bureaucratic. It could have been a government agency or an academic institution. That was the point.

The Founders and Their Vision

The man most associated with ALEC's early years was Paul Weyrich, a conservative activist with a talent for institution-building. Weyrich didn't just co-found ALEC—he also co-founded the Heritage Foundation, which became the most influential conservative think tank in Washington. If modern American conservatism has an architect, Weyrich has a strong claim to the title.

Joining Weyrich were Henry Hyde, who later served in Congress for thirty-two years and became famous for the Hyde Amendment restricting federal abortion funding, and Lou Barnett, who would go on to become the national political director of Ronald Reagan's political action committee. These weren't fringe figures. They were connected to the heart of the conservative movement.

The early membership reads like a who's who of future Republican stars. Tommy Thompson and Scott Walker, both future governors of Wisconsin. John Engler, future governor of Michigan. John Boehner and John Kasich, both future House members who would become Speaker and governor respectively. Jack Kemp, Jesse Helms, Eric Cantor. Many of these names would dominate Republican politics for decades.

In 1975, with support from the American Conservative Union, ALEC registered as a federal nonprofit. Some historians, including journalist Bill Moyers, trace ALEC's philosophical DNA back to the Powell Memorandum, a 1971 document written by Lewis Powell shortly before his appointment to the Supreme Court. Powell argued that American business needed to become far more aggressive in defending the free enterprise system against its critics. ALEC would become one vehicle for that aggression.

How the Machine Works

ALEC operates through nine task forces, each focused on a different policy area. These task forces bring together legislators and private sector members to draft model bills. It's an unusual arrangement. Legislators and corporate lobbyists sit at the same table, working on legislation as partners rather than adversaries.

Here's where it gets interesting. Private sector members effectively hold veto power over the model bills that emerge from these task forces. A bill can't move forward if the corporate members object. This structure gives businesses remarkable influence over the legislative process before any bill ever reaches a state capitol.

Once a task force produces a model bill, it goes to ALEC's board of directors for approval. The board consists exclusively of legislators—but ALEC also maintains a Private Enterprise Advisory Council that meets whenever the board meets. This council includes representatives from corporations like ExxonMobil, Pfizer, AT&T, State Farm Insurance, and Koch Industries.

A former ALEC co-chairman named Noble Ellington offered a revealing description of the relationship in 2011. "I really kind of think of us as one board," he said, before adding, "It's certainly not our goal to sit there and do everything that business wants to have done."

The distinction seemed to matter more in theory than in practice.

A Legislative Menu

What kinds of bills does ALEC produce? The organization has drafted model legislation across an enormous range of issues:

• Reducing regulations on businesses
• Lowering individual and corporate taxes
• Restricting immigration
• Loosening environmental regulations
• Tightening voter identification requirements
• Weakening labor unions
• Opposing gun control measures

Research by Columbia University political scientist Alex Hertel-Fernandez traced ALEC's shifting priorities over the decades. In the late 1970s, the focus was primarily social issues: abortion, drugs, gun laws, religious freedom, and opposition to school busing for desegregation. By the 1980s, criminal justice took center stage. By the 1990s, business deregulation had become the overwhelming focus.

This evolution reflects a broader shift in conservative politics away from culture war issues toward economic concerns—though as we'll see, ALEC never entirely abandoned the culture war.

Stand Your Ground

One of ALEC's most consequential model bills involved something called "stand your ground" laws. These laws expand the circumstances under which a person can use deadly force in self-defense. Under traditional self-defense law, you generally have a duty to retreat if you can safely do so before using lethal force. Stand your ground removes that duty. If you feel threatened, you can stand your ground and fight.

Florida passed the first modern stand your ground law in 2005. ALEC saw an opportunity. The organization adopted a model bill using the exact wording of the Florida law, then distributed it to members across the country. Within a few years, stand your ground laws had spread to thirty states.

This is ALEC's assembly line in action. A law passes in one state. ALEC packages it as a model bill. Members carry it home and introduce it in their own legislatures. Suddenly what looked like a local Florida experiment has become a national phenomenon.

The implications of this particular model bill would become tragically clear in February 2012.

The Year Everything Changed

For nearly four decades, ALEC operated largely out of public view. Political insiders knew about the organization, but average Americans had never heard of it. Journalists occasionally wrote about ALEC, but the stories rarely broke through to mainstream attention.

That changed in 2011 and 2012.

In July 2011, The Nation magazine published a series of articles produced in collaboration with the Center for Media and Democracy. The articles revealed the scope of ALEC's operation for the first time to a broad audience. The Center for Media and Democracy also launched a website called "ALEC Exposed" that documented more than 800 model bills, the legislators and corporations that had helped draft them, and the states that had enacted them.

The coverage sparked immediate controversy. ALEC's push for strict voter identification laws drew particular attention. These laws require voters to show government-issued photo identification at the polls. Supporters argue they prevent fraud. Critics contend they disproportionately burden minority, elderly, and low-income voters who are less likely to have such identification—and who tend to vote Democratic.

An advocacy group called Color of Change launched a campaign pressuring corporations to withdraw their ALEC memberships. The pressure was building, but the real crisis was still to come.

Trayvon Martin

On February 26, 2012, a seventeen-year-old named Trayvon Martin was shot and killed in Sanford, Florida. He was walking back to a relative's home after buying Skittles and iced tea at a convenience store. A neighborhood watch volunteer named George Zimmerman followed Martin, confronted him, and shot him dead.

Zimmerman claimed self-defense. Local police initially declined to arrest him, citing Florida's stand your ground law.

The case ignited a national firestorm. Suddenly millions of Americans were learning about stand your ground laws for the first time—and learning about the organization that had helped spread them across the country.

Color of Change launched a new campaign targeting ALEC's corporate members. The pressure proved overwhelming. In the weeks that followed, more than sixty corporations and foundations announced they were ending their association with ALEC. The list read like a corporate hall of fame: Coca-Cola, Kraft Foods, McDonald's, Amazon, General Electric, Apple, Procter & Gamble, Walmart, and the Gates Foundation all dropped their support. Blue Cross and Blue Shield, the massive health insurance consortium, withdrew. Thirty-four legislators also left the organization.

ALEC responded by calling the campaign "a coalition of extreme liberal activists committed to silencing anyone who disagrees with their agenda." The organization disbanded its Public Safety and Elections Task Force—the one responsible for both stand your ground laws and voter identification requirements.

Doug Clopp of Common Cause, a government reform group, credited the ALEC Exposed reporting for making the campaign possible. "For 40 years you couldn't get the kind of accountability we're seeing now," he said, "because ALEC, its members, its legislators, its bills were secret."

The Tech Exodus

The corporate defections didn't stop in 2012. In late 2014, a wave of technology companies announced they were cutting ties with ALEC: Google, Microsoft, Facebook, eBay, and Yahoo. Many cited environmental concerns as a key point of disagreement.

Google's executive chairman at the time, Eric Schmidt, was particularly blunt. He said ALEC was "just literally lying" about climate change. Coming from one of the most powerful figures in the tech industry, this was a stunning rebuke.

Uber, Lyft, T-Mobile, and BP followed. Even defense contractor Northrop Grumman and oil company Occidental Petroleum ended their memberships.

An ALEC spokesperson downplayed the departures. "Like any other membership group, membership in ALEC ebbs and flows, and in 2014 we gained far more private-sector members than we lost."

The History They'd Rather Forget

The corporate exodus forced ALEC to confront some uncomfortable history. In the 1980s, ALEC had opposed the movement to pressure American businesses to divest from South Africa as a way of fighting apartheid. At the time, this put ALEC on the wrong side of one of the great moral causes of the era.

Even more troubling was a 1985 ALEC memo that surfaced in later years. The memo opposed what it called "the current homosexual movement," characterized homosexuality as a conscious choice, and claimed that pedophilia was "one of the more dominant practices within the homosexual world." This was vicious misinformation, the kind of smear that contributed to discrimination and violence against gay Americans for decades.

When asked about the document in 2013, an ALEC spokesman said the organization doesn't draft model bills on social issues anymore. "I'm also sad that the critics would not acknowledge that organizations change over time," he added.

Whether ALEC has truly changed—or simply learned to be more careful about what it puts in writing—remains an open question.

The Reach of the Network

ALEC doesn't operate alone. It's part of a broader ecosystem of conservative organizations that reinforce and support each other.

The State Policy Network, or SPN, is a national association of conservative and libertarian think tanks. SPN is a member of ALEC, and ALEC is an associate member of SPN. The two organizations encourage their members to join each other. Some SPN think tanks write model legislation that gets introduced at ALEC meetings. The Guardian newspaper has described ALEC as "SPN's sister organisation."

ALEC also belongs to the Atlas Network, a global organization of free-market think tanks that operates in over ninety countries. What works in the United States can be exported abroad, and what works abroad can be imported here.

And as of December 2013, ALEC counted more than 85 members of Congress and 14 sitting or former governors as "alumni"—people who belonged to ALEC as state legislators before rising to higher office. These aren't just connections. They're pathways for ALEC's influence to extend from state capitals to Washington.

Project 2025

In recent years, ALEC has become involved in one of the most ambitious conservative efforts in American history: Project 2025. This initiative, led by the Heritage Foundation, aims to dramatically reshape the federal government should a Republican win the presidency.

ALEC sits on Project 2025's advisory board. The project's proposals include consolidating executive power in ways that critics argue would threaten democratic checks and balances. For an organization that spent fifty years building power in state legislatures, involvement in a plan to reshape the federal government represents a significant expansion of ambition.

At ALEC's July 2022 policy summit, a political commentator observed that if the conservative constitutional convention movement succeeds—a movement he said "is gaining momentum" largely out of public view—the United States would become the "conservative nation" ALEC has been working toward.

A constitutional convention called by the states could, in theory, rewrite the Constitution itself. ALEC has long supported such a convention, seeing it as a way to embed conservative principles into America's founding document permanently.

The Defense

ALEC and its supporters offer a straightforward defense of the organization. They describe it as promoting "public-private partnerships for the advancement of free market principles." They point out that everything ALEC does is legal. They emphasize that ALEC members freely choose to join and participate.

A senior ALEC director of membership named Chaz Cirame offered this perspective: "The hook about some conspiracy or some secret organization is a lot better story than one about bringing state legislators together to talk about best practices around the country."

There's something to this. ALEC isn't literally secret—its name appears on model bills, and membership isn't hidden. The organization isn't doing anything illegal. And there are progressive organizations that also draft model legislation, though none approaches ALEC's scale or influence.

The question isn't legality. It's whether this kind of influence is healthy for democracy.

The Critique

Critics see something more troubling. When corporations can sit at the same table as legislators, working as partners to draft the laws those legislators will introduce, the line between public service and private interest blurs. When a legislator introduces a bill written by ALEC without disclosing that fact, voters can't evaluate where the bill really came from or whose interests it serves.

A Brookings Institution study of state legislation from 2011-2012 found that ALEC model bills becoming law were linked most often to controversial social and economic issues. The study concluded that this involvement in divisive issues "undermines ALEC's ability to exercise influence over fiscal ones."

In other words, ALEC's influence comes with a cost. The more visible and controversial the organization becomes, the harder it gets to operate in the shadows.

Fifty Years and Counting

In 2023, ALEC celebrated its fiftieth anniversary with a gala at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. Half a century after Mark Rhoads launched the Conservative Caucus of State Legislators in Chicago, the organization he helped create has become one of the most powerful forces in American politics.

Louisiana state representative Donald Ray Kennard, who served as ALEC's national chairman in 2003, put it plainly: "We are a very, very conservative organization. We're just espousing what we really believe in."

That honesty is refreshing. ALEC believes in free markets, limited government, and the power of the private sector. It has spent fifty years building an organization to advance those beliefs. Whatever you think of those beliefs, the execution has been remarkably effective.

The real question is whether American democracy can function properly when one side has built such a sophisticated machine for turning ideology into law—and the other side is only now beginning to understand how that machine works.

Every year, roughly 1,000 ALEC model bills get introduced in state legislatures across the country. About 200 become law. Most Americans have no idea this is happening. And that, perhaps more than anything else, is how ALEC prefers it.