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AN PP 4 26

Across the country, Republican-led state legislatures are passing a slate of laws that effectively shield oil and gas companies from legal claims that they are responsible for the destruction and mounting toll caused by climate change. Fifteen laws have either been passed or are currently being debated in 11 states. Together, they threaten to remove long-standing tools for the public to hold corporations accountable.

A ProPublica investigation has found that most of these bills are part of a coordinated effort, orchestrated by a constellation of groups that share staff or have funding ties to the prominent conservative activist Leonard Leo, who is credited with placing conservative justices on the U.S. Supreme Court. These groups have drafted state legislation, planned its dissemination and engaged a well-connected lobbying firm to get them signed into law.

The effort is unfolding as courts are weighing more than 30 significant lawsuits by states, counties and municipalities accusing fossil fuel companies of misrepresenting the risks their products posed to consumers and seeking to recoup the costs of disasters and other climate impacts like wildfire losses or coastal flooding that their products helped cause. A goal of the legislation is to block these cases from going forward and prevent new ones from being filed.

The strategy to establish state laws that will make it all but impossible to sue oil and gas companies was laid out in detail by a group of lobbyists and political operatives in December, during a panel presentation at the annual States and Nation Policy Summit of the American Legislative Exchange Council — the influential organization that brings together state lawmakers, corporate leaders and conservative activists to draft and promote legislation.

During the session, one of the panelists, Will Hild, the executive director of a nonprofit called Consumers’ Research, described the climate cases as a liberal effort to use the judicial system to exact a new tax on energy companies in the form of civil judgments. Another panelist, Oramel H. Skinner, the former solicitor general for Arizona and the executive director of the nonprofit Alliance for Consumers, warned that those judgments will trickle down to make citizens’ lives less affordable and ultimately make many of their choices — whether to own pickup trucks or purchase a side of beef — illegal.

ProPublica reviewed an audio recording of the event obtained by the nonpartisan watchdog group Documented.

Hild and Skinner had come to the session with a ready-made fix: a set of pre-written bills and plenty of funding.

Consumers’ Research and the Alliance for Consumers are both funded by organizations connected to Leo. ProPublica examined lobbying records across 25 states, federal tax disclosures for more than a dozen organizations and notes from other closed-door strategy sessions among ALEC members and found that several Leo-supported groups are part of a national strategy to give legal immunity to companies for their climate emissions.

Since 2021, Leo has been deploying a $1.6 billion gift through a series of nonprofits and other organizations that obscure the source and the recipients of donations — so-called dark money groups. Much of that money has been routed through a nonprofit judicial advocacy group Leo founded — now called The 85 Fund — which both receives and disseminates Leo’s funding. Many of these nonprofits are increasingly focused on issues related to climate change.

The panel session’s moderator, Michael Thompson, is a senior vice president at CRC Advisors, Leo’s for-profit Virginia-based political and corporate consulting firm. He also sits on ALEC’s Private Enterprise Advisory Council. Hild’s organization, Consumers’ Research, received more than 65% of its funding in 2024 through a dark money group called Donors Trust. The 85 Fund contributed more than $67 million to Donors Trust in 2024. Consumers’ Research also works closely with — and contracted more than $670,000 of work in 2024 to — CRC Advisors. Another panelist, Paul N. Watkins, was a legal fellow at Consumers’ Research. According to tax filings, his law firm received more than $2.2 million in 2024 from the group. As recently as 2024, Skinner was also counsel for Leo’s 85 Fund, according to the nonprofit’s tax filings.

= POWELL MEMO BS

“For decades, the left has leveraged immense resources to capture the institutions that shape our society — the legal system, universities, medical and scientific bodies, the entertainment industry, and our biggest corporations,” Leo wrote to ProPublica in a text message. “That takeover resulted in a radically woke culture that does not reflect the will of the American people, or the pillars of limited constitutional government that made our country great. That is why our enterprise supports organizations that are committed to crushing liberal dominance and restoring balance in the institutions that shape society.”

At the ALEC session, Skinner presented a model bill that would effectively bar cities and towns from bringing public nuisance lawsuits against corporations and others when the issue is a broad public harm like climate change. In several cases, plaintiffs have argued that the impacts of climate change — the buckling of a road from extreme swings in temperature, for example — are a “nuisance” caused by fossil fuel companies.

Nuisance claims are common in the American legal system, giving individuals, companies or communities a way to sue when someone else’s actions damage their property, degrade the health or safety of the environment around them or interfere with their rights. Under these laws, parties can ask for financial compensation or seek court orders to remedy problems, such as pollution. Skinner, however, argues that nuisance laws should only be used to address local, easily fixable problems, like excessive noise from a bar. His bill would curtail the use of public nuisance suits in climate cases by limiting liability for manufacturers and other businesses and giving state attorneys general the sole authority to bring them.

“Think really hard about every lever you have in your states to shut off the ability for this woke lawfare machine to churn,” Skinner told the audience. “The left’s goal is to reshape society around you using the courtroom.”

The second draft law, called the Energy Freedom Act, was produced by the policy nonprofit associated with Hild’s organization. It would, among many provisions, shield businesses from liability related to emissions of greenhouse gases if those releases did not violate the federal Clean Air Act.

Critics of the bills say they subvert the rights of local communities. They send the message that “you can pollute with impunity,” said Carly Phillips, a senior scientist with the Union of Concerned Scientists. “It’s really a thumb in the eye of places that are affected by climate change.”

The push to block climate suits across the states comes as several of the cases against the oil industry approach, or have already entered, the perilous legal phases of discovery, when plaintiffs will have the opportunity to seek confidential industry documents and depose oil executives. The stakes for oil companies are enormous. By some estimates more than $10 trillion in damages can be attributed to U.S. emissions.

:{:{There’s a reason why state and local governments have increasingly brought these suits. The frequency and cost of climate-influenced disasters, including severe storms, drought and flooding, continues to mount — between $350 billion and $450 billion in each of the last three years — stretching government budgets.}:

Significantly, the science that makes it possible to attribute how much any one disaster was influenced by climate change has steadily advanced. To cite one example, the March heat waves across the U.S. would have been virtually impossible without the emissions that have caused climate change, according to the European science group World Weather Attribution, and were about four times as likely to happen as they were a decade ago.}:

Boulder, Colorado, is among the places facing increasing droughts, more extreme precipitation and larger wildfires — all of which are significantly propelled by climate change linked to the emissions from the use of fossil fuels. The state has estimated the costs of these perils will run into the many hundreds of millions of dollars. In 2018, Boulder County sued Exxon Mobil and the Canadian oil company Suncor Energy, accusing the companies of “intentional, reckless and negligent conduct.”

Among its claims, the county alleged the oil companies engaged in a conspiracy to mislead the public and violated consumer protection rules by mischaracterizing the dangers of their products. They accused the oil companies of creating a public nuisance by altering the environment and leaving the county to pay to abate growing hazards such as the flooding that tests roads and bridges. Exxon Mobil and Suncor Energy have never filed a response in Colorado but asked for the case to be dismissed.

Ever since, the lawsuit has been mired in a dispute over whether Colorado courts were the correct venue, with the state Supreme Court ultimately ruling last May that they were. Suncor filed to the U.S. Supreme Court to reconsider, and this fall it will weigh the company’s petition asking whether federal environmental law preempts the state law.

:{:{The high-profile national court case is just one facet in an increasingly tense fight over liability for the fossil fuel industry. In January, the American Petroleum Institute, the largest fossil fuel industry group in the United States, said fighting the climate liability lawsuits was one of its top priorities in 2026. Lobbying records for the group from last year show that it advocated for legislation to protect oil producers from climate lawsuits at the state level. }:

The Trump administration; other industry groups, including the Chamber of Commerce; and several of the nonprofit advocacy groups associated with Leo have argued that state courts are the wrong venue for claims that ultimately concern emissions that drift widely across borders, and they wish to see other cases moved or dismissed. They say that because the federal government already has the authority to regulate those emissions, the federal courts, not the states, should hear the claims.}:

In an interview, Hild told ProPublica that he sees the suits as an illegitimate effort to enact policy through the courts and to “regulate the entire U.S. economy from a single state.”

In an email, Skinner wrote: “Our effort is not one focused on climate change. But it is true that left-wing activists and their dark money donors have put vast sums of money and years of groundwork into pushing a coast-to-coast campaign of climate-focused public nuisance lawsuits.”

Neither Watkins nor Thompson responded to requests for comment.

When Skinner and Hild finished their presentation at ALEC they made a QR code available to download the language of the model bills and directed the audience to a woman named Catherine Gunsalus, who was in the back of the room. She would be able to answer any questions, they said.

Gunsalus until recently worked for the Heritage Action Fund, the political and lobbying arm of the Heritage Foundation, the Trump-aligned think tank that is most recently known for promoting the Project 2025 agenda. Records show that Gunsalus has also lobbied in collaboration with another Leo-affiliated group, Americans for Public Trust.

In April 2025, she formed a lobbying firm called Varidon Strategies and began registering in states almost immediately afterward, according to records. By mid-summer, Varidon was representing Alliance for Consumers Action Fund; Consumers’ Research; The Honest Election Project, an affiliate of The 85 Fund; as well as other Leo entities in 25 states. In the majority of those filings, Varidon used an email address at the domain of Holtzman Vogel, a Virginia-based law firm that is often retained by Leo’s organizations.

Gunsalus did not reply to a detailed list of questions.

In the four months since the ALEC summit, there has been substantial activity in the states where Varidon has registered. On Jan. 5, representatives in Missouri introduced the loosely related Eliminate Criminal Profiteering Act, which could stop revenues flowing to law firms from settlements in the sort of nuisance suits often used in climate cases. Two days later, legislators took up the Public Nuisance Reform Act, which proposes narrowing the definition of what could be considered a nuisance.

That same month, similar bills were introduced in Indiana, Oklahoma and Tennessee. In February, eight more followed in Oklahoma, Iowa, South Carolina, Utah, Louisiana and Kansas. Skinner, who is registered to lobby in Kansas, was invited to testify in a hearing about that state’s bill and launched a new “End the Lawfare” website targeting the “left-wing” agenda. As of April 2, versions of the model legislation offered at the ALEC meeting have been introduced across 11 states altogether. In Utah, the governor has signed two related bills into law, and in Tennessee and Indiana, bills are awaiting their governors’ signature.

The more states there are with some sort of waiver in place, the narrower the pathway for cities and states to seek redress as environmental conditions worsen, and the costs continue to rise. Hild and Skinner and the Leo network’s bills also serve another purpose: teeing up a conflict that pits states against one another, a conflict that only the Supreme Court or Congress can finally resolve.

As Hild put it at the ALEC gathering, “This is economic civil war.”

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Home | Behind the GOP's radical agenda to penalize 'sinners'

Thom HartmannJuly 06, 2024

Donald Trump, the Republican Party, and Project 2025 have some very specific plans for nationally resetting the legal status of half the American population, and they’re using religion and “sin” to justify their bizarre imposition of 18th century values.

They explicitly want to reverse the status of women’s legal, workplace, marital, and social equality and return to a time when biblical law dictated that men ran everything from the household to business to governance and law.

One key to women being able to play leadership and workplace roles has been their ability to regulate their own fertility, from access to birth control, the morning-after pill, and abortion.

By enforcing the Comstock Act — which is still on the books, as Clarence Thomas, Sam Alito, and numerous other Republicans keep reminding us — they will be able to ban the shipment of anything, from drugs to surgical devices, that can be used to produce an abortion. This could even end most hospital-based abortions by essentially outlawing the equipment needed to perform them.

As Project 2025 proclaims on p. 594 of their Mandate for Leadership for the next Republican administration:

:{:{“Announcing a Campaign to Enforce Criminal Prohibitions in 18 U.S. Code §§ 1461 and 1462 [the Comstock Act] Against Providers and Distributors of Abortion Pills That Use the Mail. Federal law [the Comstock Act] prohibits mailing ‘[e]very article, instrument, substance, drug, medicine, or thing which is advertised or described in a manner calculated to lead another to use or apply it for producing abortion.’}:

Following the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs, there is now no federal prohibition on the enforcement of this statute. The Department of Justice in the next conservative Administration should therefore announce its intent to enforce federal law….”}:

The second key is to give men the power to challenge women who want a divorce. As Senator JD Vance said in 2021:

“One of the great tricks that I think the sexual revolution pulled on the American populace” is the idea that “these marriages were fundamentally, you know, they were maybe even violent, but certainly they were unhappy, and so getting rid of them and making it easier for people to shift spouses like they change their underwear, that’s going to make people happier in the long term”.

Republican legislators in Louisiana, Oklahoma, Nebraska, and Texas have already proposed eliminating no-fault divorce in those states, and the trend is picking up steam among GOP politicians nationwide.

Multiple Project 2025 partners, including the powerful and influential American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), which has helped introduce thousands of pieces of state and federal legislation, are explicit about this goal, as Media Matters for America noted:

“The American Legislative Exchange Council proposed a piece of legislation dubbed the “Marriage Contract Act,” which would have eliminated no-fault divorce. [Center for Media and Democracy, ALEC Exposed, 2/13/17]”

The consequences could be dramatic and deadly for women, as The Guardian recently explained:

“Between 1976 and 1985, states that passed the [no-fault divorce] laws saw their domestic violence rates against men and women fall by about 30%; the number of women murdered by an intimate partner declined by 10%; and female suicide rates declined by 8 to 16%.”

Republicans nationwide are calling for a reversal of the women’s rights movement dating all the way back to Abagail Adams’ imploring her husband John to “remember the ladies” at the Constitutional Convention of 1787 through today, and are not shy about it.

For example, Federal District Judge Michael Kacsmaryk, 46, was appointed to the federal bench by Donald Trump. A Republican activist and religious fundamentalist, he’s said that “so-called marriage equality” has put America “on a road to potential tyranny” and reflects a “complete abuse of rule of law principles.”

As The Washington Post noted, Kacsmaryk has argued that:

“The sexual revolution ushered in a world where an individual is ‘an autonomous blob of Silly Putty unconstrained by nature or biology’ and where ‘marriage, sexuality, gender identity and even the unborn child must yield to the erotic desires of liberated adults.’”

Kacsmaryk, the judge who tried to outlaw mifepristone nationally (which the Supreme Court will almost certainly decide on next year) is part of a substantial movement within the GOP to use religion to roll back the rights and status of women.

Because their “beliefs” are grounded in their religion and they believe that women who get abortions or use some types of birth control (IUDs, morning-after pills, etc.) are committing the ultimate sin, murder, they want to see these sinning women suffer for their “crimes.”

Like people who love the death penalty (and in two states now state legislators have called for the death penalty for women who get abortions), they want to be able to torture them and watch them suffer; they want them to experience humiliation, and feel mortification for their sin of rejecting a pregnancy initiated by a man who was ordained by their god to be their master and the head of their household.

Torturing women for religious reasons is nothing new for American theological zealots.

Louise and I used to live just a short drive from Dover, New Hampshire, the fourth-largest city in the state, near the Maine border and the Atlantic seacoast. Generations ago, rightwing politicians and preachers were enforcing social control, much like the GOP’s forced birthers are trying to do today.

John Greenleaf Whittier’s poem “How the Women Went from Dover” tells the tale of three young women who dared to challenge that day’s most powerful religious men, that early generation of the people driving the most extreme parts of what today has morphed into the forced birth movement.

Whittier’s poem begins:

The tossing spray of Cocheco’s fall

Hardened to ice on its rocky wall,

As through Dover town in the chill, gray dawn,

Three women passed, at the cart-tail drawn!

The three women were Anne Coleman, Mary Tomkins, and Alice Ambrose, and their crime was adhering to and promoting female-tolerant Quaker beliefs in a rabidly rightwing town.

This so enraged the minister of Dover’s Congregational church, John Reyner, that he and church elder Reverend Hatevil Nutter (yes, that was his real name) lobbied the crown magistrate, Captain Richard Walderne, to have them punished for their challenge to Reyner’s and Nutter’s authority.

It was a bitter New England winter when Walderne complied, ordering the three women stripped naked and tied to the back of a horse-drawn cart by their wrists, then dragged through town while receiving ten lashes each.

As Whittier wrote:

Bared to the waist, for the north wind’s grip

And keener sting of the constable’s whip,

The blood that followed each hissing blow

Froze as it sprinkled the winter snow.

A local man, George Bishop, wrote at the time what he witnessed:

“Deputy Waldron caused these women to be stripped naked from the middle upwards, and tied to a cart, and after a while cruelly whipped them, whilst the priest stood and looked and laughed at it.”

It was a start, from Reverend Reyner’s point of view, but hardly enough to scare the women of the entire region from which he drew his congregation. So, he got the young women’s punishment extended to 11 nearby towns over 80 miles of snow-covered roads, all following the same routine.

So into the forest they held their way,

By winding river and frost-rimmed bay,

Over wind-swept hills that felt the beat

Of the winter sea at their icy feet.

The next town was Hampton, where the constable decided that just baring them above the waist wasn’t enough. As Sewall’s History of the Quakers records:

“So he stripped them, and then stood trembling whip in hand, and so he did the execution. Then he carried them to Salisbury through the dirt and the snow half the leg deep; and here they were whipped again.”

As Whittier wrote in his poem:

Once more the torturing whip was swung,

Once more keen lashes the bare flesh stung.

“Oh, spare! they are bleeding!” a little maid cried,

And covered her face the sight to hide.

Whipping, beating, stoning, hanging, nailing, being pilloried (publicly clamped to a post through neck and wrist holes, often naked and sometimes for days at a time), dragging, burning, branding, and dozens of other techniques were employed by religious and government authorities in the early American colonies to enforce religious thought and behavior, particularly against women.

As Whittier wrote:

If her cry from the whipping-post and jail

Pierced sharp as the Kenite’s driven nail,

O woman, at ease in these happier days,

Forbear to judge of thy sister’s ways!

For the entirety of “civilized” human history — in country after country, culture after culture, religion after religion — crusaders for Zeus, Ra, Thor, Odin, Aphrodite, Venus, JHWH, Shiva, Rama, Krishna, Jesus, Quetzalcoatl, Mohamed, Ceridwen, Xpiacoc, Ishtar, and Amen (among hundreds of others) have, at various times, punished, tortured, and even killed women who refused to acknowledge their male gods and the rules of their patriarchal religious and political systems.

— Adherents to radical Islam from Saudi Arabia to Afghanistan to The Philippines today require women to cover most all of their bodies, and delight in publicly whipping and even beheading females who won’t comply.

— Fundamentalist Hindus in India today burn women to death if they’ve defied religious authorities or the patriarchs of their families.

— For over 1000 years, Christian fundamentalists have — as Whittier documents — tortured, hung, impaled, and burned to death women who defied their male ministers’ religious mandates.

What we’re seeing today in these attempts to regulate women’s behavior by the GOP is a simple extension of religious fundamentalism and patriarchy that goes back as far as ancient Samaria.

This lust for domination is really about wielding political power under the guise of religion.

Again, this is nothing new. It’s an ancient story that keeps echoing through history and Trump, the GOP, and Project 2025 are committed to reviving.

Here in America today, it’s part of a larger war on “uppity women,” non-whites, non-fundamentalist-Christian people, and gender minorities.

Which is why it’s so clear that bringing back enforcement of the Comstock Act via Project 2025 is not about the safety of women. It’s not even about reducing the number of abortions.

It’s about control, power, and their assertion that an angry Christian god has told them they are uniquely suited to interpret his scripture in a political context. They, and they alone, can choose to embrace the punitive parts of Christianity and ignore the empathetic and loving parts of it.

Those sadists want to shame women who’ve rejected their religious beliefs and gone on to get abortions, seek divorces, or participate in the workplace or government. Who have defied their religiously-justified patriarchal political authority.

They want to publicly humiliate women, harass them, and teach them a lesson about who’s really in charge.

And, if the adjudicated rapist Donald Trump takes the White House this fall, they’ll be able to gleefully do it — like Reverend Nutter — under the sanction and protection of the law.

NOW READ: How to end all Trump prosecutions

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5 23 kinsgston ff plant with a natural gas plant by one of the most powerful utilities in the U.S. At the same time, Tennessee lawmakers are defining gas as “clean energy.” Source: Paul Harris/Getty Images

It was a big deal when Ohio Governor Mike DeWine signed a law designating methane gas as “green energy” in January. The bill’s passage was covered by local news, national news, industry publications and glossy magazines.

So when we recently learned that Tennessee Governor Bill Lee signed a similar law last month—HB 0946, which legally defines methane gas as “clean energy”—we were a bit surprised. Aside from Caroline Eggers at Nashville’s WPLN News, who has done two great stories on the bill, we couldn’t find any coverage of the legislation.

It’s possible that most local and national media were distracted. The bill, which states that public utilities must count “natural gas” as a “permissible source” of clean energy, was signed into law on April 12, 2023—the same day state lawmaker Justin J. Pearson was reinstated to the Tennessee Legislature after being infamously expelled for protesting on the chamber floor. (Heck, that’s what we were covering at the time).

Whatever the reason, Tennessee’s new law deserves the same level of scrutiny as Ohio’s, as it’s a key part of a growing industry-funded strategy to delay climate action by codifying misinformation about natural gas into law. Like gas, the strategy is most harmful when people don’t notice it seeping in. So today, we’re belatedly...>When deceptive marketing becomes the law zzz...the industry brands as “natural gas,” is not a “clean” or “green” source of energy. It is a fossil fuel primarily made of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas. Methane gas has “contributed to the largest increase in global fossil CO2 emissions in recent years,”&...That’s why many scientists say Despite all this, the fossil fuel industry has been marketing gas as a climate solution for decades. This marketing has only intensified as the public has gotten more serious about tackling climate change.

But industry-created climate misinformation is no longer just infiltrating podcasts and social media feeds. It’s also infiltrating the law. The phenomenon started in Europe last year, when the European Parliament voted to label certain uses of natural gas as “green.” That meant billions of dollars that were intended to fund climate-friendly projects could legally be used for methane power plants and terminals.

Now, industry climate misinformation has also started making its way into U.S. state law—albeit in slightly different ways.

Ohio’s bill labeling gas as “green,” for one, appears to be more of a public relations stunt than anything. Ohio Governor DeWine’s press secretary told Natural Gas Intelligence that “the legislative language did not affect any funding or regulations,” adding that it was “more of an opinion statement.” The Ohio bill’s own sponsor doesn’t even seem to know what it does; he told Energy News Network he hoped the law would help companies in the gas business meet Environment, Social and Governance (ESG) investing standards. But he added: “I don’t know if it will work.”

Tennessee’s new law, on the other hand, has a specific, anti-climate policy intent. It doesn’t just vaguely say that “gas is clean energy;” it says that local governments attempting to set “clean energy” standards must include gas in that definition. “That makes it a kindred spirit with the now over 20 states who have passed ‘preemption bills’ attempting to prohibit cities from limiting the use of gas in buildings,” said David Pomerantz, the executive director of the Energy and Policy Institute.

The common thread: industry influence

What unites these new state laws is their connection to fossil fuel interests. Ohio’s green energy law was funded by a dark money group with ties to the gas industry, the Washington Post reported in January. The conservative American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) shared with Ohio lawmakers a “model bill” with talking points about how methane gas is clean energy, according to emails obtained by the Energy and Policy Institute. Those emails explicitly spell out how the industry creates laws to keep itself in business.

We don’t have the same smoking gun private emails linking the gas industry and dark money groups to Tennessee’s bill. But there are a few very public connections between the lawmakers who supported the Tennessee bill and fossil fuel interests, including some of the same fossil fuel groups that created Ohio’s bill.

Three of the Tennessee bill’s co-sponsors are ALEC members:Rep. Chris Todd, who is an ALEC “state chair”, Rep. Susan Lynn, who is on ALEC’s board of directors, and Sen. Ed Jackson, also an ALEC state chair. Tennessee lawmakers have also publicly aligned themselves with the same dark money group that funded Ohio’s law, by signing The Empowerment Alliance’s “Declaration of Energy Independence.” Signers of the declaration, which calls methane gas the “environmentally responsible bridge to our energy future”, include Governor Bill Lee and multiple state senators—including bill co-sponsor Sen. Walley.

Representative Clark Boyd, who first sponsored HB 0946, has received $10,000 in donations from the oil and gas industry and $13,500 from electric utilities from 2018 to 2023. But his largest industry donation—$8,000 between 2018 to 2023—comes from the Tennessee Electric Cooperative Association (TECA), which has also donated to every state senator who sponsored the bill.

TECA is a trade association representing the state’s utility companies, all of which get their power from the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA). TECA thus advocates for the interests of TVA—and TVA has big plans to expand its methane gas production in Tennessee. Specifically, TVA is currently working on $3.5 billion worth of gas projects that, if completed, will constitute the second-largest utility gas expansion in the country by 2030, according to the Sierra Club.

TVA has received significant pushpack to its planned gas expansion. In January, 112 organizations signed a letter to the EPA calling for a stop to the projects. In the letter, the groups cited the need for actual clean energy. "The EPA can either use its legal power to advance the clean energy economy, or…can needlessly sign off on dangerous fossil fuel expansion,” they wrote.

The fact that methane gas is now legally “clean energy” in Tennessee is a benefit for TVA and its planned methane gas expansion. And it’s not the only recent bill that benefits TVA. Last month, Rep. Clark Boyd sponsored a bill that makes it a Class C felony to interrupt or interfere with “critical infrastructure” like pipelines. In February, Boyd also sponsored a bill to block any future bans of gas stoves. Last year, Tennessee lawmakers passed the Tennessee Natural Gas Innovation Act, which legally categorized methane gas as a source of “clean energy” for utilities. They also passed laws preventing local governments from blocking fossil fuel infrastructure and the state from working with banks that divest from fossil fuel companies.

Clearly, state governments have become the battleground for America’s energy transition—and fossil fuel interests are fighting hard. So we’ll continue to follow this story in Tennessee, and the fossil fuel industry’s fight to codify misinformation into law. If you see anything similar happening with clean energy laws in your state, let us know—especially if you have proof of industry influence. Because to avoid the dangers of gas, you first have to be able to detect it.

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17 (so gop) states pass laws to prot dark $

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BHM observances should include how corporations and those of immense wealth have amassed political power and economic wealth by exploiting racism toward people of color, especially African Americans, in this country over several centuries.

Examples:

The Royal African Company and other British “crown corporations” transported slaves to the American colonies
The “Fugitive Slave Clause” of the U.S. Constitution (Article I, Section 2, Clause 3) mandated that escaped slaves (the property of slaveholders) when caught had to be returned to their owners.
The “Three-Fifths “Compromise” in the Constitution(Article I, Section 2, Clause 3) defined slaves (which had no political rights) as 3/5ths of a person in determining a state’s population – to ensure that southern states would have more votes in the Electoral College to perpetuate slavery.
JP Morgan bank used slaves as collateral for loans to slave owners in the 19th century.
The 13th Amendment contained an “exceptions clause” – prisoners could be used as forced labor. “Convict leasing” or “slavery by another name” involved African American forced to to work forrailroads, U.S. Steel and other corporations to rebuild the south after the Civil War.
African-American strikebreakers were used widely in the meat packing, steel, coal mining, automobile, and railroad industries between the end of Civil War and New Deal to stoke racism between white and black workers to prevent the rise of unions.
Housing, automobile, and construction corporations profited by laws (including discriminatory FHA mortgage underwriting) that promoted redlining of neighborhoods to maintain high housing values, especially in suburbia.
The disproportionate mass imprisonment of African Americans, due to racist drug and other laws, has given rise to highly profitable and powerful private prison corporations, namely CoreCivic and Geo Group. The Prison Industries Act (promoted byALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council) has expanded prison labor and financially benefited many companies, among them Victoria's Secret, Whole Foods Market, Walmart, Microsoft, Starbucks, BP,Nintendo,AT&T,Target, Dell, Eddie Bauer, and Boeing.
Racial predatory loans by Wall Street financial entities, which profited in the billions, fueled the 2007-9 financial crisis.
Toxic industries tend to be placed or to expand in African American poor communities.
The explosion of police violence against innocent African Americans in cities and subsequent financial settlements in amounts that communities can not afford has given rise to a new profitable financial instrument for corporate and individual investors: “police brutality bonds.”

:{:{Not to be overlooked is the corporate hijacking of the Fourteenth Amendment, intended to provide legal due process and equal protection to African Americans when it was ratified in 1868. Two decades later, the Supreme Court hijacked the decision, ruling that a corporation is a “person” with the same due process and equal protection rights intended exclusively for African Americans. ...}:

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For nearly half a century, billionaire Charles Koch has quietly funded, initiated, and supported efforts to dismantle democracy in the United States, two professors wrote for Progressive Magazine.

Nancy MacLean, the William H. Chafe distinguished professor of History and Public Policy at Duke University, and Lisa Graves, executive director of True North Research and a co-creator of the websites Koch Exposed and Koch Docs, detailed a seemingly never-ending list of ways one of the richest people in the world and his wealthy allies continue to “divide the American electorate.”

The conservative American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), which has long been funded by Koch and his late brother, David, has strategized on ways to enforce voter suppression efforts by passing voter ID laws – which began when Barack Obama was first elected in 2008.

Last year, the Center for Media and Democracy, for which Graves sits on the board, found that a handful of Koch-backed groups collectively spent more than $1 billion on the 2020 election.

One of the organizations, Americans for Prosperity, spent around $70 million leading up to the 2022 midterms, involving itself in over 450 races on efforts that heavily targeted swing voters.

Soon after the election, Koch released Believe in People: Bottom-Up Solutions for a Top-Down World, a book in which he claimed he was ready for “a final act building bridges across political divides.” No more political involvement. MacLean and Graves noted that a few days prior to the book release, The Wall Street Journal published an article titled, “Charles Koch Says His Partisanship Was a Mistake.”

The book even contained phrases like, “Boy, did we screw up.” “What a mess!” “This is crazy! Are we going to have a civil war?” He had convinced the public that his time toying with democracy was over.

But, MacLean and Graves said that “mainstream news editors seemed to forget that” they were reporting on “a specialist in strategic disinformation, who had perfected the practice of deceiving the public during his network’s three decades of climate change denial” – a mastermind of finesse.

Even with that, what Maclean and Graves call Koch’s “most diabolical” move thus far, is how he bandwagoned the “white supremacist” reaction to nationwide civil unrest following George Floyd’s murder in 2020, by initiating a campaign that geared fear-mongering language towards the idea of teaching race in schools – also known as critical race theory.

The Koch network proceeded to fund organizations that actively fought against CRT, although a spokesperson from a Koch-funded group claims that is untrue.

Two examples of Kock-backed anti-CRT initiatives include ALEC’s financial support of a workshop titled “Against Critical Theory’s Onslaught,” featuring the main figurehead of anti-CRT rhetoric, Christopher Rufo in 2020; and when a coalition of Koch-funded groups including the Manhattan Institute and Heritage Foundation advocated against the idea of teaching race in schools in a published letter.

Aside from funding organizations that promote anti-CRT language, Koch also funds Independent Women’s Forum (IWF) and Independent Women’s Voice (IWV), which work in tandem to promote anti-trans language. For example, the groups created a “Women’s Bill of Rights” which asserts that trans women are not women.

MacLean and Graves wrote, “Just as Koch-funded operations weaponize and intensify racism to secure political power, they also exploit and escalate misogyny, homophobia, and transphobia by any means to boost Republican power.”

Despite his claim that he was removing himself from politics two years ago, it’s clear that with the success of a majority conservative Supreme Court, the continued push to control the bodies of women; anti-CRT, anti-trans, and other discriminatory laws that Koch’s behind-the-scenes funding and staunch support of those who can bring he and his allies' vision of a fully dismantled democracy to life presses on.

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nc policy

four out of five Americans, across the political spectrum, consistently support transparency when it comes to contributions to organizations that spend money on campaigns. Unfortunately, a growing number of states, now including North Carolina, are advancing so-called “donor privacy” bills to block public access to information about who is spending big money to secretly influence our vote and our government.

:{:{}:

Senate Bill 636, is one such bill that is on track to pass the state Senate this week. What’s more, the mandate in this bill to conceal donor information applies not just to 501(c)(3) charitable, religious, and education organizations, but also to 501(c)(4) organizations that regularly engage in substantial partisan campaign activity, 501(c)(5) labor organizations and 501(c)(6) organizations like chambers of commerce.

Basically, if someone wants to spend big in North Carolina elections, all they will need to do under this legislation is to find some nonprofit groups through which they can route the money and they can be certain that the public won’t be able to trace the cash back to them. The effect will be to render limits on campaign contributions even more meaningless than they already are.

Sadly, all these new so-called donor privacy bills work toward the same general goal: preventing the public identification of big donors to nonprofit organizations. These bills strike at the heart of the “important government interests” that the U.S. Supreme Court identified in the seminal 1976 case,Buckley v. Valeo,in which the justices found that disclosure informs voters about the sources of political spending and helps to guard against corruption.

And it’s no surprise that these “donor privacy” bills are straight out of the ALEC playbook. The organization even has a “toolkit” for it.

Under current North Carolina law, so-called IE-only (independent expenditure) PACs are subject to disclosure, and so are the groups that donate to IE-only PACs. But in dark money shell games, that only accounts for the first two entities that are spending in North Carolina elections. If the money trail goes back further, through three or four nonprofits, the state Board of Elections and the public likely won’t be able to investigate those transactions. Current campaign finance statutes don’t require such nonprofits that are a few steps removed to disclose their donors, and if the SBOE wants to investigate, the nonprofits will be able to point to the provisions that would become law in SB 636 to say that they are not even allowed to disclose those transactions.

These shell games already exist of course, but SB 636 puts up another new wall, saying that the public can’t get access to this information if the money trail goes through more than just one or two nonprofits. The proposal would make it easy for wealthy special interests to route their money through a few groups just to avoid transparency and accountability.

During the 2020 election cycle, North Carolina voters were inundated with ads that distorted the facts. For example, in state Senate District 31, the innocuously named Citizens for a Better NC Senate sent mailers that lied about candidate Terri LeGrand’s policy views. Reporters traced the ultimate funding source for the mailers back to a Virginia nonprofit that was funded, in part, by donations from other nonprofits.

The beneficiary of those false ads was state Sen. Joyce Krawiec, who is now through her sponsorship of SB 636, helping to lead the charge to allow fat-cat donors to hide their political contributions by funneling them through nonprofit groups.

A few big-name examples of 501(c)(4) groups on the GOP side that have abused these loopholes would be the NRA, Club for Growth, and Heritage Action, the 501(c)(4) sister group to the Heritage Foundation. Democratic-leaning groups, like the 1630 Fund and Future Forward, may have less name recognition, but they have also engaged in similar tactics. Even small groups with one or a few wealthy funders can take advantage of the loophole, routing their money through a series of shell LLCs and 501(c)(4) groups before it gets to the Super PACs, at which point it’s impossible to determine where the money ultimately came from.

Donor privacy laws codify these practices and prevent the public from ever finding out who is funding our elections.

The bottom line: We all pay a price when political contributions influence our government. With the Greg Lindberg scandal, the now-imprisoned insurance company executive was trying to buy favorable treatment from regulators, putting North Carolina consumers at risk.When Duke Energy lobbies officials whose campaigns it helped fund to avoid paying its fair share of environmental cleanups, we all pay the price with higher utility bills.

We can all agree that the current political system isn’t working as well as it should for regular North Carolinians and their families. And now with Senate Bill 636, state legislators are threatening to make things even worse, by making it nearly impossible for voters to learn the identities of the big-money donors trying to influence our elections.

Rather than carving our legal protections for nonprofits’ political spending, state lawmakers should require real transparency regarding the sources of big money in our elections to create more government accountability, less influence for wealthy special interests, and less political corruption.

Melissa Price Kromm is the executive director of N.C. Voters for Clean Elections.

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CORP ROLE

12 22 kpfa

17 (so gop) states pass laws to prot dark $

eg 1

in a state with a reputation for political scandal, Florida’s 2020 elections saw a particularly brazen scheme to swing three state Senate races.A “dark money” group sent out mailers promoting the campaigns of three “sham” candidates—in one case, diverting enough votes to a candidate with thesame last nameas former Democratic Sen. José Javier Rodríguez to defeat him. Rodríguez lost by just 32 votes, and Democratic candidates in the other two districts were defeated as well.

The Orlando Sentinel reported that the group behind the misleading mailers, which has renamed itself as Grow United, received a $1.15 million donation from an organization closely tied to the business trade association Associated Industries of Florida. A Dec. 2 Sentinel investigation detailed the group’s consultants’ close coordination withelectric monopoly Florida Power & Light, as well as the power utility’s ties to state Republican leaders, who control the chamber and can block bills like one that would empower solar electricity generators.

Florida organizations supporting Democrats also donated $700,000 to Grow United to obscure the funding source behind expenses like election mailers,a revelation that led to the resignation of a senior House adviser.

Last month, the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Affairs launched an investigation into one of Grow United’s donors. The “sham” candidate in Rodriguez’s race pled guilty last August and is cooperating in testimony against the consultant who allegedly put him up to it, former Republican state Sen. Frank Artiles. Artiles has pled not guilty in the case.

With dark money rampant in the state, especially in state Democratic primaries, a Florida Republican is seeking to make it a crime for public officials to request or release information about the sources of money behind election spending by groups that are not required to reveal their donors.

In January, Republican Florida Rep. Toby Overdorf introduced the Personal Information Protection Act (H.B. 1547), which would prohibit public agencies from requesting that any individual, corporation, or other entity release personal information besides what is already required by campaign finance and other laws, or when they have a lawful warrant to seek the information. The bill would also prohibit agencies from publishing such information they may have in their possession. Florida Senator Joe Gruters introduced a similar bill in the Senate (S.B. 1848) that would do the same thing, but only for personal information of donors and other individuals affiliated with 501(c)(3) organizations, though its sponsor says he’s willing to broaden it to cover other types of groups. Each bill would allow for the right of civil action and violators could face possible prison time of up to 90 days.

The House version would prevent campaign finance regulators from trying to force non-disclosing organizations like (c)(4) nonprofits to reveal their donors when they spend money to influence elections in the state.

The new Florida bill is modeled after a policy propagated by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a nonprofit that brings together corporate lobbyists with conservative lawmakers to advance legislation that favors business interests. Rep. Overdorf is one of about 31 Florida elected officials listed as ALEC members as of April 2021, according to a state public records request from the nonprofit Center for Media and Democracy (CMD). Gruters is the chair of the Florida Republican Party, re-elected to that position last month, and is a close ally of former President Trump, having co-chaired his 2016 state campaign.

In recent years, such bills criminalizing the disclosure of politically-active nonprofits’ donors have spread to a number of states, passing into law in 2021 in Arkansas, Iowa, South Dakota, and Tennessee.

“These types of bills are unnecessary—there are already constitutional protections for donors that would actually face threats, harassment, or reprisal from public identification—and their only true achievement may be to simply impede transparency for politically active nonprofits and make dark money darker,” said Aaron McKean, legal counsel for state and local reform at the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center, which works to increase transparency in democracy.

“Voters have a right to know which wealthy special interests are spending big money to influence their vote and rig the political system in their favor,” said McKean. “Florida’s legislators should be focused on ensuring voters know the true sources of money used to influence elections.”

A poll commissioned by the Campaign Legal Center previously found strong bipartisan support for “publicly disclosing contributions to organizations involved in elections” so that wealthy special interests cannot operate with impunity and politicians can be held accountable.

florida has led the nation in public corruption convictions for much of the past couple decades. From 1976 to 2018, Florida was among the top 10 states in federal corruption convictions per 10,000 residents, according to a report from the University of Illinois at Chicago.

A longtime state ethics watchdog tells Sludge that the practice of routing funds through dark money groups will proliferate in the state until the Legislature has the political will to stop it.

“I don’t think there will be any reduction in dark money in elections, it’s just going to increase,” said Ben Wilcox, research director of the nonprofit Integrity Florida. “The campaign finance system in Florida is so dysfunctional, it makes this sort of activity so easy to do, and easy to hide the source of campaign donations. There are all sorts of loopholes.”

With the end of Florida’s legislative session coming next month and the bills not gathering co-sponsors, Wilcox thinks that the state’s investigation into the Grow United case has likely chilled their support this year. But Wilcox tells Sludge, “The fact that they filed the bills this year, to further protect the sources of dark money, it tells you whether or not the bills pass this year, they probably will come next year. The powers that be are intent on keeping dark money dark.”

Wilcox also pointed to a loophole in state campaign finance law that allows unlimited donations to state political committees controlled by politicians. “It’s a form of legal corruption,” he said.

“When you look at Florida Power & Light, they give the maximum to various candidates, and then all the big money goes into the political committees, donations of $100,000 and more.” State campaign finance records show that in recent years, the committee Friends of Ron DeSantis has received donations of over $10 million total from Citadel hedge fund manager and GOP megadonor Ken Griffin, $850,000 from investment company Spring Bay Capital, $200,000 from Kane Financial Services, and nearly $125,000 from the Florida Home Builders Association, among many others.

Last May, Gov. Ron DeSantis signed into law S.B. 1890, a bill sponsored by Republican State Sen. Ray Rodrigues, that would have set a $3,000 cap on contributions to political committees supporting or opposing constitutional amendments until the measure obtains enough valid signatures to qualify for the ballot. Florida lawmakers left untouched the ability for donors to make unlimited donations to candidates’ political committees. The law was blocked in federal court on July 1, the day it was slated to take effect, and in August Florida’s Attorney General did not appeal, leaving the injunction in place.

The Tampa Bay Times reported last month that lobbyist Jorge Chamizo provided the bill language to staff of Senate sponsor Gruters, working on behalf of two groups: People United for Privacy and Opportunity Solutions Project.According to CMD, which tracks dark money groups, People United for Privacy was formed by the State Policy Network, an umbrella organization of right-wing causes. Opportunity Solutions Project is the advocacy arm of the Florida-based Foundation for Government Accountability, a State Policy Network member.

This year, Jorge Chamizo is registered to lobby for a long list of business clients, including Associated Industries of Florida and Duke Energy, which was an ALEC member as recently as 2020. Other clients of Chamizo this year include Peoples Gas System, Tampa Electric Company, health insurer Anthem, health care provider Centene, and Uber.

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https://www.commoncause.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/ALEC-anti-voter-letter.pdf

8 pp ltr

June 14, 2021 We are writing to urge you to cease your association with, and end your funding of, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) based on its active efforts to restrict the American people’s freedom to vote and spread lies about the integrity of our elections to undermine American democracy. Faced with public outrage over legislation that creates barriers to voting rights enacted or proposed in more than 47 statesi , and the bills’ disproportionate impact on people of color, young people, and the elderly, hundreds of companies have publicly denounced any discriminatory legislation that makes it harder for people to vote.ii Perhaps your company is one of them. Nonetheless, your participation in ALEC serves to promote and legitimize the group’s anti-democratic efforts to create more barriers to voting. Despite claiming it would stop working on electoral issues in 2012, ALEC has reengaged on highly controversial policies related to elections and redistricting in recent years, perhaps without your company’s knowledge. In 2019, ALEC created a secret working group on redistricting, ballot measures, and election law, known as the “ALEC Political Process Working Group.”iii The group is led in part by Cleta Mitchell, a controversial attorney who has spread disinformation about the results of the 2020 election and served as a legal advisor to former President Trump as he secretly pushed election officials in Georgia to overturn the results of a free and fair election.iv Another leader of ALEC’s secret working group is Arizona state Representative Shawnna Bolick, who recently proposed a bill to allow the state legislature to overturn the results of a presidential election.v

ALEC’s own CEO, Lisa Nelson, said in February 2020 that ALEC was already working with state legislators on efforts to challenge the 2020 election results and “question the validity of an election.”vi Nelson’s comments were made nine months before the election even took place. Then, in June 2020, ALEC held an exclusive call for its members on the topic of mail-in voting featuring the Honest Elections Projectvii, a group that pushes voter restriction laws and which spread disinformation about the integrity of mail-in voting during the 2020 election.viii But ALEC’s spread of disinformation about voting pre-dates the 2020 election cycle. In 2017, ALEC hosted a panel featuring three members of former President Trump’s disbanded and discredited election integrity commission (Hans von Spakowsky, J. Christian Adams, and Christy McCormick), where they made unfounded claims of voter fraud and pushed for legislation to restrict the right to vote.ix Make no mistake, ALEC and its allies’ involvement in spreading disinformation about voting and undermining the integrity of our elections led to the violent insurrection we witnessed on January 6th at the U.S. Capitol. And now your company’s funding and support of ALEC is being used to pass new Jim Crow-style anti-voter laws at the state level and block federal voting reform from passing in Congress. In March 2021, ALEC held a briefing with U.S. Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX), one of the leading proponents to reject the results of the 2020 election, on a strategy to oppose a bill expanding access to the ballot box in Congress and support the national campaign to restrict voting rights at the state level.x U.S. Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) has also recently said that he has “been speaking to legislators through ALEC” about election and voting-related policies.xi

2 2

In an internal memo, Heritage Action, an advocacy group leading the effort to pass voting restrictions at the state level, recently wrote that ALEC would be a key policy and lobbying partner in their multi-year campaign to push anti-voter laws, many of which specifically target and limit voting access for people of color, young people, and the elderly.xii One report has identified more than 100 state legislators connected to ALEC that are lead sponsors or co-sponsors of bills that limit voting access in Georgia, Arizona, Florida, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Texas in 2021 alone.xiii In addition to restricting the freedom to vote, ALEC has also been actively promoting partisan gerrymandering strategies, despite the group’s nonpartisan, tax-exempt status. The public has little information about ALEC’s secret working group on elections, but in October 2019 Slate obtained an audio recording, documenting that ALEC was instructing state legislators how to gerrymander districts that benefit themselves and obscure the public’s access and knowledge about their work.xiv According to the Texas Observer, speakers at a 2019 ALEC conference encouraged legislators to throw away notes and avoid saying things in email on redistricting that they do not want the public to see, further undermining transparency in the redistricting process.xv

The Heritage Foundation’s Hans von Spakovsky -- a frequent speaker at ALEC conferences who has been described as a “polarizing figure in voting rights circles” by The Washington Postxvi for his work that has “led to disenfranchisement among poor and minority groups” -- encouraged legislators to use “citizen voting age population” in redistricting to skew the process to help Republicans win elections. This partisan admission is similar to that of Thomas Hofeller, the longtime Republican redistricting operative responsible for drawing many of the GOP-favored gerrymandered maps from the last few decades. Hofeller urged the use of citizen voting age population so redistricting would be “advantageous to Republicans and Non-Hispanic Whites.”xvii Also in 2019, ALEC filed a brief with the U.S. Supreme Court defending the Virginia legislature’s racial gerrymanders, which were ultimately struck down as unconstitutional.xviii And in 2018, ALEC adopted a “model” resolution stating that redistricting powers should remain with partisan politicians and the courts should not be able to provide relief to voters who have been discriminatorily gerrymandered.xix

Your continued financial support of ALEC is an active endorsement of these efforts to create more barriers to the freedom to vote and weaken representation for the American people in government. Intended or not, the money your company is contributing to ALEC helps fund this modern Jim Crow effort. Since its founding, ALEC has had a long history of pushing anti-voter and anti-democratic laws that limit the people’s ability to participate in our democracy. One of ALEC’s first leaders, Paul Weyrich, famously said: “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 quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down."xx In 2012, after facing backlash for advocating for legislation that would restrict voting rights, particularly for people of color, ALEC told its members, donors, and the public it would no longer work on electoral issues and disbanded its “Public Safety and Elections Task Force.”xxi

Now, ALEC has broken that promise. Apparently having forgotten their lesson, ALEC has rejoined the ranks of

hyper-partisan organizations perpetuating the “Big Lie” and is actively working to undermine American

democracy and restrict the people’s right to vote.

We, the undersigned organizations, work on a variety of issues and don’t always agree on every policy, but we all

believe in a strong American democracy, where every eligible American is able to exercise their freedom to vote

in free, fair, and safe elections. We believe that building a democracy that works for everyone is going to take all

of us in both the nonprofit and for-profit sectors.

At a time when ALEC-backed legislation to undermine the right to vote has provoked unprecedented public and

corporate outrage, we urge your company to immediately cease all funding and sever all ties with ALEC. We also

urge your company to publicly oppose any efforts that create more barriers to voting and undermine confidence in

our democratic institutions.

Sincerely,

National organizations:

A. Philip Randolph Institute

Advancement Project National Office

AFL-CIO

African American Ministers In Action

Alliance for Climate Education

Alliance for Democracy

Alliance for Youth Action

Amalgamated Transit Union International

American Family Voices

American Federation of State, County, and Municipal

Employees (AFSCME)

American Federation of Teachers (AFT)

American Friends Service Committee

Andrew Goodman Foundation

Black Voters Matter Fund

Blue Future

Blue Wave Postcard Movement

BOLD ReThink

Build Back Better USA

Center for Biological Diversity

Center for Common Ground

Center for Constitutional Rights

Center for Media and Democracy

Center for Popular Democracy

Change The Chamber

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington

(CREW)

Color Of Change

Common Cause

Common Defense

Communications Workers of America (CWA)

CongressMajority.org

CorpGov.net

DemCast USA

Democracy 21

Democracy Initiative

Democracy Matters

End Citizens United / Let America Vote Action Fund

Equal Citizens

Equal Justice Society

Equality Federation

Fair Fight Action

Feminist Majority Foundation/Ms.

First Affirmative Financial Network

Franciscan Action Network

Greenpeace US

Impact Fund

Institute for Research & Education on Human Rights

Inc.

Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility

Lambda Legal

Lawyers for Good Government (L4GG)

League of United Latin American Citizens

League of Women Voters of the United States.

Lights for Liberty

Missionary Oblates

NARAL Pro-Choice America

National Education Association (NEA)

Network for Responsible Public Policy

New American Leaders Action Fund

No Dem Left Behind PAC

Northwest Coalition for Responsible Investment

Palestine Legal

People For the American Way

People's Action

Progressive Turnout Project

Public Citizen

Publish What You Pay--United States

Rock the Vote Action Fund

School Sisters of Notre Dame Cooperative Investment

Fund

Scrutineers LLC

Secular Coalition for America

Secure Elections Network

Service Employees International Union (SEIU)

Sierra Club

Sisters of the Holy Cross

Small Planet Institute

Solidaire Action Fund

South Asian Americans Leading Together (SAALT)

Southern Poverty Law Center Action Fund

Stand Up America

State Innovation Exchange

State Voices

SumOfUs

The Black Heritage Museum & Cultural Center, Inc.

The Campaign to Keep Guns Off Campus

The Civics Center

The Ethical Capitalism Group

The Workers Circle

Tobaccofree Earth

True North Research

Un-PAC

Union of Concerned Scientists

Unitarian Universalist Association

UnKoch My Campus

ValueEdge Advisors

Vote.org

VoteAmerica

#VOTEPROCHOICE

Women's International League for Peace and Freedom

Zevin Asset Management

20/20 Vision

44 Virtues

9to5

State and local organizations:

Alabama

Greater Birmingham Ministries

Alaska

Alaska AFL-CIO

Alaska Community Action on Toxics

Alaska Public Interest Research Group (AKPIRG)

Save Our State

Stand UP Alaska

The Alaska Center Education Fund

Arizona

AFSCME AZ Affiliates

CASE Action FUND

Progress Arizona

The AZ Ground Game

Arizona AFL-CIO

Arkansas

For AR People

Southern Progress Fund

California

California Common Cause

Courage California

East Valley Indivisibles

Equality California

Harrington investments, Inc.

Indivisible San Francisco (ISF)

Indivisible San Jose

Indivisible South Peninsula

Indivisible Ventura

KyotoUSA

Legal Aid at Work

Northridge Indivisible

Peace & Justice Community of St. Cross Episcopal Church

Positive Women's Network-USA

Venice Resistance.....

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ALEC Exposed

https://www.alecexposed.org › wiki › ALEC_Exposed

Through the corporate-funded American Legislative Exchange Council, global corporations and state politicians vote behind closed doors to try to rewrite state ...

Florida Republican Introduces ALEC Bill to Protect Dark ...

https://readsludge.com › 2022/02/25 › florida-republica...

Feb 25, 2022 — A “dark money” group sent out mailers promoting the campaigns of three “sham” candidates—in one case, diverting enough votes to a candidate with ...

ALEC Held Third Voter Suppression Summit with Dark Money ...

https://www.exposedbycmd.org › 2022/10/14 › alec-he...

Oct 14, 2022 — The American Legislative Exchange Council held its third known voter suppression summit for state lawmakers on July 25 and 26 preceding its ...

Special to PW: ALEC-inspired bill promoting more campaign ...

https://ncpolicywatch.com › 2021/05/11 › special-to-p...

May 11, 2021 — ALEC-inspired bill promoting more campaign finance secrecy should be rejected; North Carolina Voters for Clean Elections.

Dark Money Voter Suppression Group Holds “Academy” for ...

https://www.prwatch.org › news › 2021/08 › dark-mon...

Aug 2, 2021 — ALEC will hold an “exclusive, invitation-only academy” for state lawmakers with the Honest Elections Project on July 26-28 in Salt Lake City ...

ALEC Lied About Its Work on Election Suppression Bills

https://prospect.org › civil-rights › alec-lied-about-its-w...

Sep 3, 2021 — When a broad coalition of more than 300 civil rights and democracy reform groups called for corporations to ditch the American Legislative ...

How the American Legislative Exchange Council Turns ...

https://blog.ucsusa.org › elliott-negin › how-the-americ...

Jun 29, 2022 — State lawmakers introduced nearly 2900 bills based on ALEC templates from 2010 through 2018. More than 600 of them became law.

'Dark money': ALEC wants image makeover - Politico

https://www.politico.com › story › 2015/07 › alec-koch...

Jul 30, 2015 — The American Legislative Exchange Council, composed of conservative state lawmakers and corporations, devoted part of its annual conference last ...

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"con con"

12 22 mail

this year, CMD exposed how the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and right-wing groups like Convention of State Action are spending close to $25 million annually to push their stealth plan to rewrite the U.S. Constitution in order to lock in minority control and cripple the ability of the federal government to protect our rights, regulate big corporations, and deal with climate change.

Their goal? Forcing Congress to convene a constitutional convention that gives GOP leaders supermajority control over any amendments that get sent out to the states for ratification. And CMD released a report this year, “Convention of State Politicians,” documenting how voters would have zero say in the process.

But you don’t have to take my word for it.

CMD obtained audio from an ALEC meeting where former PennsylvaniaSenator Rick Santorum actually said, “We have the opportunity, [through a constitutional convention], to have a supermajority, even though we may not even be in an absolute majority when it comes to the people who agree with us.”

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https://www.alternet.org/2022/11/gop-lobbying/

an badash 11 22

For decades ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council quietly drafted right-wing legislation, pushing it to conservative state lawmakers who only had to change a few words here or there and all of a sudden they become a sponsor of a bill that would further the conservative corporate agenda.

According to a 2012 Bloomberg BusinessWeek investigation (archived), about 200 of ALEC’s model bills became law every year.

While most of the bills don’t garner public attention, many Americans are familiar with the rash of so-called “Stand Your Ground” laws that effectively allow the use of deadly force in the name of self defense by people who would claim they felt threatened by another person. Trayvon Martin’s killer successfully used a “Stand Your Ground” defense to avoid conviction.

ALEC, which is supported by corporations, is now “pushing states to adopt a new law shielding all US businesses from ‘political boycotts,'” according to The Guardian, in response to what some are calling “woke capitalism.”

How?

By drafting model legislation that states would pass which would require any government entity to include a clause in all their contracts banning any company they do business with from supporting political or economic boycotts. Those government entities could include a state government or a local police dept., school district, or perhaps a county clerk’s office.

“According to the text of the proposed law, which is written by Alec’s lawyers so that all a legislature has to do is fill in the name of its state, it is a response to banks, investment funds and corporations refusing to invest in or do business with industries that damage the environment or are aligned with oppressive laws,” The Guardian reports.

One line from the model legislation reads: “The collusion of corporations, and institutions to boycott, divest from, or sanction any industrymayviolate existing antitrust and fiduciary laws and harms consumers, shareholders, and states.” [kermit roosevelt exclusive vs inclisive equality]

The Guardian adds that “Some corporations are increasingly concerned that consumer pressure will cause other companies to boycott them over their funding of rightwing politicians and causes, or social positions.”

===

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https://theintercept.com/**2022/09/**16/fossil-fuel-industry-climate-free-speech/

REPS. JAMIE RASKIN, D-Md., and Katie Porter, D-Calif., probably didn’t plan for their committee hearings to run at the exact same time this week, but the hearings sure were talking to each other.

In her Committee on Natural Resources hearing, Porter highlighted the role PR firms play in blocking climate policy. Rep. Blake Moore, R-Utah, and his selected witness, Amy Cooke, CEO of the conservative John Locke Foundation, expressed concern that preventing companies and their hired PR firms from spreading misinformation about climate change would have a chilling effect on free speech.

Meanwhile, the House Oversight Subcommittee on Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, chaired by Raskin, focused on free speech attacks against environmentalists, digging into the fossil fuel industry’s attempts to curb citizens’ speech rights via strategic litigation and laws that criminalize protest. Taken together, the two are a perfect illustration of the industry’s First Amendment strategy: expand free speech for corporations, curb it for citizens.

raskin’s free speech hearing focused on two key tactics: the increased filing of strategic lawsuits against public participation, or SLAPPs— defamation suits aimed at penalizing citizens or citizen groups for exercising their First Amendment rights — and theproliferation of so-called critical infrastructure bills, which pile on fines and criminal sentences for those caught trespassing or vandalizing near pipelines, power plants, railroads, or other infrastructure. These anti-protest bills were a direct industry backlash to the Standing Rock protests in 2016 and 2017. Starting with a law passed in Oklahoma in 2017, they proliferated with the help of the industry group American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers and the American Legislative Exchange Council, which drafts and disseminates pro-corporate model legislation for adoption by state governments. Seventeen states now have critical infrastructure laws on the books, with several more considering proposals.

####

“SLAPPs and anti-protest bills are really two sides of the same coin,” said Deepa Padmanabha, deputy general counsel for Greenpeace and a witness at Raskin’s hearing. “They’re tactics used by the same corporate actors to quash dissent. They’re pushing legislation to silence us, to criminalize our critiques through anti-protest bills. And they’re also filing SLAPP suits to silence dissent.”

Greenpeace has dealt with both. Greenpeace USA activists were arrested in 2019 under Texas’s felony critical infrastructure law for unfurling banners on a bridge, which temporarily blocked shipping. The goal of the action was to highlight the connection between the oil industry and climate change.

Greenpeace is engaged in active litigation in a couple of SLAPP suits too. In one, Energy Transfer, the company behind the Dakota Access Pipeline, sued the organization for its role in the Standing Rock protests. The suit was initially filed in federal court and invoked the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, orRICO, a law designed to prosecute organized crime. “Energy Transfer was alleging that our advocacy work to uplift Indigenous voices at Standing Rock constituted organized crime,” Padmanabha said.

Because RICO allows for damages to be tripled if a defendant is found guilty, Greenpeace faced a $1 billion fine. Losing that suit would have had a truly chilling effect on free speech. A federal judge threw out the case, but Energy Transfer filed again in North Dakota (minus the RICO charge), a state that doesn’t have an anti-SLAPP law on the books.

:{:{}:

“SLAPPs and anti-protest bills are really two sides of the same coin.”

}:

Anti-SLAPP laws allow defendants a quick way to get SLAPP suits dismissed, minimizing the time and money spent on meritless cases. Currently, 31 states and the District of Columbia have adopted anti-SLAPP statutes, which makes it fairly easy for corporate entities to go venue shopping for a court in a state without such a law. To address that gap, Raskin proposed new legislation this week to create federal anti-SLAPP protection. While some players in the fossil fuel industry may oppose Raskin’s bill, others have actually sought to avail themselves of anti-SLAPP protections. Exxon Mobil, for example, in its final attempt to thwart the fraud case against it in Massachusetts, argued that the suit was a SLAPP.

The oil company’s attorney Justin Anderson maintained that Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey’s fraud complaint against Exxon was not valid because the company’s public statements on climate policy should be considered political opinion (“petitioning activity,” in legal parlance), not misleading advertising — even when Exxon falsely claimed that climate change wasn’t real and overstated the company’s investments in low-carbon technology.

When one judge asked why Exxon would file an anti-SLAPP complaint rather than make a First Amendment argument in court, Anderson made clear that the point was to avoid discovery, when the corporation would be asked to hand over files and make its executives available for depositions. “The anti-SLAPP statute provides a mechanism to have a case that is brought against someone for petitioning activity dismissed at the outset before burdensome discovery is imposedon the party,” he argued.

The “petitioning activity” argument is one that the industry and its allies have trotted out repeatedly, both in court and in congressional hearings like those held this week. It’s a broad interpretation of free speech rights for corporations, the very sort of protection these same companies are opposed to extending to individuals. In his testimony before Raskin’s subcommittee, Daren Bakst, a senior research fellow on environmental policy and regulation for the Heritage Foundation, said, “The chilling effects are states bringing lawsuits against people for their speech.” It’s hard to tell because he said “people,” but he meant oil companies. Which he made clear by immediately referencing “what municipalities are doing, the government is doing against these fossil fuel companies. And I also see that Massachusetts is doing.”

This view of an oil company as a person who is being silenced for simply sharing their views on climate policy is the basic argument oil companies are making in dozens of cases across the country. These cases, brought by both municipalities and states, hinge either on fraud or nuisance claims and effectively ask that fossil fuel companies pay up for delaying action on climate, which increased both the impacts of the climate crisis and the price of adapting to a warming world. In all of them, the corporate defendants make some version of a free speech argument. They maintain that their public speech about global warming differed from their internal knowledge because their public statements were “petitioning speech,” related to their political views and desires and thus, protected. The industry has been building the foundation for such an argument for about as long as it has known about climate change — since the late 1960s.

:{:{}:

“They will try to defend their misinformation efforts as political speech covered by the First Amendment and not subject to false advertising laws.”

}:

The argument arose out of a situation not unlike the one playing out today, with war driving up prices at the pump and oil companies desperate to control public perception.

According to documents from Mobil’s corporate archive at the University of Texas at Austin, the company’s longtime PR whiz Herbert Schmertz and then-CEO, Rawleigh Warner, came up with an idea to help wrestle back control of the narrative. Using Mobil’s PR and advertising budget, they would create “idea advertising” to push the company’s take on key issues of the day and create the sense of Mobil as a citizen with a distinct personality.

They ran weekly :{advertorial:(style="background-color:#ffff66ff"):}:s in the New York Times as well as regular placements in a wide range of other publications, from the Los Angeles Times and the Wall Street Journal to Time and Fortune. Then Schmertz proposed TV and radio too. Why not?

In the early 1970s, Mobil took their TV and radio advertorials to all the big broadcast stations and only one, NBC, agreed to run them. CBS and ABC said they preferred to have their journalists cover energy issues. For Schmertz and Warner, it was a battle they had to win. What if the newspapers, or PBS, started to rethink playing nice with Mobil? In a media blitz, the two blasted CBS and ABC from every angle, in their NYT spot, on radio and TV programs, at events. Warner went to various business clubs to talk about the importance of protecting corporate free speech. Schmertz testified before Congress in 1978, urging First Amendment protection for Mobil’s ads and arguing that there was no difference between Mobil advertorials and New York Times editorials, because after all the Times was a business too.

Mobil helped rally support and funding for the first big Supreme Court case on the matter, First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti, the precursor to Citizens United. The court ruled that corporations could spend whatever money they wanted to influence politics, overruling a Massachusetts statute that said otherwise. “If the restricted view of corporate speech taken by the Massachusetts court were accepted,” Justice Lewis A. Powell wrote, “government would have the power to deprive society of the views of corporations.”

How the Media Launders Fossil Fuel Industry Propaganda Through Branded Content

“I don’t think people really appreciate how big of a deal that was in shifting the rules of speech in the public space,” environmental sociologist Robert Brulle said. “Now, suddenly, corporations could use their budgets — which are enormous, you know, much larger than individuals — to advocate their position in the public space. … It allowed for a systematic distortion of the public space that gives corporations basically a loudspeaker to amplify their voice above everybody else’s.”

The 2010 Citizens United ruling, of course, intensified that dynamic. Whereas Bellotti allowed corporations to publicly campaign for particular ballot initiatives or candidates, Citizens United allowed political speech of any sort without disclosure of who was paying, who was actually speaking. Oil companies have been working to broaden corporate free speech rights even more in recent years, as their arguments in climate litigation and before Congress show.

“They will try to defend their misinformation efforts as political speech covered by the First Amendment and not subject to false advertising laws,” said Brulle, who has co-authored briefs in some of these cases.

Robert Kerr, who’s researched Mobil’s role in the corporate free speech movement for years, said to side with the oil companies’ arguments in these cases, the Supreme Court would have to turn its back on about a century’s worth of legal precedent. “It’s really deeply established even by some of the members of the current Supreme Court that the First Amendment will never protect expression that is fraud,” he said. “The worry now is that with this court there seems to be a majority that wants to say yes to almost any question the corporate interests raise.”

It makes sense then, that the industry and its allies would be working hard to rebrand climate denialism as simply a difference of opinion, to put some distance between greenwashing and fraud, to collectively gasp about the “chilling effect” (a phrase that came up so often in minority witness testimony this week that it’s hard to believe someone somewhere wasn’t disseminating talking points) that tackling misinformation might have on free speech. The fact that those efforts are happening alongside coordinated attempts to criminalize protest is more of the same: corporations drowning out the public.

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https://www.exposedbycmd.org/2022/08/05/here-are-five-of-alecs-most-far-right-members/

no lnx

Here are Five of ALEC’s Most Far-Right Members

By ExposedByCMD Editors | August 5th, 2022

ALEC, Democracy, Extremism, Featured Investigations, News

The Center for Media and Democracy revealed on August 3 that 224 ALEC-affiliated legislators belong to far-right Facebook groups, based on “Breaching the Mainstream,” a report by the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights. Five ALEC lawmakers were profiled in the report and are republished here with permission.

STOPPING THE STEAL, SUPPRESSING VOTERS: PHIL STEPHENSON

(R-Texas House of Representatives, District 85)

ALEC member as of 2019.

After the defeat of Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential election, far-rightists quickly turned to efforts to delegitimize the results and put Trump back in the White House. “Stop the Steal” became the name for the mobilization. Animated by conspiracy theories, scores of groups with variants of the name popped up on Facebook, attracting hundreds of thousands of activists before the groups were removed from the platform.

Like the COVID Denial mobilization, Stop the Steal efforts involved a broad swath of the far-right: from long-time Tea Party leaders and establishment groups like Turning Point USA and Women for America First; to nationalist paramilitaries like the Three Percenters and Oath Keepers; to the street brawlers of the Proud Boys and Patriot Prayer; to anti-Semitic conspiracy theorists like Alex Jones of Infowars; the anti-vaxxer Freedom Angels; Qanon believers; and white nationalists. “Stop the Steal” efforts moved into the streets and helped pave the way for the January 6th Capitol insurrection.

Several legislators in this report became members of Stop the Steal Facebook groups, but none joined as many as Texas State Representative Phil Stephenson.

In November 2020, Stephenson joined at least 17 different “Stop the Steal” groups, leading in membership in that category among the legislators included in this report.

In addition to engagement with Stop the Steal groups, Phil Stephenson described in August 2021, “It was a momentous day in the Texas House as we passed legislation to protect the integrity of our elections. I was proud to support Senate Bill 1 so we can promote voter access, deter fraud, and restore full faith and confidence in our state’s electoral system.”

As the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law observed, “The legislation restricts nearly every method of voting overwhelmingly used by voters of color in 2020: It limits early voting and ballot drop boxes, curbs how absentee ballots can be distributed and who can vote by mail, and bans drive-thru voting. While the provisions of SB 1 will hinder the ability of all Texans to vote, these new restrictions intentionally and disproportionately impact communities of color.” As a result, the Texas State Conference of the NAACP and the U.S. Justice Department filed lawsuits against the voter suppression law.

In February 2020, Stephenson shed light on another aspect of his politics, posting a video on Facebook that declared, “In the Texas House, Phil has argued for and helped advance the Convention of States and the state legislature’s push for Article V, which calls for a Constitutional Convention.” The video ends with, “I’m Phil Stephenson, and I approve this message.”

As early as 2013, Stephenson has expressed his support for a “LIMITED CONSTITUTIONAL CONVENTION WITH SPECIFIC ITEMS TO BE DISCUSSED AND VOTED ON,” but that he would “BE WARY OF AN OPEN CONVENTION WITH SO MANY DEMOCRATS WHO WANT TO DO AWAY WITH OUR CONSTITUTION” [Capitals in original].

FROM THE TEA PARTY TO THE PARAMILITARY: TAMMY NICHOLS

(R-Idaho State House of Representatives District 11, Seat B)

ALEC State Chair for Idaho

Idaho State Representative Tammy Nichols provides a case study of the radicalization path that moves from the Tea Party movement, militias, and the insurrectionary bent of the People’s Rights network’s mobilizations around COVID Denial, to attacks on “critical race theory” and the embrace of School-Centered far-right activism.

In 2014, Tammy Nichols joined the Boise Tea Party (294 members) Facebook group. In 2018, her first year in office, Nichols joined the far-right paramilitary groups, the Patriot Network Summit (2,799 members*) and U.S. Militia Northern Command-America’s Militia (3,275 members*). She also joined the Posse-Influenced groups, Constitutional Grassroots Movement (7,026 members), Rural Land Rights Advocates (RLRA) (2,626 members), and The National Constitutional Coalition of Patriotic Americans 6,326 members). Finally, in 2019, Nichols joined the Islamophobic group Idaho G416 Patriots (722 members).

In 2020, Nichols joined two of Ammon Bundy’s People’s Rights network chapters—the Area 1 People’s Rights Washington (81 members*) and People’s Rights IDAHO Group (1,345 members*). That same year, Nichols joined the COVID Denial groups Idaho BrushFires (formerly All Jobs are Essential) (1,097 members) and Idaho for Medical Freedom (810 members). In 2021 she joined the School-Centered groups, Stop Critical Race Theory (14,721 members), Stop CRT & National Civics Standards in K-12 Schools (1,694 members), and No Left Turn in Education (11,913 members).

Nichols couples her Facebook memberships with on-the-ground activism. Her state legislative page describes her as the Phyllis Schlafly Eagles State Leader and recipient of the 2016 Phyllis Schlafly Eagle Award. Schlafly was a Christian Right leader who grew to national prominence fighting the Equal Rights Amendment. In addition, Nichols’ page says she received the American Conservative Union Foundation Award in 2019 and 2020 and the Club for Growth Defender of Economic Freedom Award in 2020.

Despite garnering the American Conservative Union and Club for Growth awards, Nichols’ real-life activities in Idaho have skewed in the Posse-style and paramilitary direction. For example, in May 2018, Nichols announced in the Constitutional Grassroots Movement group, “We (Idaho Political Prisoners Foundation) are bringing KrisAnne Hall here to Boise, Idaho next month and are looking for ad sponsors. I am rounding up groups, organizations, or individuals who may be interested in doing this.” The event was slated to include “political prisoners” Ammon Bundy and Eric Parker, the latter a member of the paramilitary Three Percenters.

In June 2020, along with 15 other legislators, Nichols took part in a gathering at the State House chamber to oppose Governor Brad Little’s COVID-19-related policies. Promoted by far-rightists and attended by Ammon Bundy, Eric Parker, and several armed supporters, the participating far-right Idaho Freedom Foundation commissioned a “study” claiming that attending legislators could pass legislation in violation of House quorum rules. Rather than doing so, the legislators issued a proclamation accusing Little of Constitutional violations, a far-right refrain throughout the waves of COVID Denial mobilizations. In 2022, Tammy Nichols continued to promote Idaho Freedom Foundation text alerts.

In keeping with COVID Denial, Nichols sponsored bills to prohibit vaccination mandates and employer inquiries about employees and potential employees vaccination status.

Nichols’ jaunts into far-right nationalism led her to rub elbows with Michelle Malkin, the self-declared “mommy” to the “Groyper” mobilization led by white nationalist Nick Fuentes. In a “Legislative Summary” circulated in February 2022, Nichols wrote, “It was also my pleasure to attend an event this evening with Michelle Malkin, put on by [the anti-choice] Idaho Chooses Life. Great talk with great reminders…[S]he talked about one of my favorite documentaries that she is on called ‘Rocky Mountain Heist.’ If you have never seen it, please, please watch it as it is currently happening in Idaho.”

The Citizens United-produced “Rocky Mountain Heist” film is narrated and co-written by Michelle Malkin. The film alleges that the “Gang of Four–a secretive group of leftist millionaires and billionaires… orchestrated one of the most successful campaign-funding schemes ever” and initiated “a never-ending campaign to radically change the culture of a once-reliable Red mountain state.”

COVID DENIAL AND THE INFLUENCE OF THE POSSE COMITATUS: ANTHONY SABATINI

(R-Florida House of Representatives, District 32)

Member of ALEC’s Commerce, Insurance and Economic Development Task Force

Florida State Representative Anthony Sabatini provides an example of the radicalization seen in the overlapping Stop the Steal and COVID Denial mobilizations. As captured in this report, in 2020, Sabatini joined five COVID Denial, and six Stop the Steal groups. Also that year, Sabatini joined the Posse Comitatus-influenced Constitutional Grassroots Movement.

In keeping with his Stop the Steal memberships, Sabatini pushed election conspiracies and a bill for an election audit in Florida (where Donald Trump won) because, he alleged, several counties had double-scanned ballots “or did things that are far, far worse than that.” Almost three weeks after the election, Sabatini tweeted, “I’m extremely thankful Biden lost in 2020;” in December 2020, he tweeted, “Stop the Steal.”

Sabatini’s COVID Denial activism took him into the realm of Posse-Influenced politics. For instance, he joined the group, ReOpen South Florida (3,070 members). Under the name “Chris Paul,” Florida People’s Rights network activist Chris Nelson is a group administrator. Sabatini appeared in an interview on Nelson’s ReOpen America Podcast and was announced as a speaker along with Nelson and People’s Rights figure Rachael Love Cohen at a 2020 Florida COVID Denial rally.

Sabatini has a long history of racial insensitivity. In his younger days, Sabatini dressed in blackface and as a stereotype of a Mexican. Then, when Confederate statues began to be taken down across the South, he declared that the “solemn” Confederate monuments facing removal “can find a home” in Eustis, where he served as a City Commissioner.

In May 2020, Sabatini joined the Constitutional Grassroots Movement (7,029 members), a group whose administrator, the Constitutional Grassroots Movement Facebook page, frequently posts material from KrisAnne Hall. For his part, Sabatini applied nullification and Posse-style approaches to COVID-19, writing in September 2021, “Today I submitted a Bill (bill draft #79925) which will NULLIFY Biden’s forthcoming vaccine mandate. ANY federal employee in Florida imposing the mandate will be arrested and prosecuted under Florida state law.”

As Black Lives Matter demonstrations against police racism and violence were unfolding across the country, Sabatini posted a photo of an AR-15 rifle on Facebook, writing, “Attention potential ‘protesters’ coming near Lake County, FL. This is an AR-15—this will be a very common sight upon illegal entry at any Lake County business—FYI!.”

Sabatini promoted a “Constitutional Carry Rally” featuring himself and Luis Valdes, Florida Director of militia advocate Larry Pratt’s Gun Owners of America. Far-right “constitutionalist” KrisAnne Hall, who refers to Sabatini as her “friend,” engaged in COVID Denial activism with Sabatini, speaking at a June 2020 event with the far-right legislator and writing, “WE WON the Florida mask mandate appeal TODAY! Bravo all who fought!… Congratulations to my friend Anthony Sabatini—Thank you for letting me join you in this fight for #LibertyFirst.”

In November 2021, Sabatini described his and KrisAnne Hall’s joint COVID Denial activism:

“Just spoke to 400+ patriots from around Florida at a rally in Tallahassee in support of a TOTAL BAN on private sector vaccine and mask mandates! Then, constitutional activist KrisAnne Hall, JD and I led the whole crowd through the State Capitol building demanding a meeting with all legislative leaders—calling on them to go on the record in support of a FULL ban.”

Sabatini had attended the far-right National Conservatism conference in Orlando the previous month.

MILITIAS, THE BUNDY’S AND A CONSTITUTIONAL CONVENTION: KELLY TOWNSEND

(R-Arizona State Senate, District 16)

ALEC member as of 2020

Before being elected to the Arizona state Senate, Kelly Townsend was already a seasoned far-right activist, having moved from anti-abortion and Tea Party politics to far-right paramilitary militia groups and efforts to rewrite the U.S. Constitution in the far-right’s image.

In 2009, three years before she won office, Kelly Townsend joined the activist-oriented Walk for Life West Coast—Official Group Page (3,728 members), a San Francisco-based group that organizes an annual anti-choice march on the anniversary of Roe v. Wade. In a recap of its 2022 march, the group makes clear its central aim of overturning this legal cornerstone of abortion rights:

“Energized by the impending U.S. Supreme Court case which may finally overturn the notorious Roe v. Wade decision, you came from as far away as Oregon, Idaho and Nebraska to gather in Civic Center Plaza… Our speakers were fantastic, as always. ‘I believe Roe v. Wade has been outlawed, because God remembers you,’ thundered the Rev. Clenard H. Childress, Jr. said, predicting the justices have already decided against Roe v. Wade in their private consultations.”

That same year, Townsend co-founded and served as President of the Greater Phoenix Tea Party.

In 2014, Townsend’s steps toward radicalization were visible when she traveled to Nevada to join other public officials in a rally supporting racist rancher Cliven Bundy, an effort backed by Richard Mack’s far-right Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association (CSPOA). According to CSPOA, Townsend and other legislators planned to “attend the Press Conference Monday afternoon with the CSPOA and Oath Keepers along with the Bundys and other sheriffs and public officials from across the country.”

After taking office, between 2015 and 2017, Townsend joined the National Tea Party #DraintheSwamp (3,927 members*), the Arizona Citizens Defense League, Group Chat (3,106 members), and TEA Party United – Let’s Organize! (13, 275 members).

While proclaiming dedication to “fiscal and constitutional conservatism in government and to return our nation to its founding principles,” TEA Party United – Let’s Organize! nonetheless supported the broad range of issues associated with the Tea Party movement generally, including COVID Denial, conspiracy theories about “fake news” and the 2020 election, anti-Muslim bigotry, anti-immigrant politics, and the jumble of far-right hysteria viewed as “profound” by administrator Thomas Ash:

“I caught Dr. Stanley’s sermon this past Sunday and no more profound words and relevant words have I heard in recent memory other than John 3:16. He talked about the communists that have taken over the Democrat party and are destroying the nation from within. Specifically he was referring to the ‘Mob,’ ‘BLM,’ ‘ANTIFA,’ the ‘Cancel Culture,’ the ‘Woke,’ and the ‘1619 Project,’ and ‘Critical Race Theory’ crowd who seek to divide us, destroy our history, disrespect our flag, hate our country, and weaponize government institutions against those who don’t fit in [sic] world.”

Charles Stanley, referenced here, is an anti-gay bigot who heads In Touch Ministries. Stanley, the former head of the Southern Baptist Convention, once said of homosexuality, “I believe that AIDS is God indicating his displeasure and his attitude toward that form of lifestyle, which we in this country are about to accept.”

The Arizona Citizens Defense League Inc. is a gun-rights group that actively promotes the far-right Gun Owners of America, long led by now-Executive Director Emeritus and militia advocate Larry Pratt.

In 2020, Townsend joined the Arizona State Militia Community (607 members*). That same year, and into 2021, Townsend joined such COVID Denial groups as Arizonans for Liberty (1,750 members), the Anti-Vaxxer group Homeschoolers for Medical Freedom (1,452 members), and the Maricopa County chapter of the national School-Centered group Moms for Liberty (1,144 members).[89]

Townsend’s own COVID Denial activism included tweeting an image comparing vaccinations to the German Nazis. Showing the nuances in bigotry on the far right, and despite such a display of antisemitism, Townsend also criticized Arizona State Senator Wendy Rogers for her close relationship with white nationalist Nick Fuentes, writing,

“Hanging out with white supremacists, endorsing them, and declaring them the finest of patriots is all something Wendy Rogers has a constitutional right to do. But good and decent people are also free to find it repulsive and un-American.”

As a legislator, Kelly Townsend led an effort for a resolution supporting an Article V Constitutional Convention, working with the far-right Convention of States to do so. Townsend also introduced a bill to give Arizona’s 11 electoral college votes to Donald Trump on the claim that the 2020 election “was marred by irregularities so significant as to render it highly doubtful whether the certified results accurately represent the will of the voters.”

THE FAR-RIGHT LEGISLATOR: DANIEL KNODL

(R-Wisconsin State Assembly, District 24)

Former alternate for ALEC’s Health and Human Services Task Force and Public Safety and Elections Task Force

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How the right-wing American Legislative Exchange Council turns disinformation into law - Alternet.org

state lawmakers introduced nearly 2,900 bills based on ALEC templates from 2010 through 2018. More than 600 of them became law.

In June 2021, Texas Governor Greg Abbott signed into law a bill banning the state from contracting with or investing in businesses that divest from coal, oil or natural gas companies. For Texas Railroad Commissioner Wayne Christian—one of the state’s top energy regulators—the message was clear: “Boycott Texas, and we’ll boycott you.”

This article was produced by Earth | Food | Life, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

Since the beginning of this year, lawmakers in Indiana, Oklahoma and West Virginia have introduced bills that read a lot like the Texas anti-divestment law, and legislators in a dozen other states have also expressed support for the legislation’s objective.

Mere coincidence? Not at all. The template for the bill, titled the Energy Discrimination Elimination Act, was supplied by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a lobby group backed by corporations and right-wing foundations that provides state lawmakers with ready-made, fill-in-the-blank sample legislation drafted by, or on behalf of, ALEC’s private sector members, including tobacco, fossil fuel and electric utility companies.

The bills in Indiana, Texas and West Virginia are near-verbatim copies of ALEC’s draft legislation, while the Oklahoma bill is a boiled-down version. And in each case, besides Oklahoma, at least one of the bill sponsors is an ALEC member. In Texas, five of the six primary authors of the bill and four of the five sponsors are ALEC members. Wayne Christian, the “Don’t mess with Texas” guy, is a member, too.

The Energy Discrimination Elimination Act is just one of the thousands of pieces of legislation ALEC has disseminated nationwide since its formation in 1973. According to a two-year investigation of “copycat” bills published in 2019 by USA Today, the Arizona Republic and the Center for Public Integrity, state lawmakers introduced nearly 2,900 bills based on ALEC templates from 2010 through 2018. More than 600 of them became law.

What explains ALEC’s track record? A big piece of the answer lies in the way the group spreads disinformation and hides its activities from the general public.

Peddling Disinformation

ALEC’s disinformation starts with how the group describes itself.

Originally called the Conservative Caucus of State Legislators, ALEC falsely claims it is a “nonpartisan” organization that enables private sector members to collaborate with legislators on policies and programs promoting what it calls “Jeffersonian principles of free markets, limited government, federalism, and individual liberty”—a classic libertarian mantra.

Nonpartisan? Hardly. Virtually all of the roughly 2,000 state lawmakers, officials and staffers who pay a token fee of $200 for a two-year ALEC membership are Republicans.

Likewise, despite ALEC’s positive gloss, the principles it espouses would establish a corporatocracy. By “free markets,” ALEC means giving free rein to corporations by rolling back public health, environmental, consumer and voting protections; by “limited government,” it means radically downsizing the federal government; and by “federalism,” it means transferring authority from the federal government to governors and state legislatures, which corporations can more easily dominate.

ALEC’s definition of Jeffersonian principles also ignores the fact that Thomas Jefferson had some harsh words to say about undue corporate influence. In a letter to former U.S. Senator George Logan of Pennsylvania, he wrote that we must “crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength, and bid defiance to the laws of their country.” That sentiment pretty much flies in the face of one of ALEC’s main reasons for being: representing the narrow interests of its corporate benefactors.

Those benefactors are the real power behind ALEC—a network of nearly 300 companies, trade groups, corporate law firms and private libertarian foundations that pay annual dues of $12,000 to $25,000, plus as much as $40,000 to sponsor an ALEC conference session. Their tax-deductible membership fees grant them direct access to ALEC lawmakers and the opportunity to draft sample bills. Many of these corporations also ply the lawmakers with generous campaign contributions to encourage them to introduce and pass ALEC legislation.

ALEC’s current corporate members include Altria Group (formerly Phillip Morris), American Electric Power, Anheuser-Busch, Chevron, Duke Energy, Eli Lilly, Farmers Insurance, FedEx, Koch Industries, Marathon Oil, Pfizer and UPS. Among its biggest foundation donors are the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, the Adolph Coors Foundation, the Koch family foundations, the Searle Freedom Trust and the Thomas W. Smith Foundation, which together donated $9.25 million to ALEC between 2014 and 2019, according to the Center for Media and Democracy, a watchdog group that hosts the ALEC Exposed website. That $9.25 million, the center found, amounted to 60 percent of the known donations to ALEC over that time period.

Step One of ALEC’s Tactics: Orwellian Framing

When ALEC promotes new legislation, it regularly employs the kind of “up is down” framing immortalized by George Orwell in his dystopian classic “1984.” As detailed in the investigation by the three news organizations, ALEC routinely gives its bills deceptive titles and descriptions that hide their true objective, exploiting the fact that lawmakers—and even bill sponsors—often do not bother to read the text of the legislation itself.

A good example is the Asbestos Claims Transparency Act, which lawmakers introduced in at least 17 states between 2012 and 2018 and was passed into law by at least 11 states. Despite its title, the bill does not require companies to disclose information about products containing asbestos or inform those who had been exposed to the cancer-causing mineral about how to get help and seek compensation.

Even when lawmakers do take the time to read bills based on ALEC templates, ALEC uses draft language that is often purposely “unremarkable or technical” to obscure their real-world impact, the investigation by USA Today, the Arizona Republic and the Center for Public Integrity found. For example, “[b]ans on raising the local minimum wage were dubbed ‘uniform minimum wage’ laws. Changes to civil court rules to shield companies from lawsuits were described as ‘congruity’ or reforms to make laws consistent. [And] [r]epealing business regulations was disguised under the term ‘rescission.’”

Step Two: Send in the Corporate Deceivers

Next, to indoctrinate—or just mislead—state lawmakers, ALEC provides them access to a multitude of purportedly independent, “neutral” experts who are, in fact, shilling for special interests.

For example, according to the three news organizations’ investigation, Colorado state Senator Jerry Sonnenberg, who introduced the aforementioned Asbestos Claims Transparency Act in 2017, relied on outside experts to explain the bill to his statehouse colleagues. One of the alleged experts, an attorney at a corporate law firm was—unbeknownst to Sonnenberg—the co-chair of ALEC’s Civil Justice Task Force. He also was a paid consultant for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Institute for Legal Reform, which lobbies for so-called “tort reform” to shield corporations that harm people and the environment from lawsuits. Colorado legislators ultimately rejected the bill, but according to the three news organizations, it was just one of more than 80 bills introduced from 2010 through 2018 specifically designed to “limit the public’s ability to sue corporations, including limiting class-action lawsuits, a plaintiff’s ability to offer expert testimony, and cap punitive damages for corporate wrongdoing.”

The ALEC-drafted Energy Discrimination Elimination Act Texas passed last year is yet another example of the council deceiving state lawmakers. The bill targets the environmental, social and governance (ESG) standards that banks, investment firms and pension funds are increasingly applying to make it harder for fossil fuel companies to obtain insurance, financing and other support if they don’t meet ESG criteria.

It is no surprise that such a law would appeal to legislators in Oklahoma, Texas and other states where the fossil fuel industry holds sway, but why would ALEC lawmakers in other states support it? Perhaps because ALEC has been supplying them with a steady stream of climate disinformation.

There has been a scientific consensus for years that human activity—mainly burning fossil fuels—is the primary cause of climate change. There is no debate. Yet, over the last two decades, ALEC conferences have featured fossil fuel industry-funded “experts” who have falsely claimed that the benefits of carbon emissions far outweigh the costs, insisted that carbon dioxide is not the primary cause of global warming, and likened climate science advocates to Nazis. ALEC doesn’t go that far in its official statements, but it continues to falsely assert that the jury is still out on the role human activity plays in global warming.

At the same time, ALEC—which relentlessly denigrates clean energy solutions—has been flooding state lawmakers with sample legislation designed to weaken or repeal state renewable energy and efficiency standards, slash incentives for installing rooftop solar panels, eliminate tax breaks for purchasing electric vehicles, oppose federal efforts to limit power plant carbon pollution, and criminalize protests against pipeline projects.

Equally troubling, ALEC’s climate science disinformation efforts have had a discernible “trickle up” impact on federal policy. More than 60 percent of the 77 “alumni” ALEC lists on its website who are in the U.S. Congress are climate science deniers: nine of the 13 senators, including James Inhofe (R-OK), Marco Rubio (R-FL) and Thom Tillis (R-NC), and 39 of the 64 House members, including Andy Biggs (R-AZ), James Comer (R-KY) and Steve Scalise (R-LA).

Step Three: Exploit Understaffed Legislators

Disinformation thrives when legislators are distracted or not paying close attention, and ALEC takes advantage of the fact that state lawmakers have limited time, salaries and resources.

“States are prime targets for corporations because it’s easier to get things out of state legislatures than Congress,” explained political scientist Darrell West, the Brookings Institution’s director of governance studies, during a conversation I had with him a few years ago. “The biggest problem is state legislators are understaffed.”

Stella Rouse, director of the Center for Democracy and Civic Engagement at the University of Maryland, seconded that assessment, noting that the job of researching and drafting bills can be challenging and time-consuming. “The legislative staff issue is huge,” she told me. “They are vital. Legislators want to introduce bills, but when they don’t have a staff—or it is very limited—ALEC provides them with a shortcut by providing a ready-made bill. ALEC provides the expertise that legislatures lack.”

The fact that most state legislatures are part-time and consequently don’t pay lawmakers full-time salaries also strengthens the hand of groups such as ALEC, added West. “Many legislators have to have jobs on the side, so they don’t have a lot of time to put into legislating. That makes them dependent on outside sources.”

Alex Hertel-Fernandez, an assistant professor at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs, explains that ALEC’s success hinges on more than supplying sample legislation. The author of “State Capture: How Conservative Activists, Big Businesses, and Wealthy Donors Reshaped the American States—and the Nation,” Hertel-Fernandez told the Washington Post in a 2019 interview that “ALEC also provides research help for bill development, political strategy and talking points, and even the witnesses the legislators can call to testify on behalf of a bill. Beyond these immediate services, ALEC fosters a network through its regular convenings that establishes social bonds between its legislative and its staff and other corporate and advocacy members.” (ALEC’s 49th annual meeting will take place in Atlanta at the end of July.)

According to the National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL), a nonpartisan, professional development organization, only four states—California, Michigan, New York and Pennsylvania—have what could be considered a full-time legislature. Another six—Alaska, Hawaii, Illinois, Massachusetts, Ohio and Wisconsin—have nearly full-time legislatures. Lawmakers in another 26 states devote about three-quarters of a full-time job to legislative duties, NCSL found, while lawmakers in the remaining 14 states work only about half-time and are lucky if they have even one staff member.

Step Four: Undermine Democracy

Besides plugging bills to limit consumer rights and thwart efforts to address the climate crisis, ALEC also has been playing a behind-the-scenes role in the voter suppression movement, another front that serves its funders’ goal to impede voters who might support candidates and policies that challenge corporate dominance. To do that, ALEC amplifies the false narrative of widespread voter fraud and seeks to limit federal authority over election rules.

The organization’s anti-democratic efforts began at least a decade ago when it promoted a discriminatory voter ID law — as well as the infamous self-defense law used to excuse the murder of Trayvon Martin in Florida in 2012. Racial justice protests against “stand your ground” self-defense laws, which came under scrutiny after Martin’s death, prompted at least eight of ALEC’s corporate members, including Coca-Cola, Kraft Foods, McDonald’s, PepsiCo and Walmart, to quit. In response to the backlash, ALEC disbanded its public safety and elections committee.

The organization, however, never completely abandoned its voter suppression agenda. In 2017, it disseminated a sample bill that called for repealing the 17th amendment, which Congress passed in 1912 to allow voters—instead of state legislatures—to elect U.S. senators.

That constitutional amendment bill didn’t go anywhere—likely because it went too far—but in 2018, ALEC drafted a sample resolution to limit judicial power over redistricting, making it easier for ALEC-dominated legislatures to gerrymander district electoral maps.

More recently, ALEC members have been quietly involved in “block the vote” efforts. More than a year before the 2020 election, ALEC set up a secret working group to address redistricting, ballot measures and election law, and by the spring of 2021, more than 100 ALEC lawmakers in the battleground states of Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Texas were sponsoring or cosponsoring bills that would make it harder for college students, people with disabilities, and Black and Brown citizens to vote. According to internal documents obtained by the watchdog group Documented, ALEC is also working closely with Heritage Action for America, the political arm of the libertarian Heritage Foundation, on a $24-million campaign to lobby lawmakers in eight states—Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Michigan, Nevada, Texas and Wisconsin—to pass tighter voting restrictions.

Likely fearing the possibility of alienating its corporate members again, ALEC CEO Lisa Nelson has repeatedly denied that her organization is involved in voting issues, and the group has not posted any sample voting restriction bills on its website, according to the Center for Media and Democracy. To avoid public scrutiny, ALEC has outsourced its voter suppression work to a dark money voter suppression group disingenuously called the Honest Elections Project. Last July, ALEC hosted a two-day “exclusive, invitation-only academy” in Utah for state lawmakers with the Honest Elections Project just before its annual meeting, according to the Center for Media and Democracy. The center reported that the event was at least the second time ALEC partnered with the voter suppression group to “educate” ALEC members.

ALEC veterans on Capitol Hill are also apparently committed to undermining democracy. More than half of the 77 alumni listed on ALEC’s website currently serving in Congress (40 in the House and one in the Senate) were among the 147 Republicans in Congress who voted to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election based on lies Donald Trump and his followers spread about widespread voter fraud.

Little Public Oversight

ALEC’s success depends not only on the fact that overworked legislators can be easily manipulated, but also on the fact that the general public pays little attention to what goes on at statehouses. A 2018 survey by researchers at Johns Hopkins University found that only 19 percent of the respondents could name their state legislators and a third did not even know the name of their governor. Nearly half did not know whether their state had a one or two-house legislature.

“Most people say they like their state leaders, and a large majority even remembers learning about state government in school,” Johns Hopkins University political scientist Jennifer Bachner, one of the researchers and director of the school’s Government Analytics program, said in a press release. “Despite this, most people are not aware of who exactly represents them and the significant decisions made by their state government.”

Certainly, one major reason for pervasive public ignorance about state government is the rapid decline of local newspapers, which historically devoted substantially more resources to covering politics than broadcast media. From 2005 through 2020, roughly a quarter of all local print newspapers across the country—about 2,200—closed, the Washington Post reported last November. And “in many places where papers still exist,” the Post pointed out, “a lack of resources prevents them from reporting thoroughly on issues vital to the community—issues [such as] public safety, education and local politics.”

The Post also reported that the number of newspaper journalists dropped by more than half between 2008 and 2020, which has had a significant impact on statehouse coverage. An April Pew Research Center study quantified that loss. It found that the number of newspaper reporters covering statehouses full-time has dropped 34 percent since 2014, from 374 to just 245 this year. All told, Pew found that there are now only 850 full-time statehouse reporters from all media.

Overall, however, the number of reporters covering statehouses increased 11 percent since 2014, Pew found, due to a jump in part-time reporters and the establishment of new, nonprofit news organizations “after years of staff cutbacks in the newspaper industry.” Not all of those nonprofit news outlets, however, are necessarily trustworthy.

One such nonprofit, The Center Square, offers conservative spin masquerading as news, according to the Center for Media and Democracy. The operation, a project of the Franklin News Foundation, offers its stories gratis to newspapers that cannot afford to cover statehouses themselves. Like ALEC, it is supported by the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, which donated $500,000 between 2019 and 2020, and the Charles Koch Foundation, which chipped in $212,000 between 2016 and 2018.

To make matters worse for bona fide reporters, Republican leaders in GOP-controlled statehouses in Iowa, Kansas and Utah recently passed rules limiting when journalists can report from the floors of their legislative chambers, making it even more difficult for them to ask questions and follow policy deliberations. No surprise, ALEC members are well-represented in each of these states’ senate Republican leadership: two out of eight in Iowa, four out of five in Kansas, and six out of 10 in Utah.

Attention and Activism Are Key to Fighting Back

Given ALEC’s stealthy influence on statehouses, especially the 62 state legislative chambers controlled by Republicans, it is imperative that concerned citizens engage with their legislators and closely monitor ALEC’s activities in their state. As campaigns by civil rights, labor and environmental organizations have demonstrated, it is possible to pressure ALEC’s corporate sponsors to leave the organization, making it harder for ALEC to fund its disinformation campaigns.

Protests organized by Color of Change and other racial justice groups against ALEC’s voter ID and “stand your ground” laws resulted in several high-profile corporate members leaving ALEC. Since then, a brighter spotlight on ALEC’s controversial positions has encouraged a veritable Who’s Who of U.S. businesses to desert the organization, including Amazon, AT&T, Bank of America, Dow Chemical, Facebook, General Electric, General Motors, Google, IBM, Microsoft, Procter & Gamble, Verizon and Visa.

ALEC’s scientifically indefensible stance on climate change also has prompted some of its corporate members to defect—even in the energy sector—especially after news organizations and advocacy groups such as Greenpeace and the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) drew attention to ALEC’s flagrant lies. Oil and gas giants BP America, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil, Occidental Petroleum and Shell, as well as electric utilities Entergy, Pacific Gas and Electric, and Xcel Energy, have all since severed ties with the organization.

Public interest groups are also turning up the heat on ALEC over its relatively recent voter suppression efforts. In June 2021, a diverse coalition of more than 300 organizations sent a letter to 40 ALEC corporate and trade association members, including Blue Cross Blue Shield, Coca-Cola, GlaxoSmithKline and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, urging them to quit ALEC “based on its active efforts to restrict the American people’s freedom to vote and spread lies about the integrity of our elections to undermine American democracy.”

As Louis Brandeis famously wrote in 1913, three years before he was appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court, “Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants.” In other words, you have to force disinformation out of the shadows to vanquish it.

Thanks to efforts to bring ALEC’s disinformation to light, as well as pressure from shareholders, unions and public interest organizations, more than 100 corporate and nearly 20 trade association and foundation members have canceled their memberships since 2012, and ALEC’s annual revenue dropped from a high of $10.35 million in 2017 to $7.97 million✎ EditSign in 2020. When it comes to fighting ALEC’s corporate-friendly, anti-democratic legislative agenda, close attention and continued activism are key to exposing the organization’s true nature and thwarting its ultimate goal of decimating public health, environmental and workplace safeguards to pad the profits of its corporate supporters.

Author’s Note: The organizations that closely monitor ALEC include the Center for Constitutional Rights, Center for Media and Democracy (host of ALEC Exposed), Common Cause, Documented, Stand Up to ALEC and True North Research. For more on the Union of Concerned Scientists’ (UCS) efforts to counter disinformation, see “What You Can Do About Disinformation.” Lindsey Berger, campaign manager for the UCS Center for Science and Democracy, and Lisa Graves, founder and executive director of True North Research, provided research for this article.

Author Bio: Elliott Negin is a senior writer at the Union of Concerned Scientists.

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omg

https://www.prwatch.org/news**/2021/08**/13747/alec%E2%80%99s-annual-meeting-queues-fights-over-federal-powers-fossil-fuels-big-tech

the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) is holding its first post-Trump in-person meeting this week in Salt Lake City, Utah at the five-star Grand America Hotel.

While Trump is no longer in office, ALEC members still wearing their MAGA hats can participate in Trump-themed trainings such as, "Achieving and Using Political Power: How You Implement an America First Agenda," and "Writing the History of the Future: Messaging Strategies to Reclaim States' Power & American Exceptionalism."

The Annual Meeting kicked off on Monday with an "exclusive, invitation-only academy" for state lawmakers with the dark money voter suppression group the Honest Elections Project, where ALEC politicians were "to discuss the implementation of new election legislation" with three secretaries of state, among other "fun and educational" events, the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) reported.

The Annual Meeting will provide a platform for a number of high-profile Trump loyalists. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (R), former Secretary of Energy Rick Perry (R), U.S. Senator Mike Lee (R), Fox News contributor Jason Chaffetz, and ALEC's favorite economists Stephen Moore and Art Laffer are all scheduled to speak.

Rewriting our nation's founding document, protecting the interests of fossil fuels, fighting President Biden, regulating Big Tech, weakening unions, and undermining public education are all on the agenda.

Special Program to Work on Radical Rewrite of U.S. Constitution

ALEC is extending its conference well into the evening on Friday this year to hold an "interactive academy" on rewriting the U.S. Constitution. Attendees will "learn how an Article V amendments convention will actually play out," and "cast their ballots to decide which ideas to pursue," an invite obtained by CMD details.

One of the goals of the tutorial appears to be to convince lawmakers that a runaway convention can be prevented, despite expert opinions that this is impossible.

"Once you have the convention, it is subject to nobody's control," Georgetown University Law Professor David Super told the AP. "It makes its own agenda. It makes its own voting rules that decides how long it lasts and how far it goes."

At the 2020 Annual Meeting, former Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker (R) detailed a legal strategy to force a convention to rewrite the nation's founding document even though at the time only 28 of 34 states needed had resolutions calling for one pending.

Former State Rep. Ken Ivory (R-UT) will moderate the event, whileU.S. Rep. Yvette Herrell,Prof. Robert Natelson, David Biddulph, former U.S. Comptroller General David Walker, and Dr. Barry Poulson will present.

ALEC is already pushing constitutional convention calls for a balanced budget amendment and sweeping new limits on federal powers, but meeting attendees will also have the opportunity to consider a newly proposed convention call for a package of tax and fiscal reforms, including "abolishing the existing Internal Revenue Code," called the Application Under Article V of the U.S. Constitution to Propose an Amendment to Require Fiscal Limitations and Accountability for the Legislative and Executive Branches of the National Government.

The model application also seeks to combine the states that pass it with other balanced budget amendment convention calls in an attempt to reach the 34 states needed to convene a constitutional convention.

Protecting Fossil Fuel Interests and Other Climate Harming Measures

ALEC politicians will once again consider model bills to protect fossil fuel interests and polluters.

Meeting attendees will debate a number of policies framed around ending "energy discrimination."The radical Energy Discrimination Elimination Act would punish financial institutions and other companies that cease to do business with fossil fuel companies by barring the state from investing in them and denying them state business. The policy also includes an anti-boycott measure which prohibits government contractors from boycotting energy companies, even asking for "written verification" from companies stating that they "will not boycott energy companies during the term of the contract."

This model, as well as the Affordable, Abundant, Reliable Electricity Act, which seeks to protect all energy producers in the name of maintaining a reliable electrical grid, are being lobbied for by Randy Eminger, executive director of the Energy Policy Network, an email obtained by CMD details.

An advocate for "clean coal," Eminger describes his mission at Energy Policy Network as, "to support the continued use of coal-fueled power," in the email, and notes that "four other comrades from the industry" will be at the ALEC conference as well.

In keeping with ALEC's climate-denial history and pay-to-play work for fossil fuel giants, ALEC lawmakers will also vote on resolutions to oppose any government action to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, and oppose any restrictions on the use of fossil fuels to produce electricity.

Indeed, ALEC is even proposing a model bill, the Safeguarding Greenhouse Gas Regulatory Authority Act, to bar any state agency from regulating greenhouse gas emissions or entering into any regional compact without "specific legislative authorization.”

The Resolution Urging States to Establish**Electric Vehicle** Charging Stations as a Competitive Market Free From Utility Commission Regulation urges state utility commissions to forbid "regulated utilities from using electric customer funds to build its own fleet of electric charging stations," thereby removing crucial funds to expand the infrastructure a larger fleet of electric cars will need in the future. This will have the intended consequence of forcing people to continue driving gas-guzzling vehicles for longer than necessary.

ALEC is also introducing another preemption model bill around plastics, the Act to Establish Statewide Uniformity for Essential Plastic Regulations. Spun as a policy to ensure "essential" plastic products are available, the proposed bill would bar municipalities from banning or taxing plastic food wrappers and plastic water bottles. The measure follows a 2015 American City County Exchange (an ALEC offshoot) resolution that calls on local government not to regulate many single-use products,including, "reusable bags, disposable bags, boxes, cups, and bottles that are made of cloth, paper, plastic, extruded polystyrene, or similar materials."

Regulating Big Tech?

Despite claiming to be for free markets, and in a move to satisfy the MAGA crowd at ALEC, a resolution and a number of discussions will take place at the meeting on regulating Big Tech.

The Resolution in Support of State Governments Upholding Free Speech on the Internet follows along the same line of Trump's suit against Facebook, Twitter, and Google over their supposed censoring and violation of his First Amendment rights. The resolution states, "American Legislative Exchange Council members support state legislatures protecting free speech on the Internet and implementing targeted, effective measures to prevent any public or private entity from censoring, blocking, or restricting free speech on the Internet or social media platforms for any reason other than sexual obscenity or excessive violence."

Workshops titled, "Tech Talk: Content Moderation on Social Media Platforms," and "Taxing Tech: Will State Regulation Harm Consumers and Raise Prices?" are scheduled, as well as larger discussions titled, "Should Big Tech Be Regulated?" and "Free Markets or Government Regulation of Big Tech?"

Prohibiting Public Sector Union Collective Bargaining

ALEC has fought long and hard to decimate unions, so it no surprise that it is asking members to consider the Fair and Accountable Public Sector Authority Act. In what can only be understood as a massive attack on working people and the wages, benefits, and workplace conditions obtained through collective bargaining, ALEC's model bill prohibits public employers from recognizing unions and from collective bargaining with unions.

The model bill goes further than ALEC's Comprehensive :{Public Employee Freedom :(style="background-color:#ffff66ff"):}:Act, which would prohibit public employers from requiring workers in a bargaining unit to join the union or pay dues, and allow individual workers to bargain independently with their employer.

Taking the Culture War to Public Schools

Yesterday, CMD reported on ALEC's role in the promoting state legislation designed to restrict what can be taught about history and race in the public schools.

At the meeting this week, ALEC politicians will debate the American Civics and History Act. In the name of promoting civics, the bill would force public schools to make all social science teaching materials available online; require "state or local Board[s] of Education to approve instructional materials prior to first use"; require public school students to take courses on U.S. history, civics, and state government; and make high school students take a civics test similar to the one used for new citizens.

The model also states that "No public school shall direct or otherwise compel a teacher or student to personally affirm, adopt, or adhere to any belief relating to a current event or currently controversial issue," and "controversial issue" is vaguely defined to encompass just about anything.

Meeting attendees will also tackle topics including "Free Speech in Higher Education," "Parental Rights and Curriculum Transparency," and "Alternative Teacher Certification."

China and Taiwan

Following ALEC's presentation of its International Pioneer Award to Taiwan's President Tsai Ing-wen at the 2020 States & Nation Policy Summit in December, it is again wading into the politics around China and Taiwan.

ALEC members will debate the Resolution to Prioritize Strengthening the U.S.-Taiwan Partnership to Enhance Global Supply Chain Security and Resilience with a goal of enhancing "global supply chain security for both sovereign democracies," and hear from Taiwanese Ambassador H.E. Bi-khim Hsiao.

Discussions regarding Taiwan's neighbor, China, strike a different tone. Attendees will participate in discussions titled, "US-China Relations: BFF (Friends) or BFF (Foes)," "The Future of China's Rise and What It Means to American Democracy," or "Chinese Influence Operations at the Sub-National Level: Spotting and Stopping Malign Influence in Your Backyard." In addition, there is a workshop on "Will China Overtake the US Economically?"

Fighting the Biden Agenda

ALEC is putting forth a number of proposed measures aimed at blocking the President's agenda and queuing up a 10thAmendment legal battle between federal and state government powers.

The radical Executive Order Review Process Act would establish a state mechanism to review Presidential executive orders to determine if they are unconstitutional. If a state attorney general decides one is, all state agencies and local governments would be barred from implementing or enforcing the executive order if it relates to "a pandemic or other public health emergency; the regulation of natural resources; the regulation of the agriculture industry; the regulation of land use; or the regulation of the financial sector through the imposition of environmental, social, or governance standards."

The bill appears to be a product of ALEC's new Functional Federalism Working Group. The working group's leader, former Utah state Rep. Ken Ivory, in a late February meeting "floated three potential ways for state lawmakers to present a united front against the Biden agenda: nullification, or passing state legislation to invalidate federal actions that states believe are unconstitutional; the initiation of a constitutional convention that would pass amendments giving states more power; and the passage of non-binding resolutions reaffirming the U.S. Constitution’s Tenth Amendment, which declares that powers not explicitly granted to the federal government belong to the states, in state legislatures," Grist reported

ALEC is also targeting Biden's aid to the states as part of the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA), which made available $350 billion in state and local recovery funds. ALEC's Statement of Principles on ARPA Aid to State Governments and Resolution Urging Congress to Let States Cut Taxes both recommend how the money should be spent.

Dinner with Christian Right Activists

ALEC usually provides a venue at its meeting for allies to reach its legislative members, and this meeting is no different.

On Thursday, the Christian Right Family Research Councilis holding a "Values Action Dinner" at the hotel to promote anti-trans legislation in the states "to save adolescents from experimentation."

The legislation is likely based on Arkansas's SAVE Adolescents from Experimentation Act (SAFE Act), which was enacted in April after a veto override and bans gender-affirming medical treatments and hormone therapies for transgender youth. The bill's primary sponsor, Rep. Robin Lundstrom, will be a featured speaker at the dinner. Following a suit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union, the SAFE Act was temporarily blocked by a federal judge last week.

Other Christian Right groups ALEC has provided space for at its meetings in the past include: Alliance Defending Freedom, National Association of Christian Lawmakers, and the National Pro-Life Women's Caucus, a project of Susan B. Anthony List.

Other new model policies to be introduced at the annual meeting include:

Statement of Principles on Direct-To-Consumer Shipping of Spirits

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no lnx

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/08/09/the-big-money-behind-the-big-lie

The New Yorker

A Reporter at Large

August 9, 2021 Issue

The Big Money Behind the Big Lie

Donald Trump’s attacks on democracy are being promoted by rich and powerful conservative groups that are determined to win at all costs.

By Jane Mayer

August 2, 2021

It was tempting to dismiss the show unfolding inside the Dream City Church in Phoenix, Arizona, as an unintended comedy. One night in June, a few hundred people gathered for the première of “The Deep Rig,” a film financed by the multimillionaire founder of Overstock.com, Patrick Byrne, who is a vocal supporter of former President Donald Trump. Styled as a documentary, the movie asserts that the 2020 Presidential election was stolen by supporters of Joe Biden, including by Antifa members who chatted about their sinister plot on a conference call. The evening’s program featured live appearances by Byrne and a local QAnon conspiracist, BabyQ, who claimed to be receiving messages from his future self. They were joined by the film’s director, who had previously made an exposé contending that the real perpetrators of 9/11 were space aliens.

But the event, for all its absurdities, had a dark surprise: “The Deep Rig” repeatedly quotes Doug Logan, the C.E.O. of Cyber Ninjas, a Florida-based company that consults with clients on software security. In a voice-over, Logan warns, “If we don’t fix our election integrity now, we may no longer have a democracy.” He also suggests, without evidence, that members of the “deep state,” such as C.I.A. agents, have intentionally spread disinformation about the election.Although it wasn’t the first time that Logan had promoted what has come to be known as the Big Lie about the 2020 election—he had tweeted unsubstantiated claims that Trump had been victimized by voter fraud—the film offered stark confirmation of Logan’s entanglement in fringe conspiracies. Nevertheless, the president of the Arizona State Senate, Karen Fann, has put Logan’s company in charge of a “forensic audit”—an ongoing review of the state’s 2020 Presidential vote. It’s an unprecedented undertaking, with potentially explosive consequences for American democracy.

Approximately 2.1 million Presidential votes were cast in Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix and accounts for most of the state’s population. In recent years, younger voters and people of color have turned the county’s electorate increasingly Democratic—a shift that helped Biden win the traditionally conservative state, by 10,457 votes. Since the election, the county has become a focus of ire for Trump and his supporters. By March, when Logan’s company was hired, the county had already undergone four election audits, all of which upheld the outcome. Governor Doug Ducey, a Republican and a former Trump ally, had certified Biden’s victory. But Trump’s core supporters were not assuaged.

As soon as the Fox News Decision Desk called the state for Biden, at 11:20 p.m. on November 3rd, Trump demanded that the network “reverse this!” When Fox held firm, he declared, “This is a major fraud.” By the time of the “Deep Rig” première, the standoff had dragged on for more than half a year. The Cyber Ninjas audit was supposed to conclude in May, but at the company’s request Fann has repeatedly extended it. On July 28th, the auditors completed a hand recount, but they are still demanding access to the computer routers used by Maricopa County and also want to scrutinize images of mail-in-ballot envelopes. The U.S. Department of Justice has warned that “private actors who have neither experience nor expertise in handling” ballots could face prosecution for failing to follow federal audit rules. Trump, meanwhile, has fixated on Arizona’s audit, describing it as a step toward his “reinstatement.” On July 24th, he appeared in Phoenix for a “Rally to Protect Our Elections,” and said, “I am not the one trying to undermine American democracy—I’m the one trying to save American democracy.” Predicting that the audit would vindicate him, he rambled angrily for nearly two hours about having been cheated, calling the election “a scam—the greatest crime in history.”

In June, I stood in the bleachers at the Veterans Memorial Coliseum in Phoenix, where the audit was taking place, and witnessed people examining carton after carton of paper ballots cast by Arizonans last fall. Some inspectors used microscopes to investigate surreal allegations: that some ballots had been filled out by machines or were Asian counterfeits withtelltale bamboo fibres. Other inspectors looked for creases in mail-in ballots, to determine whether they had been legitimately sent in envelopes or—as Trump has alleged—dumped in bulk.

As the audit has unfolded, various violations of professional norms have been observed, including inspectors caught with pens whose ink matched what was used on ballots. One auditor turned out to have been an unsuccessful Republican candidate during the election. As I watched the proceedings, black-vested paid supervisors monitored the process, but their role was cloaked in secrecy. The audit is almost entirely privately funded, and a county judge in Arizona recently ordered the State Senate to disclose who is paying for it. Last week, Cyber Ninjas acknowledged having received $5.7 million in private donations, most of it from nonprofit groups led by Trump allies who live outside Arizona, including Byrne.

I was joined in the bleachers by Ken Bennett, a former Arizona secretary of state and a Republican, whom the State Senate had designated its liaison to the audit. He acknowledged that, if the auditors end up claiming to have found large discrepancies, “that will of course be very inflammatory.” Indeed, a recent incendiary claim by the auditors—that the vote had tallied about seventy thousand more mail-in ballots than had been postmarked—prompted one Republican state senator to propose a recall of Arizona’s electoral votes for Biden. (In fact, the auditors misunderstood what they were counting.) Nevertheless, Bennett defended the audit process: “It’s important to prove to both sides that the election was done accurately and fairly. If we lurch from one election to another with almost half the electorate thinking the election was a fraud, it’s going to rip our country apart.”

Many experts on democratic governance, however, believe that efforts to upend long-settled election practices are what truly threaten to rip the country apart. Chad Campbell, a Democrat who was the minority leader in the Arizona House of Representatives until 2014, when he left to become a consultant in Phoenix, has been shocked by the state’s anti-democratic turn. For several years, he sat next to Karen Fann when she was a member of the House, and in his view she’s gone from being a traditional Republican lawmaker to being a member of “Trump’s cult of personality.” He said, “I don’t know if she believes it or not, or which would be worse.” Arizona, he added, is in the midst of a “nonviolent overthrow in some ways—it’s subtle, and not in people’s face because it’s not happening with weapons. But it’s still a complete overthrow of democracy. They’re trying to disenfranchise everyone who is not older white guys.”

Arizona is hardly the only place where attacks on the electoral process are under way: a well-funded national movement has been exploiting Trump’s claims of fraud in order to promote alterations to the way that ballots are cast and counted in forty-nine states, eighteen of which have passed new voting laws in the past six months. Republican-dominated legislatures have also stripped secretaries of state and other independent election officials of their power. The chair of Arizona’s Republican Party, Kelli Ward, has referred to the state’s audit as a “domino,” and has expressed hope that it will inspire similar challenges elsewhere.

Ralph Neas has been involved in voting-rights battles since the nineteen-eighties, when, as a Republican, he served as the executive director of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights. He has overseen a study of the Arizona audit for the nonpartisan Century Foundation, and he told me that, though the audit is a “farce,” it may nonetheless have “extraordinary consequences.” He said, “The Maricopa County audit exposes exactly what the Big Lie is all about. If they come up with an analysis that discredits the 2020 election results in Arizona, it will be replicated in other states, furthering more chaos. That will enable new legislation. Millions of Americans could be disenfranchised, helping Donald Trump to be elected again in 2024. That’s the bottom line. Maricopa County is the prism through which to view everything. It’s not so much about 2020—it’s about 2022 and 2024. This is a coördinated national effort to distort not just what happened in 2020 but to regain the House of Representatives and the Presidency.”

Richard Hasen, a law professor at the University of California, Irvine, and one of the country’s foremost election-law experts, told me, “I’m scared shitless.” Referring to the array of new laws passed by Republican state legislatures since the 2020 election, he said, “It’s not just about voter suppression. What I’m really worried about is election subversion. Election officials are being put in place who will mess with the count.”

Arizona’s secretary of state, Katie Hobbs, whose office has authority over the administration of elections, told me that the conspiracy-driven audit “looks so comical you have to laugh at it sometimes.” But Hobbs, a Democrat, who is running for governor, warned, “It’s dangerous. It’s feeding the kind of misinformation that led to the January 6th insurrection.” QAnon followers have been celebrating the audit as the beginning of a “Great Awakening” that will eject Biden from the White House. She noted, “I’ve gotten death threats. I’ve had armed protestors outside my house. Every day, there is a total barrage of social media to our office. We’ve had to route our phones to voice mail so that no one has to listen to it. It can be really traumatizing. I feel beaten up.” She added, “But I’m not going to cave to their tactics—because I think they’re laying the groundwork to steal the 2024 elections.”

Although the Arizona audit may appear to be the product of local extremists, it has been fed by sophisticated, well-funded national organizations whose boards of directors include some of the country’s wealthiest and highest-profile conservatives. Dark-money organizations, sustained by undisclosed donors, have relentlessly promoted the myth that American elections are rife with fraud, and, according to leaked records of their internal deliberations, they have drafted, supported, and in some cases taken credit for state laws that make it harder to vote.

Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, a Democrat from Rhode Island who has tracked the flow of dark money in American politics, told me that a “flotilla of front groups” once focussed on advancing such conservative causes as capturing the courts and opposing abortion have now “more or less shifted to work on the voter-suppression thing.” These groups have cast their campaigns as high-minded attempts to maintain “election integrity,” but Whitehouse believes that they are in fact tampering with the guardrails of democracy.

One of the movement’s leaders is the Heritage Foundation, the prominent conservative think tank in Washington, D.C. It has been working with the American Legislative Exchange Council (alec)—a corporate-funded nonprofit that generates model laws for state legislators—on ways to impose new voting restrictions.

Among those deep in the fight is Leonard Leo, a chairman of the Federalist Society, the legal organization known for its decades-long campaign to fill the courts with conservative judges. In February, 2020, the Judicial Education Project, a group tied to Leo, quietly rebranded itself as the Honest Elections Project, which subsequently filed briefs at the Supreme Court, and in numerous states, opposing mail-in ballots and other reforms that have made it easier for people to vote.

Another newcomer to the cause is the Election Integrity Project California. And a group called FreedomWorks, which once concentrated on opposing government regulation, is now demanding expanded government regulation of voters, with a project called the National Election Protection Initiative.

These disparate nonprofits have one thing in common: they have all received funding from the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation. Based in Milwaukee, the private, tax-exempt organization has become an extraordinary force in persuading mainstream Republicans to support radical challenges to election rules—a tactic once relegated to the far right. With an endowment of some eight hundred and fifty million dollars, the foundation funds a network of groups that have been stoking fear about election fraud, in some cases for years. Public records show that, since 2012, the foundation has spent some eighteen million dollars supporting eleven conservative groups involved in election issues.

It might seem improbable that a low-profile family foundation in Wisconsin has assumed a central role in current struggles over American democracy. But the modern conservative movement has depended on leveraging the fortunes of wealthy reactionaries. In 1903, Lynde Bradley, a high-school dropout in Milwaukee, founded what would become the Allen-Bradley company. He was soon joined by his brother Harry, and they got rich by selling electronic instruments such as rheostats. Harry, a John Birch Societyfounding member, started a small family foundation that initially devoted much of its giving to needy employees and to civic causes in Milwaukee. In 1985, after the brothers’ death, their heirs sold the company to the defense contractor Rockwell International, for $1.65 billion, generating an enormous windfall for the foundation. The Bradley Foundation remains small in comparison with such liberal behemoths as the Ford Foundation, but it has become singularly preoccupied with wielding national political influence. It has funded conservative projects ranging from school-choice initiatives to the controversial scholarship of Charles Murray, the co-author of the 1994 book “The Bell Curve,” which argues that Blacks are less likely than whites to join the “cognitive elite.” And, at least as far back as 2012, it has funded groups challenging voting rights in the name of fighting fraud.

Since the 2020 election, this movement has evolved into a broader and more aggressive assault on democracy. According to some surveys, a third of Americans now believe that Biden was illegitimately elected, and nearly half of Trump supporters agree that Republican legislators should overturn the results in some states that Biden won. Jonathan Rauch, of the Brookings Institution, recently told The Economist, “We need to regard what’s happening now as epistemic warfare by some Americans on other Americans.” Pillars of the conservative establishment, faced with a changing U.S. voter population that threatens their agenda, are exploiting Trump’s contempt for norms to devise ways to hold on to power. Senator Whitehouse said of the campaign, “It’s a massive covert operation run by a small group of billionaire élites. These are powerful interests with practically unlimited resources who have moved on to manipulating that most precious of American gifts—the vote.”

An animating force behind the Bradley Foundation’s war on “election fraud” is Cleta Mitchell, a fiercely partisan Republican election lawyer, who joined the organization’s board of directors in 2012. Until recently, she was virtually unknown to most Americans. But, on January 3rd, the Washington Post exposed the contents of a private phone call, recorded the previous day, during which Trump threatened election officials in Georgia with a “criminal offense” unless they could “find” 11,780 more votes for him—just enough to alter the results. Also on the call was Mitchell,who challenged the officials to provide records proving that dead people hadn’t cast votes. The call was widely criticized as a rogue effort to overturn the election, and Foley & Lardner, the Milwaukee-based law firm where Mitchell was a partner, announced that it was “concerned” about her role, and then parted ways with her. Trump’s call prompted the district attorney in Fulton County, Georgia, to begin a criminal investigation.

In a series of e-mails and phone calls with me, Mitchell adamantly defended her work with the Trump campaign, and said that in Georgia, where she has centered her efforts, “I don’t think we can say with certainty who won.” She told me that there were countless election “irregularities,” such as voters using post-office boxes as their residences, in violation of state law. “I believe there were more illegal votes cast than the margin of victory,” she said. “The only remedy is a new election.” Georgia’s secretary of state rejected her claims, but Mitchell insists that the decision lacked a rigorous evaluation of the evidence. With her support, diehard conspiracy theorists are still litigating the matter in Fulton County, which includes most of Atlanta. Because they keep demanding that election officials prove a negative—that corruption didn’t happen—their requests to keep interrogating the results can be repeated almost indefinitely. Despite three independent counts of Georgia’s vote, including a hand recount, all of which confirmed Biden’s victory, Mitchell argues that “Trump never got his day in court,” adding, “There are a lot of miscarriages of justice I’ve seen and experienced in my life, and this was one of them.”

Mitchell, who is seventy, has warm friendships with people in both parties, and she often appears grandmotherly, in pastel knit suits and reading glasses. But, like Angela Lansbury in “The Manchurian Candidate,” to whom she bears a striking resemblance, she should not be underestimated. She began her political career in Oklahoma, as an outspoken Democrat and a champion of the Equal Rights Amendment. She was elected to the state legislature in her twenties, but then lost a bid for lieutenant governor, in 1986. She told me that she subsequently underwent a political conversion: when her stepson squandered the college tuition that she was paying, she turned against the idea of welfare in favor of personal responsibility, and began reading conservative critiques of liberalism. When I first interviewed her for this magazine, in 1996, she told me that “overreaching government regulation is one of the great scandals of our times.”

On behalf of Republican candidates and groups, she began to fight limits on campaign spending. She also represented numerous right-wing nonprofits, including the National Rifle Association, whose board she joined in the early two-thousands. A former N.R.A. official recently told the Guardian that Mitchell was the “fringe of the fringe,” and a Republican voting-rights lawyer said that “she tells clients what they want to hear, regardless of the law or reality.”

In our conversations, Mitchell mocked what she called the mainstream media’s “narrative” of a “vast right-wing conspiracy to suppress the vote of Black people,” and insisted that the fraud problem was significant. “I actually think your readers need to hear from people like me—believe it or not, there are tens of millions of us,” she wrote. “We are not crazy. At least not to us. We are intelligent and educated people who are very concerned about the future of America. And we are among the vast majority of Americans who support election-integrity measures.” Echoing what has become the right’s standard talking point, she declared that her agenda for elections is “to make it harder to cheat.”

Mitchell told me that the Democrats used the pandemic as a “great pretext” to “be able to cheat”: they caused “administrative chaos” by changing rules about early and absentee voting, and they didn’t adequately police fraud. She denied that race had motivated her actions in Georgia. Yet, in an e-mail to me, she said that Democrats are “using black voters as a prop to accomplish their political objectives.”

Few experts have found Mitchell’s evidence convincing. On November 12, 2020, the Trump Administration’s own election authorities declared the Presidential vote to be “the most secure in American history.” It is true that in many American elections there are small numbers of questionable ballots. An Associated Press investigation found that, in 2020, a hundred and eighty-two of the 3.4 million ballots cast in Arizona were problematic. Four of the ballots have led to criminal charges. But the consensus among nonpartisan experts is that the amount of fraud, particularly in major races, is negligible. As Phil Keisling, a former secretary of state in Oregon, who pioneered universal voting by mail, has said, “Voters don’t cast fraudulent ballots for the same reason counterfeiters don’t manufacture pennies—it doesn’t pay.”

What explains, then, the hardening conviction among Republicans that the 2020 race was stolen? Michael Podhorzer, a senior adviser to the president of the A.F.L.-C.I.O., which invested deeply in expanding Democratic turnout in 2020, suggests that the two parties now have irreconcilable beliefs about whose votes are legitimate. “What blue-state people don’t understand about why the Big Lie works,” he said, is that it doesn’t actually require proof of fraud. “What animates it is the belief that Biden won because votes were cast by some people in this country who others think are not ‘real’ Americans.” This anti-democratic belief has been bolstered by a constellation of established institutions on the right: “white evangelical churches, legislators, media companies, nonprofits, and even now paramilitary groups.” Podhorzer noted, “Trump won white America by eight points. He won non-urban areas by over twenty points. He is the democratically elected President of white America. It’s almost like he represents a nation within a nation.”

Alarmism about election fraud in America extends at least as far back as Reconstruction, when white Southerners disenfranchised newly empowered Black voters and politicians by accusing them of corruption. After the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, some white conservatives were frank about their hostility to democracy. Forty years ago, Paul Weyrich, who helped establish the Heritage Foundation and other conservative groups, admitted, “I don’t want everybody to vote. As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.”

Like many conservatives of her generation, Cleta Mitchell was galvanized by the disputed 2000 election, in which George W. Bush and Al Gore battled for weeks over the outcome in Florida. She repeatedly spoke out on behalf of Bush, who won the state by only five hundred and thirty-seven votes. A dispute over recounts ended up at the Supreme Court.

Few people noticed at the time, but in that case, Bush v. Gore, Chief Justice William Rehnquist, along with Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, hinted at a radical reading of the Constitution that, two decades later, undergirds many of the court challenges on behalf of Trump. In a concurring opinion, the Justices argued that state legislatures have the plenary power to run elections and can even pass laws giving themselves the right to appoint electors. Today, the so-called Independent Legislature Doctrine has informed Trump and the right’s attempts to use Republican-dominated state legislatures to overrule the popular will. Nathaniel Persily, an election-law expert at Stanford, told me, “It’s giving intellectual respectability to an otherwise insane, anti-democratic argument.”

Barack Obama’s election in 2008 made plain that the voting-rights wars were fuelled, in no small part, by racial animus. Bigoted conspiracists, including Trump, spent years trying to undermine the result by falsely claiming that Obama wasn’t born in America. Birtherism, which attempted to undercut a landmark election in which the turnout rate among Black voters nearly matched that of whites, was a progenitor of the Big Lie. As Penda Hair, a founder of the Advancement Project, a progressive voting-rights advocacy group, told me, conservatives were looking at Obama’s victory “and saying, ‘We’ve got to clamp things down’—they’d always tried to suppress the Black vote, but it was then that they came up with new schemes.”

Mitchell was at the forefront of the right’s offensive. In 2010, she accused the Majority Leader of the Senate, the Democrat Harry Reid, who was running for reëlection in Nevada, of planning “to steal this election if he can’t win it outright.” Her evidence was that Democrats in thestate had provided “clearly illegal” free food at voter-turnout events—a negligible infraction, given that Reid won by more than forty thousand votes.

A year later, Mitchell successfully defended Trump, who had been exploring a Presidential bid, against charges that he had taken illegal campaign contributions. She had been recommended to Trump by Chris Ruddy, the founder of the conservative media company Newsmax, which was also a Mitchell client. Later, Ruddy introduced the future President to Mitchell over dinner at Mar-a-Lago. (She told me that she found Trump “gracious,” and noted that, since the 2020 election, she has talked with him “pretty often.”)

In 2013, the Supreme Court struck down a key section of the Voting Rights Act,eliminating the Justice Department’s power to screen proposed changes to election procedures in states with discriminatory histories, one of which was Arizona. Terry Goddard, a former Arizona attorney general and a Democrat, told me that “the state has a history of voter suppression, especially against Native Americans.” Before Rehnquist became a Supreme Court Justice, in 1971, he lived in Arizona, where he was accused of administering literacy tests to voters of color. In the mid-two-thousands, Goddard recalled, Republican leaders erected many barriers aimed at deterring Latino voters, some of which the courts struck down. But the 2013 Supreme Court ruling initiated a new era of election manipulation.

Around this time, Mitchell became a director at the Bradley Foundation. Among the board members were George F. Will, the syndicated columnist, and Robert George, a Princeton political philosopher known for his defense of traditional Catholic values.By 2017, Will, who has been a critic of Trump, had stepped down from the Bradley board. But George has continued to serve as a director, even as the foundation has heavily funded groups promulgating the falsehood that election fraud is widespread in America, particularly in minority communities, and sowing doubt about the legitimacy of Biden’s win. The foundation, meanwhile, has given nearly three million dollars to programs that George established at Princeton.He has written in praise of Pence’s refusal to decertify Biden’s election, and has lamented that so many Americans believe, “wrongly,” that “the election was ‘stolen.’ ” But he declined to discuss with me why, then, he serves on the Bradley Foundation’s board.

The board includes Art Pope, the libertarian discount-store magnate, who serves on the board of governors at the University of North Carolina.? Pope, who has also acknowledged the legitimacy of Biden’s victory, declined to discuss his role at the foundation. Another board member is Paul Clement, a partner at the law firm Kirkland & Ellis,who is one of the country’s most distinguished Supreme Court litigators. He could not be reached for comment.

Mitchell argues that the right spends “a pittance” on election issues compared with the left. “Have you looked at the Democracy Alliance?” she asked me. The Alliance, whose membership is secret, distributes hundreds of millions of dollars in dark money to many left-leaning causes. But, when it comes to influencing elections, the contrast with the Bradley Foundation is clear. Whereas the Alliance’s efforts have centered on increasing voter participation, the Bradley Foundation has focussed on disqualifying ostensibly illegitimate voters.

Like most private nonprofits, the Bradley Foundation doesn’t disclose much about its inner workings. But in 2016 hackers posted online some of the group’s confidential documents, which showed that, once Mitchell became a director, she began urging the foundation to support nonprofit organizations policing election fraud. Mitchell has professional ties to several of the groups that received money, although she says that she has abstained from voting on grants to any of those organizations.

One recipient of Bradley money is True the Vote, a Texas-based groupthat, among other things, trains people to monitor polling sites. Mitchell has served as its legal counsel, and hacked documents show that she advocated to the I.R.S. that the group deserved tax-exempt status as a charity. To earn such a designation, a group must file federal tax forms promising not to engage in electoral politics. In a letter of support, she asserted that “fraudulent voting occurs in the United States,” citing a 2010 case in which the F.B.I. arrested nine Floridians for election violations. But, as with many voter-fraud allegations, the details of the case were less than advertised. The accusation involved a school-board election in a rural Black community in which a campaign had collected dozens of absentee ballots, in violation of the law. The charges were eventually dismissed. The judge found “no intent to cast a false or fraudulent ballot.” True the Vote, which was granted tax-exempt status, has since been the subject of numerous complaints from voters, who have accused it of intimidation and racism.

Last year, a Reuters report characterized Mitchell as one of four lawyers leading the conservative war on “election fraud,” and described True the Vote as one of the movement’s hubs. The story linked the group and three other conservative nonprofits to at least sixty-one election lawsuits since 2012. Reuters noted that, during the same period, the four groups, along with two others devoted to election-integrity issues, have received more than three and a half million dollars from the Bradley Foundation.

It’s a surprisingly short leap from making accusations of voter fraud to calling for the nullification of a supposedly tainted election. The Public Interest Legal Foundation, a group funded by the Bradley Foundation, is leading the way. Based in Indiana, it has become a prolific source of litigation; in the past year alone, it has brought nine election-law cases in eight states. It has amassed some of the most visible lawyers obsessed with election fraud, including Mitchell, who is its chair and sits on its board.

One of the group’s directors is John Eastman, a former law professor at Chapman University, in California. On January 4, 2021, he visited the White House, where he spoke with Trump about ways to void the election. In a nod to the Independent Legislature Doctrine, Eastman and Trump tried to persuade Vice-President Mike Pence to halt the certification of the Electoral College vote, instead throwing the election to the state legislatures. Pence was not persuaded.

Two days later, Eastman spoke at Trump’s “Save America” rally in Washington, hours before the crowds ransacked the Capitol in an effort to stop Congress from certifying Biden’s win. “This is bigger than President Trump!” Eastman declared. “It is the very essence of our republican form of government, and it has to be done!” He thundered that election officials had robbed Trump by illegally casting ballots in the name of non-voters whose records they had extracted, after the polls had closed, from a “secret folder” in electronic voting machines. He told the crowd that the scandal was visible in “the data.” There is no evidence of such malfeasance, however. Eastman, who recently retired, under pressure, from Chapman University, and was stripped of his public duties at another post that he held, at the University of Colorado Boulder, told me he still believes that the election was stolen, and thinks that the audits in Arizona and other states will help prove it. The Bradley Foundation declined to comment on him, or on Mitchell, when asked about its role in funding their activities.

Two other Public Interest Legal Foundation lawyers—its president, J. Christian Adams,and another board member, Hans von Spakovsky—served in George W. Bush’s Justice Department, where they began efforts to use the Voting Rights Act, which was designed to protect Black voters, to prosecute purported fraud by Black voters and election officials. Both men have argued strenuously that American elections are rife with serious fraud, and in 2017 they got a rare opportunity to make their case, when Trump appointed them to a Presidential commission on election integrity. Within months, after the commission was unable to find significant evidence of election fraud, it acrimoniously disbanded. Adams and von Spakovsky, who are members of what Roll Call has termed the Voter Fraud Brain Trust, have nevertheless continued their crusade, sustained partly by Bradley funds. Von Spakovsky now heads the Heritage Foundation’s Election Law Reform Initiative, which has received grants from the Bradley Foundation.

At Heritage, von Spakovsky has overseen a national tracking system monitoring election-fraud cases. But its data on Arizona, the putative center of the storm, is not exactly alarming: of the millions of votes cast in the state from 2016 to 2020, only nine individuals were convicted of fraud. Each instance involved someone casting a duplicate ballot in another state. There were no recorded cases of identity fraud, ballot stuffing, voting by non-citizens, or other nefarious schemes. The numbers confirm that there is some voter fraud, or at least confusion, but not remotely enough to affect election outcomes.

Even Benjamin Ginsberg, a Republican lawyer who for years led the Party’s election-law fights, recently conceded to the Times that “a party that’s increasingly old and white whose base is a diminishing share of the population is conjuring up charges of fraud to erect barriers to voting for people it fears won’t support its candidates.”

The Voter Fraud Brain Trust lent support to Trump’s lies from the time he took office. In 2016, when he lost the popular vote by nearly three million ballots, he insisted that he had actually won it, spuriously blaming rampant fraud in California. Soon afterward, von Spakovsky gave Trump’s false claim credence by publishing an essay at Heritage arguing that there was no way to disprove the allegation, because “we have an election system that’s based on the honor system.”

More than a year before the 2020 election, Cleta Mitchell and her allies sensed political peril for Trump and began reviewing strategies to help keep him in office. According to a leaked video of an address that she gave in May, 2019, to the Council for National Policy,a secretive conservative society, she warned that Democrats were successfully registering what she sarcastically referred to as “the disenfranchised.” She continued, “They know that if they target certain communities and they can get them registered and get them to the polls, then those groups . . . will vote ninety per cent, ninety-five per cent for Democrats.”

One possible countermove was for conservative state legislators to reëngineer the way the Electoral College has worked for more than a hundred years, in essence by invoking the Independent Legislature Doctrine. The Constitution gives states the authority to choose their Presidential electors “in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct.” Since the late nineteenth century, states have delegated that authority to the popular vote. But, arguably, the Constitution permits state legislatures to take this authority back. Legislators could argue that an election had been compromised by irregularities or fraud, forcing them to intervene.

In August, 2019, e-mails show, Mitchell co-chaired a high-level working group with Shawnna Bolick, a Republican state representative from Phoenix. Among the topics slated for discussion was the Electoral College. The working group was convened by alec, the corporate-backed nonprofit that transmits conservative policy ideas and legislation to state lawmakers. The Bradley Foundation has long supported alec, and Mitchell has worked closely with it, serving as its outside counsel until recently.

Mitchell and Bolick declined to answer questions about the working group’s focus, but it appears that Bolick’s participation was productive. After the election, she signed a resolution demanding that Congress block the certification of Biden’s victory and award Arizona’s electors to Trump. Then, early this year, Bolick introduced a bill proposing a radical reading of Article II of the Constitution, along the lines of theIndependent Legislature Doctrine. It would enable a majority of the Arizona legislature to override the popular vote if it found fault with the outcome, and dictate the state’s Electoral College votes itself—anytime up until Inauguration Day. Bolick has described her bill as just “a good, democratic check and balance,” but her measure was considered so extreme that it died in committee, despite Republican majorities in both houses of the legislature. Yet, simply by putting forth the idea as legislation, she helped lend legitimacy to the audacious scheme that the Trump campaign desperately pursued in the final days before Biden’s Inauguration: to rely on Republican-led state legislatures to overturn Electoral College votes. Ian Bassin, the executive director of Protect Democracy, who served as an associate White House counsel under Obama, told me, “Institutions like the Heritage Foundation and alec are providing the grease to turn these attacks on democracy into law.”

Bolick has since announced her candidacy for secretary of state in Arizona. Her husband, Clint Bolick, is an Arizona Supreme Court justice and a leader in right-wing legal circles. Clarence Thomas, one of the three U.S. Supreme Court Justices who signed on to the concurring opinion in Bush v. Gore laying out the Independent Legislature Doctrine, is the godfather of one of Clint Bolick’s sons. If Shawnna Bolick wins her race, she will oversee future elections in the state. And, if the Supreme Court faces another case in which arguments about the Independent Legislature Doctrine come into play, there may now be enough conservative Justices to agree with Thomas that there are circumstances under which legislatures, not voters, could have the final word in American elections.

Months before the 2020 vote, Lisa Nelson, the C.E.O. of alec, also anticipated contesting the election results. That February, she told a private gathering of the Council for National Policy about a high-level review that her group had undertaken of ways to challenge “the validity” of the Presidential returns. A video of the proceedings was obtained by the investigative group Documented, and first reported by the Washington Spectator. In her speech, Nelson noted that she was working with Mitchell and von Spakovsky.

Although the law bars charitable organizations such as theCouncil for National Policyfrom engaging in electoral politics, Nelson unabashedly acknowledged, “Obviously, we all want President Trump to win, and win the national vote.” She went on, “But it’s very clear that, really, what it comes down to is the states, and the state legislators.” One plan, she said, was to urge conservative legislators to voice doubt to their respective secretaries of state, questioning the election’s outcome and asking, “What did happen that night?”

By August, 2020, when the Council for National Policy held another meeting, the pandemic had hurt Trump’s prospects, and talk within the membership about potential Democratic election fraud had reached a frenzy. At the meeting, Adams, the Public Interest Legal Foundation’s president,echoed Trump’s raging about mail-in ballots, describing them as “the No. 1 left-wing agenda.” He urged conservatives not to be deterred by criticism: “Be not afraid of the accusations that you’re a voter suppressor, you’re a racist, and so forth.”

A younger member of the organization, Charlie Kirk—a founder of Turning Point USA, which promotes right-wing ideas on school campuses—injected a note of optimism. He suggested that the pandemic, by closing campuses, would likely suppress voting among college students, a left-leaning bloc. “Please keep the campuses closed,” he said, to cheers. “Like, it’s a great thing!”

Five months later, Turning Point Action, a “social welfare organization” run by Kirk’s group, was one of nearly a dozen groups behind Trump’s “March to Save America,” on January 6th. Shortly before the rally, Kirk tweeted that the groups he leads would send “80+ buses full of patriots to DC to fight for this president.” His tweet was deleted after the crowds assaulted the Capitol.

Turning Point, which has received small grants from the Bradley Foundation, is headquartered in Arizona, and it has played a significant role in the radicalization of the state, in part by amplifying fear and anger about voter fraud. Turning Point’s chief operating officer, Tyler Bowyer, is a member of the Republican National Committeeand a former chair of the Maricopa County Republican Party. Bowyer’s friend Jake Hoffman runs an Arizona-based digital-marketing company, Rally Forge, that has been Turning Point’s highest-compensated contractor.In the summer of 2020, Rally Forge helped Turning Point use social media to spread incendiary misinformationabout the coming elections.

In September, the Washington Post reported that Rally Forge, on behalf of Turning Point Action, had paid teen-agers to deceptively post thousands of copycat propaganda messages, much as Russia had done during the 2016 campaign. Adult leaders had instructed the teens to tweak the wording of their posts, to evade detection by technology companies. Some messages were posted under the teens’ accounts, but others were sent under assumed personae. Many posts claimed that mail-in ballots would “lead to fraud,” and that Democrats planned to steal the Presidency.

Turning Point Action denied that it ran a troll farm, arguing that the teen-age employees were genuine, but a study by the Internet Observatory at Stanford’s Cyber Policy Center documented the scheme, along with other dubious practices by Rally Forge. In 2016, the company fabricated a politician—complete with a doctored photograph—to run as an Independent write-in candidate against Andy Biggs, a far-right Republican seeking an open congressional seat in Arizona. The ploy, evidently intended to siphon votes from Biggs’s Democratic opponent, didn’t go far, but it was hardly the company’s only scam. The Guardian has shown how Rally Forge also created a phony left-wing front group, America Progress Now, which promoted Green Party candidates online in 2018, apparently to hurt Democrats in several races.

In October, 2020, Rally Forge was banned from Facebook, and its president, Hoffman, was permanently suspended by Twitter. Undeterred, he ran as a pro-Trump Republican for the Arizona House—and won. Remarkably, the chamber’s Republican leadership then appointed him the vice-chair of the Committee on Government and Elections. Since getting elected, Hoffman has challenged the legitimacy of Biden’s victory, called for election audits, and, in coördination with the Heritage Foundation, used his position to propose numerous bills making it more difficult to vote.

This past spring, at a private gathering outside Tucson, Jessica Anderson, the executive director of Heritage Action—the politically active arm of the Heritage Foundation—singled out Hoffman for praise. As a leaked video of her remarks revealed, she told supporters that, with the help of Hoffman and other state legislators, the nonprofit group was rewriting America’s election laws. “In some cases, we actually draft them for them, or we have a sentinel on our behalf give them the model legislation so it has that grassroots, from-the-bottom-up type of vibe,” Anderson explained. “We’ve got three bills done in Arizona!” She continued, “We’re moving four more through the state of Arizona right now . . . simple bills, all straight from the Heritage recommendations.” One of the bills, she noted, was “written and carried by Jake Hoffman,” whom she described as “a longtime friend of the Heritage Foundation.”

Hoffman’s bills have made the Heritage Foundation’s wish list a reality.Voting by mail has long been popular in Arizona, with as many as ninety per cent of voters doing so in 2020, but one of Hoffman’s bills made it a felony to send a mail-in ballot to residents who hadn’t requested one, unless they were on an official list of early voters. Another bill, which Hoffman supported, will, according to one estimate, push as many as two hundred thousand people off the state’s list of early voters. Opponents say that this legislation will disproportionately purge Latinos, who constitute twenty-four per cent of the state’s eligible voters. Another bill by Hoffman banned state election officials from accepting outside donations to help pay for any aspect of election administration, including voter registration. (One of the bill’s targets was Mark Zuckerberg, whose foundation helped county election officials in Arizona handle the pandemic.) In February, at a hearing of the Committee on Government and Elections, a witness from the Washington-based Capital Research Center—also funded by the Bradley Foundation—testified in support of Hoffman’s legislation. Athena Salman, the ranking Democrat, told me she was incensed that Hoffman—“a guy who paid teen-agers to lie”—was put on the election committee. “It’s the fox guarding the henhouse!” she said.

Anderson, of Heritage, declined to respond to questions about the group’s collaborations with Hoffman, instead sending a prepared statement: “After a year when voters’ trust in our elections plummeted, restoring that trust should be the top priority of legislators and governors nationwide. That’s why Heritage Action is deploying our established grassroots network for state advocacy for the first time ever. There is nothing more important than ensuring every American is confident their vote counts—and we will do whatever it takes to get there.”

Hoffman, who formerly served as a town-council member in Queen Creek, a deeply conservative part of Maricopa County, did not respond to requests for comment. Kristin Clark, a Democrat who mounted a write-in campaign against him after the news of his troll farm broke, called Hoffman an “unintelligent man who wants to be a big guy.” She told me, “The Republicans here have changed. They were conservative, but now they’ve sold out. It’s money that’s changed it. All these giant, corporate groups that are faceless—it’s outside money.” In her view, “Jake Hoffman is but a cog.”

The spark that ignited the Arizona audit was an amateur video, taken on Election Night, of an unidentified female voter outside a polling place in what Kristin Clark recognized as Hoffman’s district.The voter claimed that election workers had tried to sabotage her ballot by deliberately giving her a Sharpie that the electronic scanners couldn’t read. Her claim was false: the scanners could read Sharpie ink, and the ballots had been designed so that the flip side wouldn’t be affected if the ink bled through. Nevertheless, the video went viral.

Among the first to spread the Sharpiegate conspiracywas another one of Charlie Kirk’s youth groups, Students for Trump. The next day, as Trump furiously insisted he had won an election that he ended up losing by roughly seven million votes, protesters staged angry rallies in Maricopa County, where ballots were still being counted. Adding an aura of legal credibility to the conspiracy theory, Adams, the Public Interest Legal Foundation president, immediately filed suit against Maricopa County, alleging that a Sharpie-using voter he represented had been disenfranchised. The case was soon dismissed, but not before Adams tweeted, “just filed to have our client’s right to #vote upheld. Her #Sharpie ballot was cancelled without cure.” Arizona’s attorney general, Mark Brnovich, a Republican, investigated, and his office took only a day to conclude that the Sharpie story was nonsense. But, by then, many Trump supporters no longer trusted Arizona’s election results. Clark, the former Democratic challenger to Hoffman, told me that she watched in horror as “they took B.S. and made it real!”

A day after the election, the office of Katie Hobbs, Arizona’s secretary of state, reported that, based on a routine, bipartisan hand recount of a sample of ballots, “no discrepancies were found” in Maricopa County. Within days, the mainstream media had called the election for Biden, based on late returns from Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Georgia. But Cleta Mitchell, who had been dispatched by Trump’s chief of staff, Mark Meadows, to help the Trump campaign in Georgia, told Fox News, “We’re already double-checking and finding dead people having voted.” As Georgia was ratifying its results with a recount, she tweeted that the tally was “fake!!!”

Meanwhile, on the conservative Web site Townhall, Hoffman demanded “a full audit of the vote count in swing states,” adding that the election was “far from over.” He claimed that there had been “countless violations of state election law, statistical anomalies and election irregularities in more than a half dozen states,” and argued that state legislatures should therefore have the final say. By December, he had joined his friend Bowyer and other members of the state’s Republican Party in filing suit against Arizona’s governor, calling for the state to set aside Arizona’s eleven electoral votes and allow the legislature to intervene.

At the same time, another version of the Independent Legislature Doctrine argument was being mounted in Pennsylvania, by the Honest Elections Project, the group tied to Leonard Leo, of the Federalist Society. Local Republicans had challenged a state-court ruling that adjusted voting procedures during the pandemic. The Honest Elections Project filed a brief with the U.S. Supreme Court arguing that the Pennsylvania court had usurped the legislature’s authority to oversee elections. The effort didn’t succeed, but Richard Hasen, the election-law professor, regards such arguments as “powder kegs” that threaten American democracy. Leo didn’t respond to requests for comment, but Hasen believes that Leo is trying to preserve “minority rule” in elections in order to advance his agenda. Hasen told me, “Making it harder to vote helps them get more Republican victories, which helps them get more conservative judges and courts.”

In the case of Arizona, it took only a week for a federal district court to dismiss Hoffman and Bowyer’s suit, citing an absence of “relevant or reliable evidence.” The court admonished the plaintiffs that “gossip and innuendo” cannot “be the basis for upending Arizona’s 2020 General Election.” Hoffman and the other plaintiffs appealed the case to the U.S. Supreme Court, which declined to hear the matter, but it waited to do so until March. In the meantime, election-fraud conspiracy theories in Arizona were growing out of control.

On November 12th, Biden was declared the winner in Maricopa County. Soon after, a Republican member of the county’s Board of Supervisors, Bill Gates, was picking up takeout food for his family when the board’s chairman—one of four Republicans on the five-person board—called to warn him to be careful going home. Ninety angry people had gathered outside the chairman’s house, and Gates’s place could be next. “We’d all been doxed,” Gates told me. He and his wife are the legal guardians of a teen-ager whose father, a Ugandan, was nearly killed by henchmen for Idi Amin. “It’s chilling to see the parallels,” Gates told me. “You’d never think there were any parallels to a strongman autocracy in Africa.” Gates considers himself a political-science nerd, but, he said, “I had no concept that we were heading where we were heading.”

Gates, who moved to Arizona as a teen-ager, was a latchkey kid whose idea of entertainment was watching C-span. He is forty-nine and describes himself as a “child of the Reagan Revolution” who started a Republican club in high school. He attended Drake University, in Iowa, partly so that he could witness the state’s Presidential caucuses. Winning a Truman Scholarship opened his way to Harvard Law School, where he joined theFederalist Society,the Harvard Law School Republican Club, and the Journal of Law and Public Policy. At Harvard, membership in all three was called the “conservative trifecta.” Gates can scarcely believe how the Republican Party and the conservative movement have changed in the years since.

Over breakfast in June, in Phoenix, he apologized for his eyes welling up with tears as he described his efforts to stand up to his own party’s mob. He said that he and the other county supervisors had been “feeling great” about how well their administration of the election had gone despite the pandemic. But, as the final ballots were counted and Trump fell behind, Maricopa County became the focal point of conspiracy theorists. “Alex Jones and those guys start coming out here, and they’re protesting outside of our election center as the counting is going on,” he said. He could hear people screaming, and what sounded like a drum: “It was Lollapalooza for the alt-right—it was crazy.” He started getting calls and e-mails saying, “You guys need to stop the steal.” Gates told me, “I’d wonder, Is this a real person?” But some angry messages came from people he knew. They said they’d never support him again. “People thought I was failing them,” Gates said. “I have been called a traitor so many times in the last six months.”

Gates says that Karen Fann, the Arizona Senate’s president, confided to him that she knew there was “nothing to” the fraud charges. (She didn’t respond to requests for comment.) Nevertheless, she buckled under the political pressure and authorized a subpoena of the county’s ballots, for the “forensic audit.” At one point, county supervisors were told that if they didn’t comply they would face contempt charges and, potentially, could be imprisoned. For a time, the official Twitter account for the audit accused the supervisors, without evidence, of “spoliation” of the ballots. “I get a little emotional when I talk about it,” Gates said. “My daughter called me, frantically trying to find out whether or not I was going to be thrown in jail.” Trump supporters set up a guillotine on a grassy plaza outside Arizona’s statehouse, demanding the supervisors’ heads. Inside, Gates recalled, one Republican member after another rose to denounce the county supervisors.

A representative for the national Republican Party tried to silence Gates when he spoke out to defend the integrity of Arizona’s election. He told me that Hoffman’s ally Tyler Bowyer, of the Republican National Committee, paid him a visit and warned, “You need to stop it.” According to Gates, Bowyer made it clear that “the Republican National Committee supports this audit.” Andrew Kolvet, a spokesman for Bowyer, denied that the visit was an official attempt at intimidation, calling it instead a “personal courtesy.”

Gates said that after he received death threats he fled with his family to an Airbnb. At one point, the sheriff sent two deputies to guard Gates’s home overnight. Trump supporters, Gates said, “are basically asking Republican leaders to bow before the altar of the Big Lie—‘You’re willing to do it? O.K., great. You’re not? You’re a rino. You’re a Commie. You are not a Republican.’ It’s been incredibly effective, really, when you think about where we’ve come from January 6th.”

Part of what had drawn Gates to the Republican Party was the Reagan-era doctrine of confronting totalitarianism. He’d long had a fascination with emerging democracies, particularly the former Soviet republics. He had come up with what he admits was a “kooky” retirement plan—“to go to some place like Uzbekistan and help.” He told me, “I’d always thought that, if I had a tragic end, it would be in some place like Tajikistan.” He shook his head. “If you had told me, ‘You’re going to be doing this in the U.S.,’ I would have told you, ‘You’re crazy.’ ”

Some of the political pressure on election officials in Arizona was exerted directly by Trump and his associates, potentially illegally. Interfering in a federal election can be a crime. As the Arizona Republic has reported, the President and his legal adviser Rudy Giuliani phoned state and local officials, including Fann. The White House switchboard tried to connect Trump with the chairman of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, but, even though the chairman was a Republican, he ducked the call, lest the President interfere improperly. Giuliani called Gates’s cell phone when he was shopping at Walgreens on Christmas Eve. Not recognizing the number, Gates didn’t answer. “You can’t make this stuff up,” he told me. Giuliani left a voice mail saying it was a “shame” that two Republicans couldn’t work things out—he’d come up with a “nice way” to “get this thing fixed up.”

“I never returned the phone call,” Gates said. A week later, when news broke of Trump’s notorious call to officials in Georgia, Gates was more relieved than ever that he hadn’t called Giuliani back. A panel of judges in New York has since suspended Giuliani’s law license, for threatening the public interest by making “demonstrably false and misleading statements” about the Presidential election.

By New Year’s Eve, when Trump tried and failed to reach the chairman of the Maricopa County board, his Administration was in extraordinary turmoil. Attorney General William Barr had resigned from the Justice Department after declaring that it had detected no significant election fraud. Even so, Trump continued to demand that the department investigate a variety of loony conspiracies, including a plot to erase Trump votes using Italian military satellites. According to a leaked e-mail, a Justice Department attorney disparaged the satellite theory as “pure insanity.” A man supposedly involved in the plot issued a denial to Reuters, and Italian police suggested that the allegation was baseless.

But the conspiracy theory, which became known as Italygate, had bubbled up from the same pools of dark money that were funding other election misinformation. Records show that Italygate was spread by a “social welfare organization” called Nations in Action, whose directors included von Spakovsky. When Talking Points Memo contacted von Spakovsky, he said that he had resigned from the board on January 8th. But the money trail remains. Crooks and Liars, a progressive investigative-reporting site, dug up tax filings showing that the group’s 501(c)(3) sibling, the Nations in Action Globally Lifting Up Fund, had received thousands of dollars from the Judicial Crisis Network—a nonprofit enterprise, closely tied to Leonard Leo, that also funds Turning Point Action.

While Justice Department officials were fending off conspiracy theories being spread by tax-exempt charities in Washington, the pressure was even more acute on local officials in Phoenix. Trump tweeted relentlessly about the audit. He “clearly has had a fascination with this issue, because he thinks it’s the key to his reinstatement,” Gates told me. “It’s not about Arizona. We’re literally pawns in this. This is a national effort to delegitimize the election system.” Gates predicted that, if “Arizona can question this, and show that Trump won,” the game will move on to Colorado, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Virginia, all of which have sent Republican delegations to observe Arizona’s audit. Noting that both QAnon followers and his own state’s Republican Party chair had referred to “dominoes” in connection with the audit, Gates said, “We know what that game is, and how it works.”

It would be tempting for Gates, a lifetime Republican with political ambitions, to blame only Trump for his party’s anti-democratic turn. But he has few such illusions. What’s really going on, he believes, is a reactionary backlash against Obama: “I’ve thought about it a lot. I believe the election of President Obama frightened a lot of Americans.” Gates argues that the fear isn’t entirely about race. He thinks it’s also about cosmopolitanism, secularism, and other contemporary values that make white conservatives uncomfortable. But in the end, he said, “the diversification of America is frightening to a lot of people in my party.”

Gates believes that his party’s reaction may backfire. Polls show that, although the Arizona audit is wildly popular among Republican voters in the state, it alienates independents, who constitute approximately a third of the state’s electorate—and whose support is necessary for statewide candidates to win.

For now, though, conservative groups seem to be doubling down on their investments in election-fraud alarmism. In the next two years, Heritage Action plans to spend twenty-four million dollars mobilizing supporters and lobbyists who will promote “election integrity,” starting in eight battleground states, including Arizona.

It is coördinating its effort with the Election Transparency Initiative, a joint venture of two anti-abortion groups, the Susan B. Anthony List and the American Principles Project. The Election Transparency Initiative has set a fund-raising goal of five million dollars. Cleta Mitchell, having left her law firm, has joined FreedomWorks, the free-market group, where she plans to lead a ten-million-dollar project on voting issues. She will also head the Election Integrity Network at the Conservative Partnership Institute, another Washington-based nonprofit. As a senior legal fellow there, she told the Washington Examiner, she will “help bring all these strings” of conservative election-law activism together, and she added, “I’ve had my finger in so many different pieces of the election-integrity pie for so long.”

Back in Arizona, where the auditors are demanding still more time, Gates believes that the Big Lie has become a “grift” used to motivate Republican voters and donors to support conservative candidates and political groups. “The sad thing is that there are probably millions of people—hardworking, good Americans, maybe retired—who have paid their taxes, always followed the law, and they truly believe this, because of what they’ve been fed by their leaders,” he said. “And what’s so dispiriting is that the people who are pushing it from the top? They know better.” ?

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https://www.exposedbycmd.org/2020/07/23/alec-2020-annual-meeting-attendees-sponsors-revealed

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the American Legislative Exchange Council‘s (ALEC) annual meeting continues this week online with workshops on rewriting the U.S. Constitution, reopening schools amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, and school privatization. The meeting was originally scheduled to be held in Orlando, but was moved online with cases of COVID-19 surging in the Sunshine State.

ALEC does not disclose its members and donors and keeps the attendees to its meetings secret. A list of the 2020 Annual Meeting attendees and sponsors was obtained by the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) and is being made publicly available below.

The list was missing some titles and institutions so CMD staff added them where possible. In addition, location information was added so that researchers can pull out state attendees. The list is likely not complete, as some speakers such as Rep. Phil King (R-TX) and Fair Lines America‘s Adam Kincaid are not listed.

Also, ALEC is offering a $50 workshop pass for this week, according to an email from ALEC CEO Lisa Nelson reviewed by CMD, so those taking up her offer will not be on this list.

In all, the list shows just 50 state lawmakers and their staff as in attendance, meaning legislators are outnumbered four to one by lobbyists and representatives of right-wing groups.

Charles Koch’s political network is well represented at the Annual Meeting with 20 staffers identified. Nine attended from Koch’s astroturf group Americans for Prosperity, eight from the Koch-founded and funded Mercatus Center at George Mason University, and one each from the Charles Koch Institute, the Cato Institute, and “Yes. Every Kid.”

Trump and the federal government again sent attendees to the Annual Meeting. In addition to Labor Secretary Eugene Scalia and Brooke Rollins, Assistant to the U.S. President for Strategic Initiatives, Justin Faulb, Legal Advisor for the Federal Communications Commission (FCC); Sayre Swarztrauber, Policy Advisor for the FCC; Lynn Johnson, Assistant Secretary for Administration for Children and Families in the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services; and Steven Winberg, Assistant Secretary for Fossil Fuel Energy in the U.S. Department of Energy.

Below is the full list of attendees in searchable form.: list doc shook [

Name Title Institution Location

Lautigar, Rachel Turning Point USA Arizona

Rogers, Mackenzie Turning Point USA Arizona

VandenNieuwenhof, Nicholas Enterprise Director Turning Point USA Arizona

Young, Logan Turning Point USA Arizona]

Murphy, John Senior Vice President for International Policy U.S. Chamber of Commerce Washington, D.C.

Myers, Dr. Currie Senior Visiting Fellow Texas Public Policy Foundation Texas

Armstrong, Sara Vice President and Managing Director U.S. Chamber of Commerce Washington, D.C.

Brown, Kristine Senior Government Affairs Director The Kansas Chamber of Commerce Kansas

Murphy, John Senior Vice President for International Policy U.S. Chamber of Commerce Washington, D.C.

Skelo, Lana Senior Director of State Legislative Affairs U.S. Chamber of Commerce Washington, D.C.

2020 Annual Meeting Sponsors

The sponsors of ALEC’s 2020 Annual Meeting are disclosed below according to funding level with “Chairman” being the top and “Trustee” the lowest.

Chairman Level

First Rule

NetChoice

Rubin, Turnbull, and Associates

Vice Chairman Level

Cigar Association of America

EdChoice

Foundation for Government Accountability

K12, Inc.

Mackinac Center

Pacific Legal Foundation

PhRMA

Director Level

American Federation for Children

Lilly

Trustee Level

Florida East Coast Industries

american Legislative Exchange Council Backs Trump on Confederate Monuments, Policing

by Don Wiener | July 16th, 2020

The corporate lobby group has reentered the culture wars by siding with Trump on race issues eight years after retreating because of public backlash against its “Stand Your Ground” and voter ID bills.

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Behind Enemy Lines at ALEC’s Right-Wing Policy Conference

The Austin Chronicle — 8/30/2019

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ALEC Doubles Down on Trump, Corporate Agenda at Annual Meeting in Texas

by David Armiak | August 14th, 2019

The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) meets this week in Austin, the capital of the Lone Star State, for its 46th Annual Meeting at the posh JW Marriott hotel.

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https://www.exposedbycmd.org/2019/08/15/alec-fails-denounce-dangerous-racist-views-leaders-members/

It has been a banner week for extremist politicians linked to the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).

ALEC’s Washington State Chair, Rep. Matt Shea, promoted and maintained close ties to an extremist group training children and young men for battle in a “Biblical warfare” while schooling them in the “biblical teachings” of racist preacher John Weaver, according to a new exposé published by The Guardian. The revelations come just weeks after the Washington House hired an outside firm to investigate whether Shea has engaged in, planned, or promoted political violence.

And ALEC alumni and Iowa congressman Steve King pondered Wednesday whether there would “be any population of the world left” without rape and incest. Rep. King was stripped of his committee posts in Congress earlier this year after questioning why white supremacy should be considered offensive.

Despite ALEC’s claim that it “does not condone hate speech of any kind,” the pay-to-play influence group has ignored calls for it to remove Shea from his ALEC leadership position, and has done nothing to repudiate the extremist statements of Shea, King, or other radical right-wing ALEC legislators.

ALEC Leader Repeatedly Echoes White Supremacists

ALEC does not disclose how its “State Chairs” are selected, but according to its 46th annual meeting agenda, they serve as leaders to their state’s delegation, receive special training, and are invited to exclusive events. Rep. Shea (R-Spokane) has been listed as an ALEC State Chair since July 29, 2017.

In November of 2018, The Seattle Times reported that Spokane County Sheriff Ozzie Knezovich had referred Shea to the Federal Bureau of Investigation for circulating a manifesto advocating a U.S. holy war that Knezovich described as a “‘how to’ manual consistent with the ideology and operating philosophy of the Christian Identity/Aryan Nations movement and the Redoubt movement of the 1990s.”

Shea’s “Biblical Basis for War” calls for the killing of all males who do not agree to “obey” biblical law. The radical agenda Shea circulated included a stop to all abortions, an end to same sex marriage, an end to idolatry, an end to communism, and replacing America’s current justice system with Biblical law.

As a result, Shea lost his leadership role within the Washington state Republican Caucus, and many donors cut ties with him. ALEC, however, kept him in his position as State Chair.

In addition to the “Biblical Basis for War,” The Guardian reported in April of 2019 that Shea had engaged in conversationsabout “carrying out surveillance, ‘psyops’ and even violent attacks against his perceived political enemies.”

Shea also authored legislation to create “a separate and independent state” in “the eastern portion of Washington” called “Liberty.” A presentation Shea gave titled ” is displayed as justification for the new state, in which he calls Christianity the United States’ religion.

According to Dave Neiwert, author of the book “Alt-America: The Rise of the Radical Right in Trump’s America,” there has been a dedicated effort to try to get white supremacists to move to the Northwest to create an all-white ethnostate there. The demographics of the proposed State of Liberty would have significantly less racial diversity than the rest of the state.

ALEC Legislator of the Week Led Dangerous White Supremacist Group

When the Corvallis Advocate reported that Oregon Rep. Mike Nearman was listed as the vice president of Oregonians for Immigration Control (OFIC), he denied it. OFIC has been described by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) and local news organizations as a hate group that “has links to influential white nationalist eugenicist John Tanton.” The Daily Beast later confirmed that Nearman was “very definitely” the vice president of the organization “some time after early March 2017.”

An ALEC member, Nearman was selected as the “ALEC-FreedomWorks Legislator of the Week” in July of 2017.

Nearman may not work for OFIC any longer, but he still participates in the group’s events, including an OFIC lunch on March 26, 2019. Nearman now has a position as “the state director of the anti-union Freedom Foundation,” according to the Salem Reporter. The Freedom Foundation is an affiliate of ALEC’s sister organization, the State Policy Network, a right-wing web of “think tanks” in 49 states that is often called upon to provide the academic legitimacy for ALEC model bills as they are introduced.

Registered ALEC Member Opined that There Aren’t “Enough White Kids”

Former Arizona representative and ALEC member David Stringer stirred controversy last year when he gave a speech complaining that “there aren’t enough white kids to go around” to integrate Arizona’s schools and that immigration is an “existential threat” to Arizona.

Josselyn Berry, of ProgressNow Arizona, said that Stringer’s comments were “racist and paranoid” as well as “fear mongering and hateful.” Furthermore, a local news outlet that Stringer “had a hard time apologizing and providing a ‘yes or no’ answer about whether he is a white nationalist.” According to Arizona House Minority Leader Rebecca Rios, Stringer’s rhetoric “echoes fervent racists and white nationalists like David Duke.”

The Arizona Republican Party Chairman at the time, Jonathan Lines, and ALEC-tied Gov. Doug Ducey both called for Stringer to resign in response to his statements, but ALEC made no comment.

In November 2018, Stringer was back at it, telling a group of university students that, unlike European immigrants, “African-Americans and other racial groups don’t … blend in.” That prompted the Arizona Anti-Defamation League to question Stringer’s fitness for office, and the incoming Minority Whip, Reginald Bolding, said censure and removal should be on the table.

Stringer was ultimately forced to resign from office by Republican leaders in March 2019 after his undisclosed 1983 conviction for child sex abuse came to light.

Dues-Paying ALEC Member Blamed Mass Shootings on Minority Group and Democrats

Earlier this month, ALEC member Ohio Rep. Candice Keller blamed mass shootings on transgender people, “drag queen advocates,” “homosexual marriage,” immigration policies, and “disrespect to law enforcement,” for which she credited former President Barack Obama.

Ohio Republican Party Chairman Jane Timken denounced Keller’s comments as “shocking and utterly unjustifiable” and called for her to resign, as did Butler County Sheriff Richard Jones. Jones tweeted “Candice Keller should resign at once. Shame shame.”

ALEC has not spoken out on the controversy.

In 2017, Keller spoke on a “white power advocate’s” radio show. Her appearance can be found on the ‘Resolution Radio’ website, where images for the show state, “Our white culture is beautiful!” “‘Diversity’ is a code word for white genocide,” and David Lane’s infamous white supremacist slogan, “We must secure the existence of our race and a future for white children. Because the beauty of the Aryan women must not perish from the earth.”

Keller paid ALEC for a two-year legislative membership in 2017.

ALEC’s Uncomfortable Relationship with Hate Speech

When the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) and a broad coalition of 78 organizations urged ALEC’s corporate funders to cut ties with the bill mill following inflammatory comments by hatemonger David Horowitz at last year’s Annual Meeting, ALEC took steps to distance itself from his radical views. ALEC stated that it does “not share the perspective” Horowitz expressed at its 45th annual meeting, despite the fact that Horowitz received a glowing introduction and called ALEC’s CEO Lisa Nelson .” Among other things, Horowitz proclaimed that public education “had been turned over to racist organizations like Black Lives Matter and terrorist organizations like the Muslim Brotherhood.”

Telecom giants and longtime ALEC backers Verizon, AT&T, and Comcast ultimately quit ALEC over Horowitz’s statements.

Nonetheless, ALEC has remained conspicuously silent about the dangerous and racist statements and ties of its legislative leaders and members Shea, King, Nearman, Stringer, and Keller.

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Election Manipulators Use ALEC To Push Their Partisan Power Grabs Against Voters

The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) is up to it again: promoting new ways to restrict political representation and under one of the central foundations of American democracy.

by Jay Riestenberg | Aug 20, 2019

7/17 six mos into age of trump

alec 5 // trump and koch!

recall alec warning from cronon

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The One Percent Solution: How Corporations Are Remaking America One State at a Time 1st Edition

Gordon Lafer is Associate Professor at the Labor Education and Research Center at the University of Oregon https://kpfa.org/episode/rising-up-with-sonali-december-19-2017/

https://kpfa.org/episode/rising-up-with-sonali-december-19-2017/

https://www.amazon.com/One-Percent-Solution-Corporations-Remaking/dp/1501703064

In the aftermath of the 2010 Citizens United decision, it's become commonplace to note the growing political dominance of a small segment of the economic elite. But what exactly are those members of the elite doing with their newfound influence? The One Percent Solution provides an answer to this question for the first time. Gordon Lafer's book is a comprehensive account of legislation promoted by the nation's biggest corporate lobbies across all fifty state legislatures and encompassing a wide range of labor and economic policies.

In an era of growing economic insecurity, it turns out that one of the main reasons life is becoming harder for American workers is a relentless?and concerted?offensive by the country’s best-funded and most powerful political forces: corporate lobbies empowered by the Supreme Court to influence legislative outcomes with an endless supply of cash. These actors have successfully championed hundreds of new laws that lower wages, eliminate paid sick leave, undo the right to sue over job discrimination, and cut essential public services.

Lafer shows how corporate strategies have been shaped by twenty-first-century conditions?including globalization, economic decline, and the populism reflected in both the Trump and Sanders campaigns of 2016. Perhaps most important, Lafer shows that the corporate legislative agenda has come to endanger the scope of democracy itself.

For anyone who wants to know what to expect from corporate-backed Republican leadership in Washington, D.C., there is no better guide than this record of what the same set of actors has been doing in the state legislatures under its control.

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https://www.eenews.net/stories/1060066527

zcolman

Members of the American Legislative Exchange Council, a heavyweight conservative policy organization, are feuding about their approach to climate change.

ALEC's conservative wing says the organization — which convenes corporations, think tanks and legislators — is capitulating to left-of-center interests to regain funders after an exodus of corporate titans like Google LLC and Royal Dutch Shell PLC over the organization's climate change positions. Others, however, contend that the conversation on climate has shifted away from hard-liners, with a growing number of Republicans and conservatives embracing clean technology and climate science, according to several of the group's members.

"I think the attention they got on energy and environmental issues was so intense that that's where they focused on their outreach with the center-left," said Paul Blair, director of strategic initiatives with Americans for Tax Reform and a member of ALEC. "You can't pass the laugh test with going center-left on tax issues. To me, you can't pass the laugh test with me by going center-left on energy and environment issues. But they apparently think they can."

It's a fight that reflects the broader conservative debate over climate change and the direction of the Republican Party during the Trump administration.

And it will soon come to a head, as ALEC members prepare to vote on a measure that takes aim at U.S. EPA's endangerment finding on greenhouse gases. The Obama-era finding is a compilation of scientific evidence that forms the legal basis for EPA greenhouse gas regulations. It's despised by many conservatives.

ALEC's Energy, Environment and Agriculture Task Force is slated to vote on a draft resolutionat a meeting in Nashville, Tenn., next month that calls "upon the Environmental Protection Agency to withdraw the 2009 endangerment finding for carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases and conduct a new rulemaking on this issue."

If ALEC ultimately adopts the resolution, it will serve as a model resolution for state and federal lawmakers to express their disdain for the EPA finding. The vote will put big businesses and trade groups that sit on the ALEC task force on the spot regarding whether the endangerment finding is worth investigating.

"Robust debate comes from stakeholders engaging from a variety of perspectives. And that is precisely what's happening here," said ALEC spokesman Bill Meierling. He noted that the draft resolution could be amended or changed when the task force meets in Nashville.

The tug of war at ALEC mirrors the fight between voices skeptical of mainstream climate science — like the nonprofit Heartland Institute — and groups that are more moderate on climate change, like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

Heartland is rumored to be behind the endangerment resolution, with former North Dakota state Rep. Bette Grande (R) — who now freelances for Heartland and participates in ALEC matters — thought to have drafted it and handed off the language to a state lawmaker and ALEC member.

Heartland did not respond to a request for comment.

Heartland and its allies have pushed EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt to take on the endangerment finding, which the EPA chief has been reluctant to pursue. Corporate America, meanwhile, largely supported staying in the Paris climate agreement and retaining the Clean Power Plan — an Obama administration rule to curb power plant emissions — but ultimately lost those battles to far-right groups, though some hope Trump will ultimately remain in the global climate pact.

Bellwether moment?

The endangerment finding vote may serve as a bellwether for where ALEC stands on climate change.

Is ALEC part and parcel of a conservative movement that has questioned climate change and the policy responses to it? Or does it operate among the wider atmosphere of reputation-conscious corporations and even some moderates who have opposed the Trump administration on climate change?

But that calculation also belies a more fundamental point about ALEC — while it has a reputation as a far-right group advancing industry interests, it's also a member-driven organization. If ALEC is shifting on climate and energy, it's largely because its members have, too.

"If there were some grand conspiracy, I'd know about it, and there isn't," said Eli Lehrer, president of the free-market think tank R Street Institute, which supports a carbon tax. "To the extent things have changed, it's because opinions have changed."

At its core, ALEC is an organization about free markets and limited government. Thus, its members also have railed against and helped craft bills to roll back President Obama's climate and environmental measures, many of which were federal regulations, and local incentives for clean energy. At the same time, though, the group has come under fire for taking cash from fossil fuel companies threatened by the advance of clean energy while often neglecting to mention subsidies and incentives that legacy energy sources enjoy.

Longtime ALEC watchdogs view the endangerment finding draft resolution as an attempt by its conservative members to reorient the organization to its roots after several rudderless years on energy and environment matters. Part of that is a response to the Trump administration, said Nick Surgey, director of Documented, an organization that tracks the influence of corporations on public policy.

"This is a reflection of an organization that has shifted itself more into the mainstream of climate change in terms of rhetoric in the last three to four years," Surgey said. "Now they've got almost everything they want from Scott Pruitt and the EPA, and they have to justify their existence to their funders. And it seems like they're allying themselves with the more radical of the funders."

The cohesion between ALEC and the Trump administration is evident to ALEC CEO Lisa Nelson. She sent a congratulatory email to its members on Jan. 30 to celebrate the new administration, saying, "This administration does have the potential to be an ALEC administration. It is full of the people and ideas we've advanced since 1973."

But conservatives familiar with ALEC said they're concerned that the organization has gravitated to satisfying interests that aren't committed to the free-market principles upon which the group was created. They said that dynamic is most apparent in the energy and environment space.

"When it comes to the policies of the organization, ALEC does have strong positions on issues that are consistent with the free market," Blair said. "The issue is if they are planning to upend those principles to fundraise in the future."

They worry that ALEC is trying to plug a funding gap following the high-profile exits of Google, BP PLC, Enterprise Rent-A-Car, Royal Dutch Shell PLC and others, all of which blamed the organization's stance on climate change for their departure. Those companies left largely over pressure from shareholders who were spurred into action after activist groups harped on ALEC funding streams. The conservative billionaire industrialist Koch brothers are big donors; Exxon Mobil Corp., a member of the Energy, Environment and Agriculture Task Force, is also a major funder.

Conservatives revolt

ALEC's conservative members saw warning signs recently when feathers were ruffled over what they said in the past would have been a fairly easy decision.

The energy task force couldn't agree to move on a resolution that opposed property assessed clean energy, or PACE — a financing mechanism to fund clean energy or energy efficiency upgrades. Conservatives were worried about exposing taxpayers to losses, since municipal bonds underwrote many of the projects.

But many of ALEC's members also have PACE interests. One conservative source said those groups backing PACE angled to kill the resolution and criticized ALEC for trying to appease such funders. Rockwood Group CEO Scott Zajac, whose investment firm operates in the PACE world, was particularly vocal in opposing the resolution within ALEC, the source said.

Others, though, noted that's just how the energy space is these days — corporations are on board with clean energy. Rejecting mainstream climate science or trying to stymie growth of energy sources that compete with ALEC's old guard of coal, natural gas and oil companies doesn't fly anymore.

The PACE resolution foundered over much acrimony in ALEC's July meeting and was forbidden to ever return as a discussion point. That result has generated revolt from some of the more dogmatic conservatives.

"I'm concerned that there has been an effort more recently to try and table what in the past would have been considered straightforward proposals based on free-market principles," said Tom Pyle, president of the conservative energy think tank Institute for Energy Research. "That's what ALEC is supposed to be advancing."

That effort, though, is minor compared with the endangerment finding, which is a lightning rod in climate policy circles.

Publicly traded companies on the Energy, Environment and Agriculture Task Force are getting calls about the upcoming vote on the draft endangerment finding resolution, according to a source familiar with the situation. Companies on that task force include Exxon Mobil, Pfizer Inc. and United Parcel Service Inc.

"We have not received calls on it to my knowledge, but either way it is not an issue we would support," UPS spokeswoman Kara Ross said in an email. "As one of the leaders in sustainable and transparent logistics, our position on climate change is clear."

Aside from Exxon Mobil, Pfizer and UPS, the task force also includes lobby group heavyweights such as the Edison Electric Institute, American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers, National Rural Electric Cooperative Association and American Gas Association.

E&E News contacted all those members. EEI, AGA, AFPM, Pfizer and Exxon Mobil did not respond to requests for comment. NRECA said it didn't want to challenge the endangerment finding because it supports "inside the fence" carbon emissions regulations on power plants to replace the Clean Power Plan, which Pruitt formally moved to repeal last month.

"Challenging the endangerment finding would lead to a different result, which we think would be unwise," spokesman Dan Riedinger said in an email.

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Two sessions at a summit this week for one of the country’s most powerful conservative groups will focus on voting, something civil rights groups and voting advocates are alarmed by and say could signal the group’s renewed interest in restrictive voting policies.

The focus on voting from the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) is significant because the group disbanded its Public Safety and Elections Task Force in 2012 following significant pressure from civil rights groups. Beginning in 2009, the task force helped draft model legislation for states to impose voter ID requirements that critics say makes it more difficult for people to vote.

ALEC is an association of about 2,000 state lawmakers with close ties to big business and conservative groups. ALEC produces model legislation on conservative issues that lawmakers can then introduce in their respective statehouses. Among the model measures ALEC backed is the controversial “stand your ground law” and legislation that limit the ability of localities to raise the minimum wage.

An ALEC spokeswoman said in 2012 the organization was ending the task force to focus more on economic issues. But at a policy summit this week, the group will hold two panels focused on voting issues, setting off alarm bells among activists.

“After a lot of controversy over voter ID, ALEC disbanded its task force that dealt with democracy issues and purported to be out of the business of mucking around with voting laws,” said Arn Pearson, general counsel for the Center for Media and Democracy, a group that closely follows ALEC. “This is the first time we’re seeing them come back in on it.”

One of the panels will be a “voter integrity workshop,” in which election experts will “discuss important voting policies and legislation in the states to improve the integrity of elections, the accuracy and security of state voter registration rolls, and new ways to verify the eligibility of voters.” The panel will also discuss “policy concerns” regarding automatic voter registration, a reform with bipartisan support advocates believe can add millions of Americans to the voting rolls.

A different panel will focus on redistricting as states gear up for the next round of redrawing electoral maps in 2021. The workshop will focus on “significant legal changes from the past decade; a rundown of ongoing litigation, ballot measures, and legislation; what apportionment might look like after the 2020 census and what challenges that will present.” The workshop will also look at what “groups are doing to address the multi-front campaign to shift the redistricting landscape – and find new “rights” in the Constitution.” The workshop will be led by a group called Fair Lines America, a group Pearson said he had never heard of and doesn’t appear to have an online presence.

The panel comes as the Supreme Court is considering a case out of Wisconsin that could, for the first time, set a standard for when gerrymandering can go too far to benefit one political party.

Jay Riestenberg, who closely follows ALEC for Common Cause, a public interest watchdog, said only a few states had adopted voter ID measures before ALEC took an interest in the issue in 2009. When it got out of the business of dealing with voter laws in 2012, he said, they only did so after successfully spreading voter ID laws to dozens of states. Thirty-four states have measures requiring voters to show some kind of identification at the polls.

Bill Meierling, an ALEC spokesman, said the group “does not work on or maintain policy election issues.”

“Workshops are part of the ALEC meeting and can cover a range of issues that may or may not be related to ALEC policy/work,” he said in an email.

Pearson said he was skeptical the panel’s were purely informational.

“ALEC is a pay-to-play outfit. Member organizations pay to sponsor events and workshops. Typically if something is showing up on the agenda it’s because somebody wants to push it,” he said.

“ALEC has been a very anti-democratic organization since its founding. It brings corporate lobbyists and state legislators behind closed doors to trade these so-called model bills,” Riestenberg said. “They’re kind of opposed to the very idea of representative democracy, and so when they have panels about voting and what they call voter fraud or voter integrity, it kind of raises red flags given their history on the issue and their kind of anti-democratic structure.”

Riestenberg said he was surprised ALEC did not post the names of speakers on the panel, something he said it had done in years past. ALEC officials did not respond to a question about who would be speaking on the panels.

The panels also have increased significance amid President Donald Trump’s allegations of widespread voter fraud and a commission he created in May to investigate it. Led by Vice President Mike Pence and Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach (R), members of the panel have favored voter ID, proof of citizenship laws and forcing states to more aggressively purge their voter rolls.

J. Christian Adams, a member of the Trump voter fraud probe, said in a statement he would be participating in the ALEC panel about election integrity. Adams has sued jurisdictions to try and force them to more aggressively purge their voting rolls and has said the Department of Justice is not doing enough to make sure states are maintaining accurate rolls.

Critics say the commission is an effort to weaken confidence in the U.S. election system and to lay the groundwork for more restrictive voting policies. Several studies and investigations have found voter fraud is not a widespread issue.

“There was evidence that ALEC was behind the spate of strict voter ID laws that started to be enacted throughout the country and have been found to have a voter suppressive impact,” said Ezra Rosenberg, co-director of the voting rights project at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, one of the groups suing Trump’s voter fraud commission. “Given the present environment with the Pence/Kobach commission moving toward voter purges, we do fear that this could begin another era of suppressive voter laws.”

Trump’s commission has temporarily paused as it faces multiple lawsuits. Riestenberg said ALEC could be working to continue the commission’s work.

“I kind of expected this to be the next wave. The Pence/Kobach commission is caught up in lawsuits. They’re trying to figure out what’s their next move. I think ALEC and other state level advocacy groups on the conservative side are their venue to actually push their agenda since they can’t do it through the commission.”

Huffington Post | Published: 12/6/2017

Colorado State Representative Lori Saine (R-63) arrived a little later than expected to this week’s American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) States & Nation Policy Summit in Nashville, but she had a great excuse.

Saine was arrested Wednesday at the Denver International Airport for trying to bring a loaded semi-automatic handgun through security.

Saine was charged with a sixth-degree felony. If convicted, she could face up to 18 months in jail and a fine of up to $100,000.

It is unclear why Saine tried to sneak a loaded gun onto a plane. Firearms are only allowed on planes if they are unloaded and properly stored in checked baggage.

ALEC apparently did not find Saine’s actions disturbing, as it went on to award her the Public Sector State Chair of the Year award on Thursday anyway. The award is given to State Chairs to recognize them for their work with ALEC members in promoting ALEC’s extremist agenda.

ALEC and FreedomWorks, a right-wing group instrumental in the Tea Party movement, also awarded Saine the “Legislator of the Week” award in March.

FreedomWorks praised Saine again yesterday on Twitter, “Colorado Representative @lorisaine fights for lower taxes, especially on small businesses. Thank you, Rep. Saine!”

For a number of years, the gun industry’s lobbying arm, the National Rifle Association (NRA), co-chaired ALEC’s Task Force on Public Safety and Elections, which has since been disbanded after public controversy concerning the shooting of Trayvon Martin and ALEC’s backing of radical “stand your ground” laws.

ALEC pushes a wide range of pro-gun bills around the country and opposes of gun safety measures. Currently, ALEC’s executive assistant to CEO Lisa Nelson, Sarah Spaulding, is a former legislative assistant for the NRA, and the corporate pay-to-play group’s public affairs staffer, Ashley Varner, previously worked as an NRA media spokesperson for eight years.

https://www.exposedbycmd.org/2017/12/07/alec-hires-former-koch-staffer-lead-energy-task-force

The Koch-funded American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) has hired Grant Kidwell, a former analyst from two major Koch-backed groups–Americans for Prosperity and the Charles Koch Institute–to lead its Energy, Environment and Agriculture (EEA) task force, a position that has been left vacant since July.

Funded by numerous fossil-fuel companies, ALEC and its EEA task force has a long history of passing “model bills” undermining environmental protections and opposing policies to combat climate change. The task force is made up of numerous corporate lobbyists and their trade groups that stand to benefit from measures weakening environmental protections: including Koch Industries, Exxon Mobil, Peabody Energy, the Edison Electric Institute, American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers (AFPM), the American Gas Association.

Kidwell’s first week at ALEC comes as the group holds its States and Nation Policy Summit, currently taking place in Nashville, Tennessee. Among the measures being discussed is a resolution urging the EPA to scrap the 2009 endangerment finding for greenhouse gases, which formed the legal basis for the federal government to regulate greenhouse gas pollution. According E&E News, the fossil-fuel funded Heartland Institute is rumored to be behind the resolution.

Before Kidwell’s appointment, Kenneth Stein who now works for the Koch-backed Institute for Energy Research, briefly served as the task force director from April to July 2017. John Eick, who now works for AFPM, previously led the task force from 2012-2017. Todd Wynn, who now works at the Department of Interior and previously worked at the Edison Electric Institute, was Director from 2011 to 2013.

This story was originally published in Documented here.

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American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) -- an organization where corporations and politicians vote on legislation to enact across the nation -- will be holding its 45th anniversary gala at the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C.

part of choke hold series icn

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/29102017/renewable-energy-ohio-rps-law-fossil-fuel-political-donations-coal

COLUMBUS, Ohio—On March 30, Bill Seitz, a charismatic Republican, took to the floor of the Ohio House to make a case for gutting a 2008 law designed to speed the adoption of solar and wind as significant sources of electricity in the state. The law, he warned, "is like something out of the 5-Year Plan playbook of Joseph Stalin." Adopting a corny Russian accent, he said, "Vee vill have 25,000 trucks on the Volga by 1944!'"

Nine years before, Seitz and his colleagues, Republicans and Democrats alike, had voted overwhelmingly for the measure he now compared to the work of a Communist dictator. It made Ohio the 25th state to embrace requirements and inducements to lure utilities away from coal, a major contributor of the gases fueling global climate change. Studies suggested the law would help create green energy jobs and boost the Ohio economy—and it has.

Now, Seitz said, it was obsolete. Natural gas, rapidly displacing coal, was the resource Ohio ought to foster, he said. He also argued the law gives an unfair advantage to wind and solar when the state's last nuclear plant is fighting for its life. Most important, Seitz insisted, the government had no business telling anyone what kind of energy to buy. By the time he was done, he had secured a veto-proof majority to undo key parts of the law.

What happened to turn lawmakers so decisively against a statute they'd adopted 93-to-1 less than a decade ago?

The answers begin with the 2008 financial crisis, which hit Ohio hard and greatly depressed energy demand, and they include the shale gas boom, which benefited Ohio producers and made coal uncompetitive.

But there's more to the story, too.

As fossil fuel interests mobilized at the national level to fight proposals to mitigate climate change that would undercut their profits, they made Ohio a priority for fighting clean energy policy at the state level. Beginning in earnest in 2011, a network of coal companies, utilities, think tanks, nonprofit foundations and political action committees coalesced to roll back Ohio's alternative energy initiatives.

Industry-supported think tanks provided highly questionable research purporting to show big job losses. An industry group claiming to represent consumers—and accused of using fraudulent tactics before regulatory agencies—advised Seitz's staff on how to water down the definition of alternative energy. And industry sources donated to the campaigns of state politicians, like Seitz, who've kept the repeal-and-replace bills coming, even after Republican Gov. John Kasich vetoed a similar effort.

This network includes Americans for Prosperity, a foundation funded by the energy magnates Charles and David H. Koch; the Heritage Foundation, a Washington-based advocacy group known for its criticism of climate change science; and the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), another conservative nonprofit in Washington with Koch ties that frequently spoon-feeds draft legislation to state politicians.

Seitz is on ALEC's national board of directors, but he bristles at the suggestion that he relies on the council for guidance. "ALEC doesn't drive me," he told InsideClimate News. "If anything I drive ALEC." Either way, in 2012, ALEC adopted an "Electricity Freedom Act" that reads like a declaration of war against the kind of energy rules on the books in Ohio and calls for the effort to reject them that Seitz leads.

The Rise of Clean Energy Scare Studies

Once a major coal producer, Ohio has a lesser-known history with fuel-free electricity. In the winter of 1887-88, Charles F. Brush constructed the world's first electricity-generating wind turbine on a 60-foot iron mast behind his Cleveland mansion. Brush held more than 50 patents, and his company joined with several others to form General Electric. In 1984, physicist Harold McMaster first demonstrated in his Toledo basement the potential for thin, non-silicon-based films to capture the sun's energy. Glasstech, now called First Solar, has led the conversion of Toledo into a solar manufacturing hub. The University of Toledo trains engineers for the many photovoltaic companies in the region, and, in 2007, it added the Wright Center for Photovoltaics Innovation and Commercialization to transfer what's in its labs to nearby factories.

...

"Ohio has a legitimate claim to being a leader in renewable energy, which is what makes the effort to stymie renewables here all the more ironic," said Bill Spratley, former executive director of Green Energy Ohio, an advocacy organization in Columbus. He said if the Seitz bill became law, "we might end up supplying everyone else with these wonderful technologies while we don't get to benefit from them ourselves."

Spratley testified against Seitz's bill. He noted that there are roughly 80 companies making parts for wind power systems in Ohio and scores of engineers and sales representatives installing solar, "and those jobs aren't going anywhere," he said. "Those are local jobs."

Ten years ago, more Ohio politicians embraced Spratley's message. In 2007-08, as the "Energy, Jobs and Progress" plan made its way toward law, energy demand was strong, prices were expected to remain high, and awareness of coal's contribution to climate change had peaked. The law committed Ohio to cutting energy consumption by 22 percent by 2025 and diversifying sources so that 12.5 percent of its electricity would come from alternative energy sources—geothermal, biomass, wind, solar.

In 2011, the former American Tradition Institute, now the Energy and Environment Legal Institute, commissioned an analysis of the economic impacts of Ohio's energy standards. Based in Washington, the EELI receives funding from Peabody Energy and Arch Coal, the two largest suppliers of coal in the United States. The Beacon Hill Institute, then an affiliate of Boston's Suffolk University and a frequent publisher of papers critical of climate-related policies, undertook the study.Demand and prices fell with the recession and the shale gas boom, but the promise of more jobs and less global warming continued to resonate. Or it did until studies started showing up that warned that the law would do more harm than good.

In its report, Beacon Hill forecast that the Ohio energy standards would result in the loss of 9,750 jobs, wipe out $1.1 billion in disposable income every year, and force Ohioans to pay $8.6 billion more for electricity in 2025. The authors, among them BHI's executive director, David G. Tuerck, reached this conclusion based on an economic model that ignored the rapidly declining cost of electricity generated by wind and solar. Beacon Hill later lost its Suffolk University affiliation because, a university spokesman told The Boston Globe, its research lacked rigor and tended to reach conclusions sought by its underwriters.

...

no link below, many

Cost claim and rebuttal.

On April 13, 2011, ALEC sent the Beacon report to all its members in the Ohio legislature, warning that the energy rules were "a blueprint for economic misery."

RPS cost claim and savings rebuttal.

Citing the study, state Sen. Kris Jordan introduced a bill five months later to repeal the alternative energy standards. The measure didn't make it out of committee, but Jordan, Seitz and others kept at it, until, in 2014, they managed to secure a two-year freeze on meeting the annual benchmarks established under the 2008 law.

Cost claim and rebuttal

More scare studies followed. In 2015, the Institute of Political Economy at Utah State University published a paper suggesting Ohio's energy rules would kill off 29,000 jobs. Last spring, the Buckeye Institute, a free-market think tank across the street from the Ohio Statehouse in Columbus, modeled four economic scenarios; the rosiest estimated that the renewable and energy efficiency standards would cost Ohio 6,800 jobs and $806 million in GDP by 2026.

RPS jobs claim and rebuttal.

"Those studies are completely bogus," said Terrence O'Donnell, a lawyer representing renewable energy developers at Dickinson Wright, a Columbus law practice. "The Utah one is the most ridiculous, because it blames everything that happened to the economy during the recession on the renewable portfolio standards. It's laughable. There's not one policy maker I know of who still refers to it." The Buckeye Institute, he added, assesses "a fictitious Ohio law, not the one on the books." For example, the Buckeye economists assume "that the cost containment provisions in the law simply won't kick in if prices for renewable energy rise. But they don't say why." And the price of solar electricity hasn't just fallen a little bit; it's less than half of what it was three years ago.

Several other studies have concluded that Ohio's energy rules have, on the contrary, created jobs and improved the economy.One, published by Ohio State University's Center for Resilience, found that in 2012 alone, the law stimulated a modest .04 percent, or $160 million, in GDP growth statewide. According to the Ohio Environmental Council (OEC), the state added more than 2,300 renewable energy projects and 25,000 clean energy jobs since 2009. Not minus 29,000 jobs, but plus 25,000 jobs, and not based on a model, but on payroll and labor statistics.

Renewable Portfolio Standards, State by State

Trish Demeter, the OEC's managing director of energy, said the 2008 law benefits the state in another way. Its energy efficiency provisions are saving money. For every dollar invested in efficiency, she said, "Ohio ratepayers are saving between $1.10 and $4.20 on their utility bills, depending on what kind of consumer they are." She said this data came from actual receipts, not models, and had been reviewed by the Ohio Consumers Council and the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy (ACEEE).

So whose numbers are right? On behalf of Gov. Kasich's office, Matt Cox, a Ph.D. from MIT and founder of Greenlink, a consulting practice in Atlanta, modeled three scenarios to try to determine if Ohio's energy rules were too aggressive. Overall, Cox found that the rules generated more jobs, more GDP and, in time, lowered electrical bills.

Ohio State Rep. Bill Seitz

Seitz told InsideClimate News that Cox ought not to have factored public health impacts of air pollution into his study. Cox responded, "How can you do a cost-benefit analysis and not factor in a cost that is borne, not by the utility, but by everyone else?"

Dave Anderson is policy and communications manager for the Energy & Policy Institute, a watchdog group headquartered in San Francisco. He and his team note that all three of the organizations behind the Ohio scare studies—Beacon Hill, Utah State and Buckeye—have received donations from the Koch brothers or their affiliates. For example, the Buckeye Institute receives funding from the Koch-backed Donors Capital Fund and Claude R. Lambe Charitable Foundations, as well as directly from the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation.

Passionate Opposition to Wind Power

The bill that froze Ohio's energy rules in 2014 also created an Energy Mandates Study Committee to determine whose numbers were best and what to do next.

To staff the committee, Seitz turned to Sam Randazzo, general counsel for a consortium of electricity purchasers large and small called the Industrial Energy Users of Ohio. Randazzo has been deeply involved in shaping Ohio's energy policy for five decades and, like Seitz, opposes the 2008 standards.

On Aug. 8, 2016, as the freeze neared expiration and the EMSC was due with its findings, Seitz wrote to 10 utility, gas and coal lobbyists, as well as Randazzo, that "we should be meeting as a small group to figure out what that report is going to say." (The watchdog group EPI obtained this email through a public records request.)

The EMSC counted 12 elected officials, among them Seitz, as members. These 12 collectively received $830,000 in campaign contributions from utilities, oil and gas interests, and coal mining companies, according to an investigation by the National Institute on Money in State Politics. Contributions from electric utilities to Seitz more than tripled after he began trying to dismantle the state's renewable energy standards.

Following the Money

Randazzo disputed any notion that the committee was stacked by the fossil fuel industry. "This was a legislatively appointed body with representation by both Republicans and Democrats," he said. And, it was "absolutely open to all stakeholder positions."

In an interview, Seitz was blunt about whose interests he was looking out for. "Coal is moribund and crowded out by natural gas. If there's anyone I should have an affinity for it's the natural gas guys. ... The old saying is, you dance with who brung you to the dance. In Ohio, natural gas is who brung us to the dance."

Seitz despises wind turbines, and his dedication to rolling back Ohio's energy standards stems in part from his passionate opposition to wind power. In fact, the only reason he voted for the standards back in 2008, he said, was a promise by the Senate president that he could write the language on turbines. Over time, Seitz has been behind restrictions that have wiped out any large new projects. "There will be no wind farms!" he said, with satisfaction.

Turbines, Seitz said, take up too much room, don't work when the wind doesn't blow, and are not a good fit for his district, in the far corner of the state where it borders Indiana and Kentucky. His neighbors love spending time in their yards and don't want any turbines wrecking their "view sheds," or chopping up bats and birds, he said. And it doesn't help matters that "it seems to be a cabal of urban millennials who love wind [power] and want to inflict the damage on rural landscapes—stick it out there in the country where all the bumpkins can't do anything about it. That's not very nice. So I'm not a big fan of wind."

Gov. John Kasich

The final Energy Mandates Study Committee report was a gift to incumbent utilities and gas and coal interests. It recommended an indefinite extension of the freeze on renewable standards and more or less mirrored a bill Kasich vetoed on Dec. 22, 2016, saying the measure could undermine the state's improved business climate and prevent businesses and homeowners from saving money by saving energy.

Undeterred by Kasich's veto, HB 114, the bill that passed on March 30, contains much of the EMSC wishlist.

Seitz's staff also received advice from the Consumer Energy Alliance on expanding the definition of what counts as an alternative form of energy. The CEA is comprised of few consumers, operates out of HBW Resources, a Washington-based lobbying firm, and is backed by major oil and gas companies, such as Chevron, ExxonMobil, Marathon, Shell and Norway's Statoil. It's a lobbying group that has been challenged before the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission for submitting public comment letters from individuals who later said in sworn statements that they never signed them. The CEA withdrew a petition in Wisconsin after a local reporter found that some people who signed it actually opposed the utility rate changes CEA was pushing.

Seitz laughed at the notion that he is the face of a well-funded industry campaign. "As I've made clear 20 times, I find mandates philosophically obnoxious," he said. "Look, I'm an antitrust lawyer by background and training. Antitrust lawyers tend to favor competition and not be a big fan of monopolies, and tend to believe that government interference ought to be kept to a minimum."

His bill is now in the state Senate, where it may face an uphill fight. John Fortney, spokesman for the Republican majority caucus and Senate President Larry Obhof, said any legislation will have to be a compromise acceptable to both houses and Kasich. Kasich's office did not respond to repeated requests for an interview.

Andrew Kear, an assistant professor of political science and environment and sustainability at Bowling Green State University, said HB 114 can't survive without substantial changes. He said any measure will have to recognize that renewable energy is an economic driver in parts of the state. "They have to get beyond the false dichotomy that it's environment versus economy," he said.

http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/these-corporations-have-biggest-influence-climate-policy

For better or worse, corporations have a major influence on climate change policy. Just look at Koch Industries, a multinational conglomerate owned by conservative billionaires Charles and David Koch that has contributed hundreds of millions to federal candidates and lobbying over the last 25 years.

The "Corporate Carbon Policy Footprint," a new analysis from U.K. nonprofit InfluenceMap, now ranks Koch Industries as the company with the strongest opposition to the Paris climate agreement and most intensely lobbies against policies in line with the landmark global accord.

The InfluenceMap scoring system does not measure a company's actual greenhouse gas emissions. Rather, it measures "the extent to which a corporation is supporting or obstructing the climate policy process."

For the InfluenceMap report, researchers analyzed more than "30,000 pieces of evidence" on 250 global companies and 50 major trade associations on their lobbying records, advertising, public relations and sponsored research, according to Bloomberg.

The research group gave the Wichita-based company an "F" grade for its anti-climate actions:

"Koch Industries appears to be actively opposing almost all areas of climate legislation. In 2014 in the US, they were reportedly active in their opposition to a carbon tax, funding politicians and campaigns to oppose the tax. Similarly, in 2014 they appear to have opposed the U.S. EPA Clean Power Plan in consultation and through direct engagement with policy makers, and boasted about their success in blocking the US Cap and Trade Scheme in 2010. Additionally, they appear to be opposing measures to transition to a low carbon economy, advocating against renewable energy subsidies, and funding groups that have opposed energy efficiency standards, the repeal of fossil fuel subsidies and the need for action on climate change. They seem to be exceptionally active in opposing renewable energy standards across the U.S. Both the organization and its CEO, Charles Koch, appear to have questioned climate change science, and have reportedly funded climate denial. Senior executives are active in both the National Association of Manufacturers and ALEC, which also appear to be resisting climate change related regulations and policies."

On the opposite end of the spectrum, Silicon Valley tech giant Apple was ranked highest on the list and has an A+ for its support of climate change action and its positive engagement with a number of climate change policy areas.

Here are the report's key findings:

35 of the 50 most influential are actively lobbying against climate policy. They include companies in the fossil fuel value chain (ExxonMobil, Valero Energy, Chevron), energy intensive companies (BASF, ArcelorMittal, Bayer, Dow Chemical and Solvay) and electric utilities with large amounts of coal generating capacity (Southern Company, Duke Energy and American Electric Power).

Also in this group of 35 influential companies holding back climate policy are four powerful automotive manufacturers (Fiat Chrysler, Ford, BMW and Daimler). The research found the companies lobbying to delay or dilute efficiency and CO2 emissions standards and procedures both in Europe and North America. Depending on region, passenger vehicle emissions account for 12% or more of all greenhouse gas emissions.

On the other side, 15 of the 50 most influential are pushing for an ambitious climate policy agenda, favoring renewable power and electric vehicles. They include signatories to the RE100 initiative committing to buying 100% renewable power (Apple, Ikea, Unilever, Coca Cola and Nestle) as well as power sector companies (SSE, Enel, EDF, Iberdrola and National Grid) who are shifting their business models towards low carbon electricity generation.

"The data shows the climate policy agenda, in terms of corporate influencing, is being driven by a small number of massive global corporations," Dylan Tanner, InfluenceMap executive director, said in a statement. "It also shows a group of powerful of companies in the tech, consumer goods and utilities sectors increasingly pushing for policy to implement the Paris Agreement."

InfluenceMap also ranked "influencers" or powerful trade associations that actively lobby against climate policies. A number of trade associations received an "F" grade, but here are the bottom five: U.S. Chamber of Commerce; American Petroleum Institute; American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity; National Mining Association; and the American Legislative Exchange Council.

Check out the full list here.

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mike davis says tee'd up trump win:

In the Midwest the 2010 Tea Party victories brought a new generation of feral Republicans to power, many of them groomed by far-right think tanks such as Indiana’s Policy Review Foundation (once headed by Mike Pence), Michigan’s Mackinac Center, Wisconsin’s MacIver Institute, and Minnesota’s Center of the American Experiment, all of them spoiling for a fight to the death with the region’s public-sector unions and progressive big-city governments. Coordinating through the State Policy Network (sixty-five conservative think tanks) and the American Legislative Exchange Council, they launched campaigns to destroy public-sector bargaining rights, defund unions through right-to-work laws, and privatize public education through vouchers.

They focused in other words on increasing their structural and legal advantages in ways that Democrats would find difficult, even impossible to roll back. Unions and students, of course, conducted an epic resistance in Wisconsin but were unable to recall Scott Walker, in large part because of the lackluster character of the Democratic candidate. In Ohio the unions were more successful and repealed right-to-work by referendum, but in Indiana, Michigan and West Virginia, Republican majorities rammed through right-to-work and in Michigan, a Mackinac Center-inspired receivership for Detroit’s schools.

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/02/the-great-god-trump-and-the-white-working-class

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http://www.exposedbycmd.org/2017/07/20/big-coal-burns-bright-alec-conference

...But Big Coal, which drives ALEC’s energy and anti-environmental model policies, is burning bright for him now. The fracking industries and king coal producers Noble Energy and ARCO dominated the first day of the 44th ALEC conference. The terms “clean coal” and “clean fossil fuels,” oxymorons if I ever heard one, were uttered so many times by the gas and oil industry that I lost count. And dirty coal dominated the day, with the gas and oil industry, including ExxonMobil, paying tens of thousands of dollars to host the first lunch and an entire afternoon of workshops.

The big coal producers can barely contain their glee at the gutting of environmental policies rolling out of the White House. At the opening lunch, Noble Energy executive Chip Rimer extolled that the “oil and gas industry is an example of what good policies can do.”

At the afternoon workshops paying homage to fossil fuels, a Colorado State Senator exclaimed how “great” it is to see the federal government shifting back to fossil fuels. Yikes. A Colorado Commissioner talked about burdensome, “purely political” state regulations while simultaneously bemoaning that some of her constituents are living surrounded by intrusive sound barriers erected by the fracking industry. Exactly whose rights are being infringed upon?

A gas and oil representative lamented that all the public hears about is when something goes wrong, like the “Firestone event.” Turns out the “Firestone event” was a deadly house explosion that recently occurred in Firestone, Colorado where two people were killed. The conflagration was caused when a well owned by Anadarko Petroleum was still attached to an abandoned, leaking gas line. Anadarko, a big fracking company, is a sponsor of the ALEC conference. What a nuisance that the public remembers such an event and that the state would step in to require additional safety precautions!

Renewable energy technologies are the enemy at ALEC. The Colorado Senator stated that renewable energies can’t even be considered an industry because of the subsidies needed and because “we can’t afford charities.” Totally ignored are the massive public subsidies handed out to the gas and oil industry. Even one of the presenters had to remind the audience that the fracking industry had received billions of dollars in public subsidies. You could hear a pin drop in response.

And on the docket today is the consideration by the Commerce, Insurance and Economic Development Task Force of a model policy resolution condemning Property-Assessed Clean Energy (PACE) programs, pushed by Americans for Tax Reform. PACE programs allow property owners to receive low-cost commercial loans to finance energy efficiency and renewable energy projects with long-term repayment options.

Sigh. So much for the free market.

Learn more about what’s on the agenda at this ALEC conference at ExposedbyCMD.org.

http://www.exposedbycmd.org/2017/07/23/the-alec-swampland

by ct

Though ALEC has an uneasy relationship with President Trump, they haven’t hesitated in adopting his “drain the swamp” rhetoric when extolling their plans to amend the federal constitution, repeal workers’ rights or gut social safety net programs. Trump keeps filling his “swamp” with cronies, political insiders and the corporate lobbyists that also populate the ALEC swamp.

One of these lobbyists, working for the behemoth Chinese online retailer Alibaba, asked me to communicate information about his company to my (presumably male) boss. When I replied that I am a legislator, he looked me up and down incredulously until I replied “They let women be legislators now.” He didn’t speak to me again.

Experiencing ALEC is like diving into a swamp inhabited by creatures of the past. ALEC pushes policies that take us back to a federal government sitting on the sidelines while people suffered and starved, drank contaminated water and sustained injuries at work with no recourse. They are still lamenting the 1965 law that created the Medicaid and Medicare programs, as this, according to Avik Roy of the conservative Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity, was the “real government takeover of health care.”

So ALEC is trying to backdoor these rollbacks by calling for a first ever Article V constitutional convention to cut federal spending and limit federal authority. ALEC’s Article V constitutional convention push is really a hissy fit of the far right. They are angry at their inability to persuade Congressional Republicans to gut critical, popular social safety net programs and direct the resulting savings towards massive tax cuts for their corporate buddies and wealthy friends. And ALEC members, as indicated in the Health Taskforce, are besides themselves about Congress’ seeming inability to repeal the Affordable Care Act and shrink Medicaid, which they called for yesterday in two unanimously adopted resolutions.

ALEC’s real goal is preventing the federal government from providing health care and most other things in the first place. And they are working diligently, with the Balance Budget Amendment Taskforce (BBAT) and the Convention of States (COS), to do just that by corralling 34 states to call for an Article V Constitutional Convention.

But divisions have emerged, a rarity in ALEC land. The BBAT wants a convention to adopt amendments specifically requiring a federal balance budget. They believe that 27 states out of the 34 needed, have already passed resolutions calling for such a constitutional convention.

The Convention of States (COS) project, launched at the 2013 annual ALEC conference by tea partier Mark Meckler, aims at a broader constitutional convention to pass amendments to institute term limits, and in general, limit the spending and authority of the federal government. Twelve states have passed resolutions calling for this type of constitutional convention.

I couldn’t help but compare Meckler’s talk this week to his 2013 presentation at my first ALEC conference, as he has since been buffed, shined and suited up. His message is no longer about leading a revolution, but rather restoring the constitution. He concludes with the same hard sell for state legislators to embrace our front-line role in defending liberty and “be who the founders expected you to be.” And Meckler’s solution if legislators don’t go along? “Tell your colleagues they are willing dupes for George Soros and the radical left.”

When asked by a Michigan legislator why COS doesn’t just join the BBAT and get that done first, the divisions between the two efforts emerged, something rarely seen in ALEC land. The COS folks believe that the authority of the federal government is the disease which must be cured, and the spending is but a symptom.

A representative from Pennsylvania added the latest rallying cry to the effort—repealing the 17th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and allowing state legislatures to once again choose U.S. Senators. Meckler responded that it’s more politically feasible to advance a constitutional amendment that U.S. Senators will be controlled by state legislatures.

In the meantime, the next stop for this entire effort is Arizona, where that state legislature has called for a September Convention of States. When I asked Arizona Rep. Don Shooter about this gathering, he stated that they intend to pass federal constitutional amendments they will ask Congress to consider. Though he knows Congress won’t act, that underscores the point.

Let’s hope the public won’t go along with this ALEC act which could substantially harm millions of individuals and families throughout our country.

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