There is a frantic frenzy in the blogosphere and elsewhere right now to identify the members of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) . The lists are being compiled off of every part of the ALEC webpage – something that I started doing in late February. My earliest posts of legislators involved with ALEC was on another site on the 4th of March and I have kept going from there.
The question begs to be asked – will we ever know all the members and the answer is no (which is epitomized in the quote below). The only way that we can know all the members of ALEC is if there are no more legislative members in ALEC and that should be the goal of everyone collecting the names. The endgame – the goal - is to identify ALEC members, to make sure they are never re-elected or appointed to another public office through on-going efforts to get better candidates – who are not ALEC members – to run against them. You have to have an action plan or the lists mean nothing. In today’s world that is a challenge that each one of us must take on if our democracy is to survive.
Yesterday I received information from Kossack Sloan that was disheartening. A blogger in Iowa who has been actively reporting on ALEC had written an email to the state offices inquiring about how many legislators were members and this was the reply
"A friend suggested writing to the Chief Clerk of the Iowa House. His was sure that the state paid membership dues for groups like this. So I emailed Mr. W. Charles Smithson, Chief Clerk of the Iowa House. I was a bit astounded by the reply I received:
Dear Mr. Bradley:
Technically, all House members belong to ALEC unless they choose to opt-out.
For this period none of the 60 House Republicans has opted out (the names of the House Republicans are available on the General Assembly’s Web site). Four democrats also did not opt out."
As chilling as this is to know it should provide additional impetus for each and every one of to work as hard as we can to remove this blight from our government and that begins with identifying ALEC members and continues with on-going vigilance.
You could say I have a lot of experiencing identifying ALEC members. It has been my life for the past six months. My lists have grown and grown and the methods I have used should be shared with all. I have done all my work and compiled every name I have from a public source - the web – (unlike ALEC, there is nothing nefarious abouto my work) so there are no special tools needed, except the computer you are currently using and time, lots and lots of time.
In an ALEC press release from October 29th of 2010, they stated, “ALEC is a private organization similar to membership organizations such as the YMCA.” Well, after months of intensive research I can tell you that all ALEC members note their membership to the YMCA on their webpages and it is now time for them to also note their membership to ALEC. If membership in ALEC is such a damn good thing – their members should be shouting it from the rooftops - just like they acknowledge their membership and service to the YMCA.
Members
The concept of an “ALEC member” needs to be used cautiously in all your writing. To be a “member” – they have to have paid dues. ALEC dues are a strange thing. When checking financial reports sometimes you see $25, $50, $100, $200 and even $1,000 for a lifetime membership. The majority of the time you will see these amounts noted on financial reports as “contributions”, not dues. Once you see that payment for dues or membership you know you have an ALEC member. You also have a confirmed ALEC member when the legislator admits it on the webpage, or in an documented interview or as a bio for a special event – all areas that are ripe with identifying members. The one place that has been “iffy” for establishing memberships is correspondence. Only if the correspondence is published and remains unchallenged – does it become a source. Another place that is iffy is attending ALEC meetings – because some stupid legislators will go to “a meeting” – and then never go back after they see the extreme radical nature of ALEC.
The ALEC Webpage
The ALEC webpage is troublesome if you are planning on taking member names from it. The reason for this is whenever ALEC gets any type of negative publicity they go through their website and scrub away anything they think should be gone. Because of this any links you may have saved for your member data will be lost. Keeping a screen copy of any webpage that you pull up from a cached version is mandatory. Whenever I pull member data from the ALEC webpages – I keep a screen print of it for future reference. One source of recent ALEC member information is Inside ALEC, their monthly magazine. You can peruse that for member names and even visit the “Member News” at the back of the magazine to get current information.
Identifying Past Members
Many people want to know only the current members – but that is short-sighted in the long run. The past members may run for office again or they may seek public appointments such as judicial appointment or agency appointments. ( A wonderful example of this is Ray Haynes from CA – he is always running for office and is an ex grand poobah of ALEC.) It is important to know everyone that has had past involvement with ALEC so that you can voice your opinion when and if the time comes that they are in the public eye. Another reason to know past members is that their offspring may go into politics or public service and bring that nasty ALEC philosophy with them – and that needs to be monitored.
Campaign Financial Statements
These are a good source of finding out who paid their dues in the states that allow their legislators to report this expenditure on the campaign reports. There is other interesting information on campaign reports – like Renee Kosel (IL) who actually puts down her ALEC activities as “continuing ed” or Noble Ellington (LA) who in two different years – reported paying his dues twice – I’m surprised he’s not a lifetime member. The one thing to remember is that campaign reports will also include candidates who paid ALEC dues but didn’t get elected – which is a good thing to know because they will probably run again in the future. The good thing about these is they are government documents and they usually don’t ever disappear.
Bluebooks
Each state has their own name for this. It is a listing of all the legislators for the state in any given legislative year. The problem with using these is that ALEC members very seldom claim their membership in their state bio – they are evidently so ashamed that they belong to this despicable organization that they don’t claim membership to ALEC on their state or personal webpage bios. It has been amazing to me what they will claim other non-legislative oriented memberships on their state webpages – but seldom claim membership to the organization that puts “copy and paste” legislation into their hand - yet almost all of them claim their membership to NCSL. This type of research can be time-consuming and low yielding. But, one of my searches did yield Scott Walker’s membership which I posted here on Daily Kos.
Other Medias
The web is a huge time-consuming source of information for identifying ALEC members. You have to be very specific in your search parameters. For example the following search string will be productive “legislators name” “ALEC” –Baldwin but you may have to view 10 or 20 pages of search results to find something useful. Newspaper articles, member journals of other organizations, conference reports where ALEC members are identified in their bios as ALEC members are all good sources. The caveat here – again – is that web pages have a tendency to disappear, so you need to make a screen shot of the information for future reference.
My Parting Words on ALEC Searches
Can you remember the last time your legislator sat down with THEIR TRUE CONSTITUENTS - the state taxpayer - for two or three days – multiple times a year - to discuss OUR needs for legislature. The residents of every state would love to have their legislator's attention for more than 2 hours at a town meeting - but I guess we don't have enough cash in our pockets to get their attention.
In a perfect world, we would take a list of those people involved with ALEC and use it to make sure that they are never re-elected or appointed to another public office in our democracy. In a perfect world, you would watch every move of your ALEC legislative members and challenge every bill they bring before your legislature.
The literature that has come out and is currently being distributed proves that the legislators who belong to ALEC are no longer representing the people – but are representing the corporations that ALEC serves. Read every diary posted on Exposing ALEC, because you will see that even though the ALEC bills legislators introduce can sound nice and people centered – they are heinous and only benefit the ALEC corporations at the expense of each one of us in our states.
It is my hope that over the course of the next two election cycles that we can continue our focus to remove these reprehensible ALEC legislators from our state and federal government.
Protest ALEC – August 5 – New Orleans
If you can’t make it to New Orleans – grab a bunch of your friends and protest at your own state capitol that day. Lets make this an ALEC day of protest around the world – yes, ALEC is involved - around the world.