While Republicans lie their way through another campaign, their owners are meeting in Dallas,Texas to prepare the marching orders for the upcoming state legislative sessions. Voting for a Republican legislative candidate is about the same as a vote for Charles and David Koch. The Kochs are the major funder for ALEC. They and their corporate buddies have a major say, in actuality probably the only say, in so-called proposed “model” legislation.

It is hard to tell anymore which Iowa legislators are members of ALEC. Since Iowa no longer pays ALEC dues out of House and Senate expenses, legislators are left on their own to pay ALEC dues. ALEC dues are only $100 so it is not a big deal to pay such a small fee. If you happen to be at any appearance for any legislative candidate, ask them if they are an ALEC member. Also ask how they view legislators being so close to corporate interest groups, including advancing bills that ALEC writes often verbatim.

Since ALEC operates behind closed doors, or under a rock if you prefer, it is hard to know exactly what takes place. They have three meetings a year, usually after most legislative sessions, then in the late July/ early August time frame and then another meeting in early December. We can only take an educated guess and say that they take an inventory, then write up new legislation, then hand it out to their minions.

The Center for Media and Democracy has been acting as a watch dog on ALEC. America should appreciate their diligence since they have been able to expose many ALEC legislative initiatives – sometimes even before they were able to get off the ground. Thus once more CMD has posted their assesment of current ALEC doings. This is something every progressive and every citizen concerned about ethics in government should be reading and acting on if need be.

Their most recent effort came out Thursday and it can be found here: It is very hard to distill this to a few of the most egregious, so I recommend that you go to the link to the full list and explanation. However, here briefly are a few of the actions they are expecting to come out of the current ALEC meeting. Note: it looks like ALEC has tried to mask access to many of these links. Thus I took out my link, but you can link from the prwatch link.

Changing Laws Providing for Public Education
The “Affordable Baccalaureate Degree Act” would enrich companies invested in online college degree programs and materials — like Pearson (whose subsidiary Connections Education has been a prominent member of ALEC’s Education Task Force), which sells the LearningStudio platform used by many universities like Arizona State University’s popular and much-hyped online degree program. It would “require all pubic [sic] four-year universities to offer bachelor’s degrees costing no more than $10,000, total, for four years of tuition, fees, and books. The Act would require that ten percent of all public, four-year university degrees awarded reach this price-point within four years of passage of this act.” The bill instructs universities to focus on online and blended learning “to achieve this price-point.”

Changing Laws Protecting the Environment
Not just ALEC’s “Energy, Environment, and Agriculture Task Force” will be talking about the regulation of bodies of water, however. Its “Federal Relations (Federalism) Working Group” will consider a “Draft State Constitutional ‘Water is Life Amendment'” that would encourage the State to resist federal enforcement of federal regulations seeking to protect state waters. It would also make the proposed constitutional change “enforceable in the courts of this State by any taxpaying resident without fee, expense or cost-shifting to the State,” although what entity would bear the cost is unclear.

Changing Laws Providing Healthcare
The “Medicaid Anti-Crowd-Out Act” is a particularly egregious bill that would benefit private health insurance companies by prohibiting a state “from causing or allowing Medicaid enrollment or Medicaid HMO enrollment in any situation where individuals and/or dependents have availability of commercial healthcare insurance or are already enrolled in commercial healthcare insurance” (emphasis added). Jon Peacock, Research Director of Wisconsin Council on Children and Families, said of the draft bill, “It would make anyone with an offer of employer insurance ineligible for Medicaid, regardless of how poor they are and how narrow or expensive the insurance plan is. And the proposal is so poorly drafted that it would seem to make everyone ineligible for Medicaid — because everyone has ‘availability of commercial healthcare insurance.’ This might be the most poorly drafted, overly broad piece of legislation I’ve ever seen.”

This is only a sampling. Please head on over to the link to be amazed at what corporate endorsed laws ALEC wants their minions and lackeys in the Republican Party to advance for them.