Writing GOP legislation, ALEC style: {insert name of state legislative body}

by David Safier

I've written about ALEC — American Legislative Exchange Council — on a number of occasions. It's the corporate-funded group that pays for Republican legislators from all over the country to gather and be handed ready-made legislation to drop in their state legislatures. In Arizona alone, 52 Republican legislators are members.

One of the features of ALEC's website is hundreds of pieces of "model legislation" Republicans can copy, paste and edit to fit their state's needs. These aren't snippets and suggestions. They're complete pieces of legislation. But there was always a problem. I couldn't read them because the model legislation pages are password protected.

It's a problem no longer. A new website, ALEC Exposed, has 800 of ALEC's model bills on its site for easy download, as well as all kinds of wonderful information about the organization.

For instance, here is a line from the Resolution Supporting Private Scholarship Tax Credits, adopted and approved by ALEC in 2001:

THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED that the {insert name of state legislative body} supports the creation of a tax credit for donations to nonprofit organizations that make more privately funded scholarships and educational assistance available to children.

See how easy that is? Just put in your state name, and you're ready to go.

In education, you can choose from bills like the Education Enterprise Zone Act, The Foster Child Scholarship Program Act and the Parental Choice Scholarship Accountability Act, among many, many others.

Not interested in education? You can also choose model legislation about: Tort Reform; Health, Big Pharma, and Social Welfare; Environment, Energy, and Agriculture; Democracy, Voting, and Federal Relations; Tax & Budget; and, Russell Pearce's favorite, Guns, Prisons, Crime and Immigration.

It's fun for the whole conservative legislative family!