ALEC’s Annual Meeting This Week Centers a Right-Wing Corporate Agenda

The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) is holding its 51^st Annual Meeting in Denver this week at the four-star Hyatt Regency Denver at Colorado Convention Center. ALEC state lawmakers, right-wing operatives, and corporate lobbyists are descending on the Rocky Mountain state to hear presentations and vote on model policies and resolutions that impact the environment, education, elections, fundamental human rights, and more.

Colorado Governor Jared Polis (D), Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds (R), Oklahoma Governor Kevin Stitt (R), Liberty Energy CEO Chris Wright, and GOP pollster Scott Rasmussen are slated to speak at the conference. Polis is the first high-profile Democrat to speak to the ALEC faithful in recent years.

The annual meeting officially kicked off last night with an anti-abortion “late night dessert & coffee reception” with national abortion ban proponent Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, and “pre-recorded remarks” from pollster Kellyanne Conway, Trump’s former senior counselor, to coach legislators on “how to communicate” about abortion during this fall’s campaign season. ALEC plotted its post-Dobbs strategy at its annual meeting last summer, and at least 684 state lawmakers affiliated with the group have voted to prohibit abortion access, a Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) analysis found.

This morning, the “Christian ALEC” (officially the National Association of Christian Lawmakers) — which circulates anti-abortion model legislation among its members — hosted a prayer breakfast for attendees.

ALEC Ramps Up Its Election Work

In June 2021, ALEC CEO Lisa Nelson wrote in Real Clear Politics, “ALEC doesn’t have ‘template legislation’ on voting because ALEC doesn’t work on voting issues.” CMD exposed that claim as a lie, revealing a Council for National Policy meeting video where she described the work ALEC was doing on the issue in targeted states and admitted to outsourcing model voting legislation to the Honest Elections Project (HEP).

ALEC has held at least three voter suppression summits with HEP, a voter suppression project of Leonard Leo’s 85 Fund, and last summer passed a model bill pushed by HEP banning ranked choice voting, the process by which voters rank candidates in order of preference on their ballots rather than simply voting in favor of a single candidate.

This week, ALEC members will consider model policies that align with HEP priorities laid out in its 2024 “Safeguarding Our Elections” report: the Citizen Only Voting Amendment and Only Citizens Vote Model Policy. While the voting amendment is targeted at prohibiting municipalities from allowing noncitizens to vote in local elections, the model policy covers state and federal elections — even though it is already illegal for noncitizens to vote in either. That push is part of what the New York Times describes as a wider GOP campaign designed to promote Trump’s baseless claims of widespread voter fraud and “echoes the racist ‘great replacement’ conspiracy theory.”

“In recent months, the specter of immigrants voting illegally in the U.S. has erupted into a leading election-year talking point for Republicans,” Politico reported. Republican-controlled legislatures in Iowa, Kentucky, Missouri, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Wisconsin have placed constitutional amendments to ban noncitizen voting on the ballot this November as a way of driving GOP turnout.

ALEC is also offering a workshop on the nonissue of noncitizens voting, called “States Must Do: Protecting the Vote.” The description of the training claims “the threat of non-citizen participation in our US elections is real.”

ALEC may claim this, but the facts prove otherwise. “Every legitimate study ever done on the question shows that voting by noncitizens in state and federal elections is vanishingly rare,” the Brennan Center reported. As the Brennan Center points out, even the Charles Koch-founded and funded Cato Institute determined that “noncitizens don’t illegally vote in detectable numbers.”

Meeting attendees will also debate on whether to approve The School Board Election Date Act, which would politicize school board elections across the country by requiring candidates to indicate a “political party designation” beginning in 2026 and mandating that they coincide with November elections every four years. In its Safeguarding Our Elections report, HEP recommends consolidating school board election dates with general elections in November.

Another workshop, called “Foreign Influence in American Campaigns,” will consider “options” state lawmakers have to “prevent foreign influence on state campaigns.” In the same report, HEP advises lawmakers to “ban foreign influence in ballot measure campaigns.”

In January, the ostensibly “nonpartisan” ALEC announced that it is joining forces with Run GenZ to try to draw young voters to the GOP. At the meeting, ALEC members can attend a “Boomer to Zoomer: Run GenZ Informational Meeting” to learn more about the right-wing youth candidate training partnership.

ALEC Steps Up Attacks on Strategies to Address Unfolding Climate Emergency

Meeting attendees will once again consider a number of pro-fossil fuel and climate-harming policies at the meeting this week.

Since the summer of 2021, CMD has repeatedly documented ALEC’s consideration and promotion of multiple model bills punishing companies and public entities that embrace environmental, social, and governance factors (ESG) in their business and investing practices.

Consumers’ Research Executive Director Will Hild, an anti-ESG zealot, has become a regular speaker at ALEC meetings since it became a major sponsor, and ALEC has, in turn, promoted his attacks. Hild is again scheduled to speak at this week’s meeting and is likely the sponsor of the workshop, “America Runs on Energy: ESG and Grid Sustainability.” The description of the training claims that, “Activism in investing is far from new, but the push to give outsized importance to ESG scores has a deleterious effect on our nation’s power grid.” Of course, it mentions nothing about the unfolding climate crisis and its impact on the grid.

Model legislation up for a vote at the conference relates to the power grid. The Equitable Escalation of Electricity Demand Act, for example, blames rising electrical costs on electric vehicles (EVs) and Big Tech, and seeks to pass the increased costs on to EV owners and technology companies that manage large data centers.

Another model bill, the Electric Ratepayers Affordability and Reliability Advocacy Act, claims that consumer utility boards have been co-opted by “green energy” advocates and proposes the creation of a new statewide position, a “Ratepayer Affordability and Reliability Advocate” with the “singular mission” of advocating for “the most reliable, [lowest] cost form of electricity in a service area.”

ALEC members will also vote on a related bill, the Electricity Trajectory Management Act, which would stop the decommissioning of power plants that use coal, natural gas, water, or nuclear for energy generation and require building new ones in order to meet the increasing power demands EVs and data centers place on the grid.

Under ALEC’s draft Resolution Urging States to Not Allow the Use of IRIS Assessments to Inform its Rulemakings, state regulators would not be allowed to use the Environmental Protection Agency’s Integrated Risk Information System (IRIS) “as the basis of hazard assessment or risk assessment decisions or as the basis to establish air, water or waste rulemaking.”

The Natural Asset Company Prohibition Act would ban this type of corporation. In 2023, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) floated the idea of including “Natural Asset Companies” (NACs) on the New York Stock Exchange, but then backtracked. NACs are a new type of corporation that put a market value on ecosystems and natural resources and are organized to “actively manage, maintain, restore (as applicable) and grow the value of natural assets and their production.”

The State Financial Officers Foundation (SFOF), the ALEC-tied group of Republican state treasurers, auditors, CFOs, and others weaponized to fight “woke capitalism” and ESG, and American Stewards of Liberty, the group tasked with upending Biden’s 30×30 executive order to help tackle the climate crisis, worked together to drum up opposition to NACs.

ALEC is also seeking to redefine terms used to promote sustainable energy to include traditional methods. One bill, the Act to Define Clean Energy, would replace references to “renewable energy” with “clean energy,” so that “power generation supplied by nuclear fuel” can be promoted in green energy policies. A related model up for consideration, The Affordable, Reliable and Clean Energy Security Act, would include natural gas and nuclear in the definition of “green energy.”

Smoothing the Way for States to Overturn Regulations After Chevron

Last month, the Supreme Court rejected 40 years of precedent and overturned the 1984 decision in Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council, summarily curtailing the power of federal agencies to interpret laws they administer and giving that power to the courts. The monumental decision provides an opening for lawyers to overturn regulations that address everything from the ongoing climate emergency to the healthcare crisis and workplace safety.

ALEC meeting attendees will hear a presentation titled, “After Relentless: What Will Chevron’s Revised Status Mean for State Officials?” and vote on model legislation to Establish the Office of Regulatory Management in the states. “This Office aims to enhance and utilize transparency to reduce unnecessary regulatory burdens and ensure that new regulations are evidence-based and cost-effective,” the ALEC description reads.

Once an office is up and running, it is clear that the regulatory “transparency” created will be used by anti-regulation zealots and corporations to challenge regulations that conflict with their ideology or impact their profit models.

Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI)

Partisan legislative attacks on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) efforts from the Right ramped up in 2023 and 2024, so it isn’t surprising that ALEC would provide model bills related to this to aid their members.

The Freedom from Indoctrination Act introduced this week prohibits universities and colleges from requiring DEI courses and prevents them from requiring first-year students to participate in DEI orientation activities. The model policy was first circulated by the right-wing Goldwater Institute and Speech First in April of 2023.

“During the 2023 legislative session alone, anti-diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) bills were introduced in various states 40 separate times, and all of them addressed a combination of the same four objectives: ending mandatory DEI training, preventing the use of diversity statements in job applications and promotion materials, prohibiting hiring practices designed to increase diversity, and/or ending state funding for DEI offices and personnel altogether,” as CMD reported earlier this month.

Following the Supreme Court’s decision in Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College, ALEC is circulating the SCOTUS Anti-Discrimination Implementation Act to officially ban affirmative action programs designed to increase diversity on campuses or make places of higher education reflective of local demographics.

ALEC is also asking its members to vote on the First Amendment Preservation Act, which would prevent any state agency — including universities — from contracting with “media monitoring organizations” or advertisers or marketing companies that work with these organizations.

The bill defines media monitoring organizations as groups that “rate or rank news and information sources for the factual accuracy of their content,” or “provide ratings or rankings of news sources based on misinformation, bias, adherence to journalistic standards, or ethics, including, but not limited to, organizations that claim to engage in fact checking or determining overall news accuracy.”

In other words, this bill seeks to protect those engaged in hate speech or the peddling of mis/disinformation by making it harder for state governments to assess the accuracy of information and by punishing private companies that work with fact checkers to prevent the spread of disinformation.

Education Privatization, Attacks on Free Speech and AI Gun Detection in Schools

On January 30, ALEC launched the Education Freedom Alliance in partnership with the Committee to Unleash Prosperity and the Job Creators Network to further privatize K–12 education through Education Savings Accounts (ESA), or universal, tax-funded school vouchers.

The ALEC-led coalition set “its goal of expanding universal education freedom to 25 states by 2025,” but will struggle to reach that target after only passing three ESA bills — in Alabama, Louisiana, and Missouri — so far this year, bringing the total to 12. ALEC and Charles Koch’s yes. every kid advocacy group will promote ESAs to ALEC attendees in a two-part workshop titled “The New Frontier: ESAs and Beyond.”

ALEC is also asking members to vote on the Microschool Education Act, which would give home-based or micro-school entities of 100 or fewer students the same rights as private and charter schools. Koch and the Walton Family Foundation are major backers of this latest school privatization effort.

ALEC’s American City County Exchange project will vote on the ACCE Model County Code Ordinance, which would streamline zoning for microschools.

In direct attacks on the First Amendment rights of students, ALEC meeting attendees will consider an Act to Prohibit Anti-Semitism in State K–20 Educational Institutions and an Act to Adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) Working Definition of Anti-Semitism.

The first bill appears to be positive on the surface, but within the text it states that, “The Working Definition of Anti-Semitism adopted by the International Holocaust Alliance (IHRA) that contains contemporary examples of anti-semitism may also be used to identify anti-semitism.”

Opponents fear that since this definition includes any criticism of Israel, relying on it will expose anti-war and pro-Palestinian activists to prosecution or hate crime charges for simply speaking out against Israel’s war in Gaza or occupation of Palestine, as Truthout reported in an article tying ALEC to the effort to codify the weaponized definition of anti-semitism.

The second model bill would officially adopt the IHRA definition. ALEC, along with representatives from the Israeli government and the Heritage Foundation, has been pushing state lawmakers to adopt the IHRA definition since as early as 2021.

Lastly, in a bizarre attempt to address the public health crisis of gun violence in our nation’s schools, ALEC is promoting the Use of AI Firearm Detection Software in Schools. The model bill would allow state departments of education to use taxpayer money to buy AI gun detection software.

For many years, ALEC worked with the National Rifle Association (NRA) and Gun Owners of America to develop legislation to loosen gun regulations, promote stand-your-ground laws, allow concealed handguns on college campuses, and prevent cities from suing gun manufacturers, and many others.

Redefining States’ Rights

ALEC may be spoiling for a fight in the U.S. Supreme Court to radically curtail federal powers. Up for consideration at this week’s annual meeting are two bills that would do just that.

The Presumption of State Jurisdiction Amendments, based on legislation in Utah according to the text, declares state sovereignty and jurisdiction over “natural resources; water resources and water rights; agriculture; education; and energy resources,” unless the federal government can show that “jurisdiction over the subject matter in question is specifically enumerated to the federal government under the Constitution.”

Earlier this year, Utah passed the Utah Constitutional Sovereignty Act, which empowers its legislature to “prohibit a government officer from enforcing or assisting in the enforcement of a federal directive within the state if the Legislature determines the federal directive violates the principles of state sovereignty.”

Now ALEC members are asking to vote on the same model. University of Utah Law Professor Robert Keiter told CNN after the bill passed there that, “if the legislature actually passes a concurrent resolution and overrules a federal regulation, then it will likely be overturned due to the Supremacy Clause.”

Banning Squatting

ALEC members will have the opportunity to debate and vote on a couple of models related to squatting, or the occupying of property by anyone who doesn’t own it or have permission to live in it.

The Stop Squatters Act prohibits anyone from the unauthorized entry or occupation of residential or commercial properties, creates a process for having law enforcement remove squatters, and enacts penalties of a misdemeanor if damages are less than $1,000 or a felony if they exceed $1,000. The bill mirrors a model circulated by the right-wing litigation center Pacific Legal Foundation. ALEC is also circulating a Statement of Principles on Illegal Possession of Private Property on the issue.

Squatting data is sparse, and Juan Pablo Garnham, a researcher and communications manager at Princeton University’s Eviction Lab, told The Washington Post in April that “squatting is ‘an extremely rare issue’” in the U.S.

Another Attack on Public Sector Unions

ALEC has long loathed public sector unions and circulated model policies weakening their power. The new so-called Public Employees’ Bill of Rights in front of its membership this week seeks to do the same by mandating that non-dues-paying members be given “equal rights” within a union.

The model bill also allows public employees to sue their unions and obtain a “full accounting” of union activities and dues.

ALEC publishes an anti-union playbook that was recently updated to include bills that target independent contractors and occupational licensing, CMD reported.