Tag: ALEC

Videotape Reveals Corporate-Funded Plan To Try To Overturn A Trump Loss

The right-wing group behind the “Stand your ground” laws began working in February to challenge a Trump election defeat.

A powerful corporate-funded right-wing organization that includes state legislators and lobbyists was already mobilizing early this year to overturn a possible election loss by President Donald Trump, according to a videotape of an official discussing the plan.

“Obviously we all want President Trump to win,” said Lisa Nelson, chair of the controversial American Legislative Exchange Council, which was responsible for getting the at-times-lethal “Stand your ground” laws enacted in several states.

“Really what it comes down to is the states and the state legislators,” Nelson noted in remarks in February, recorded in a videotape obtained by Documented, a watchdog group that tracks corporate influence on public policy.  Continue reading.

Watchdog groups sound the gerrymandering alarm on ALEC’s ‘redistricting’ workshops

The American Legislative Exchange Council is hosting two redistricting workshops during its annual meeting next week.

The shadowy group responsible for crafting many of the Republican Party’s most extreme, far-right laws is holding panels on redistricting at its annual conference next week, a sign that the group may be taking part in the GOP’s efforts to gerrymander in 2021, according to open government experts.

The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) is hosting two workshops during its annual meeting in Austin, Texas, teaching Republican legislators how they should navigate the redistricting process. Lawmakers in a number of GOP-controlled states gerrymandered congressional and legislative district lines at historic proportions the last time the maps were redrawn in 2011 in an attempt to insulate their control over state legislatures.

The two closed-door courses called “How to survive redistricting” and “What is redistricting and why must you do it?” will teach Republican legislators “the nuts and bolts” of redistricting, including the “legal aspects, the census process, demographic landscape and mapping process,” according to ALEC’s website. Lawmakers will also learn from “veterans of redistricting” about methodologies, resources, and strategies “to lead a successful redistricting cycle in your state.”

View the complete August 8 article by Danielle Mclean on the ThinkProgress website here.

DeVos continues carrying out ALEC’s agenda by dismantling for-profit college accountability

The following article by Brett Robertson was posted on the Media Matters website August 25, 2017:

In a little-noticed action, on August 18, the Department of Education announced a rule change that will further loosen accountability of for-profit colleges. The move signals a continuation of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos’ American Legislative Exchange Council-inspired agenda: favoring the interests of fraudulent for-profit colleges over victimized students, and dismantling higher education accountability structures.

In 2010, the administration of then-President Barack Obama announced new rules designed to ensure that for-profit career preparatory colleges yielded appropriate levels of “gainful employment” for their graduates. According to The Washington Post, the rule “effectively would shut down for-profit programs that repeatedly fail to show, through certain measures, that graduates are earning enough to pay down the loans taken out to attend those programs.” After a series of court challenges, and a process of negotiated rulemaking, the final guidelines were set to be instituted on July 1, 2017. Even before the rules were implemented, evidence indicated that the pending gainful employment regulations were already having an impact, with many colleges proactively shutting down programs that might have been noncompliant. Continue reading “DeVos continues carrying out ALEC’s agenda by dismantling for-profit college accountability”

ALEC’s Scary Plan For Electing Your Senators

The following article by David Daley was posted on the AlterNet website July 22, 2017:

The New York Times and Washington Post reported that President Trump has had conversations with top officials about whether he could pardon himself and his family, and also suggested that the White House could be mounting an attack on the credibility of Robert Mueller, the special prosecutor leading the investigation into Russian influence on the 2016 campaign.

Trump’s “election integrity” commission convened for the first time on Wednesday and he wasted no time assailing state election officials who have refused the panel’s unprecedented request for detailed voter data. The president alleged, darkly, that uncooperative states might have something to hide. “One had to wonder what they’re worried about,” Trump said. “There’s something. There always is.” Continue reading “ALEC’s Scary Plan For Electing Your Senators”

Deeply Unpopular, DeVos and ALEC in Lockstep in Trying to Destroy Public Education

The following article by Jennifer Berkshire was posted on the AlterNet website July 23, 2017:

Teachers, parents and business leaders are rising up to resist DeVos and ALEC’s extreme agenda.

Credit:  AP/Alex Brandon

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos’ speech to the American Legislative Exchange Council met with protests before she’d even arrived in Denver. But teachers and activists aren’t the only ones objecting to the extreme, anti-public education agenda DeVos shares with ALEC. One of the great questions of our time is just how far to the fringe the right wing of the Republican Party can march before the business-minded set steps in and yanks the chain. ALEC’s education platform is providing a real-time test case.

Virtually everything you need to know about ALEC’s education priorities is captured in the group’s most recent Report Card on American Education. Here, “forward-thinking” states like Arizona reign supreme thanks to a ranking system that prizes freedom from the education monopoly above all. Arizona’s high school graduation rate may be a full 25 percent lower than my own adopted home state of Massachusetts (languishing at #32 on the ALEC scale), but at least students aren’t choked by burdensome homeschooling regulations. In fact, thanks to far-sighted lawmakers like Arizona ALEC state chair Debbie Lesko (ALEC lawmaker of the year ’16), young Arizonans can now eschew school for a buffet of “a la carte learning options,” paid for with pre-loaded edu-debit cards, a vision DeVos regards as a model. Continue reading “Deeply Unpopular, DeVos and ALEC in Lockstep in Trying to Destroy Public Education”

Koch Convention to Rewrite Constitution Runs Into Roadblocks

The following article by Arn Pearson was posted on the ExposedbyCMD.org website June 12, 2017:

This year’s legislative season saw a strong push in the states from right-wing groups, bankrolled by the Koch brothers and other ultra-conservative billionaires, hoping to convene a national constitutional convention in order to inject rigid fiscal constraints into our country’s founding document. Advocates of a federal “balanced budget amendment” (BBA) picked up two more states, Wyoming and Arizona, in their drive to win the 34 resolutions needed to bypass Congress and convene a convention to propose changes to the U.S. Constitution.

That momentum, however, was blunted by surprisingly successful campaigns to rescind convention calls in three states, New Mexico, Maryland, and Nevada. As a result, BBA proponents now claim 27 states in their column, down from 28 at the beginning of the year. Continue reading “Koch Convention to Rewrite Constitution Runs Into Roadblocks”