Organizations: American Legislative Exchange Council

MEMO: Sunny California, Dark Money: Walker, Cruz, Huckabee Cozy Up To Kochs, ALEC

TO: Interested Parties
FROM: Eddie Vale
RE: Sunny California, Dark Money: Walker, Cruz, Huckabee Cozy Up To Kochs, ALEC
DATE: July 22nd, 2015

After last weekend’s Trumped-up circus in Iowa, Scott Walker, Mike Huckabee, and Ted Cruz are taking the Republican cattle call circuit behind closed doors in sunny San Diego, California.  Unfortunately for the middle class, this isn’t your ordinary speech-a-thon:  it’s the American Legislative Exchange Council, a Koch-powered bill mill where corporate interests meet policymakers in secret to find ways to warp the public interest in favor of bigger profits.

The Kochs have been involved in ALEC for “decades” and donated an “untold amount” of money along with chairing the board.  After years of building influence and padding their bottom line, ALEC is reaping the benefits of being part of the Koch primary and hosting Scott Walker, Ted Cruz, and Mike Huckabee this week as they seek to boost […]

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Republicans Still Unwilling To Protect Voting Rights and LGBT Equality One Year After Supreme Court Rulings

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One year after major Supreme Court decisions on the Voting Rights Act and the Defense of Marriage Act, conservative leaders are still denying equal rights for all Americans by failing to address the issues raised by these cases.

After the Supreme Court struck down a critical provision of the Voting Rights Act, or VRA, there has been little appetite among conservatives in Congress to fix the sections of the law that have been almost universally considered the most successful part of the landmark civil rights legislation. The VRA enjoyed bipartisan support when it was reauthorized in 2006; House Speaker John Boehner said at the time that the law had been “an effective tool in protecting a right that is fundamental to our democracy.” However, in the face of extreme opposition from the Tea Party, conservatives have either questioned the need for a legislative fix or ignored the issue entirely.

Sadly, the inaction on this issue – which has led to the passage of voter suppression laws in several states – is almost certainly politically motivated. As Paul Weyrich, founder of the Heritage Foundation and the American Legislative Exchange Council, bluntly stated in 1980, “our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.” In fact, analysis has shown that election fraud, particularly the in-person voter impersonation that supposedly prompted tougher voter ID laws, is virtually non-existent. In addition, the voters who are disproportionately affected by voter ID laws – the poor, students, Africans Americans and Hispanics – all tend to vote for Democrats.

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How Conservatives Took Over North Carolina

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Once a more moderate state amid the South’s sea of red, since 2010 North Carolina’s state legislature has pushed one of the most aggressive right-wing agendas in the country, advancing the interests of the Tea Party and big business at the expense of the middle class. Republicans in charge of the General Assembly have introduced legislation on a wide set of conservative priorities and managed to enact increasingly extreme policies. Republican lawmakers made it harder for minorities and students to vote, reduced a woman’s right to choose, opposed the minimum wage, slashed unemployment benefits, and gave tax cuts to the wealthy while raising them on the working class, small businesses, and seniors.

Republicans hold such power in North Carolina thanks to changes that began with the 2010 elections, when an influx of outside cash helped the GOP obtain control of both halves of the General Assembly for the first time in more than a century. Their majorities gave them power over once-a-decade redistricting, and with assistance from national groups and Republican operatives, they redrew North Carolina’s federal and state districts in a way that all but ensured Republican victories in 2012. In the next election cycle, the state’s new districts and some additional outside spending delivered to Republicans the governor’s mansion, a majority of the state’s U.S. House seats, and a supermajority in the state House to complement the one they had earned in the state Senate in 2010.

The GOP’s success in North Carolina wasn’t merely a mirror of the Tea Party wave that benefited Republicans across the nation in 2010; it was part of a strategy crafted on the national level and carried out with the cooperation of prominent conservative interest groups and donors, including the Koch brothers. Chief among these are the Republican State Leadership Committee, which planned and largely bankrolled a nationwide strategy to control redistricting; Americans for Prosperity, the Koch-backed group that made North Carolina a ‘model state’ for its political efforts; and the network of conservative North Carolina-focused super PACs and advocacy groups funded almost entirely by longtime political operative and Koch ally Art Pope. Using his personal, family, and business money, Pope created and sustains groups including the Civitas Institute, the John Locke Foundation, and Real Jobs NC, which collaborate on electoral strategy and public policy to advance conservative reforms.

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VRA Hearing’s Republicans Have Troubling Record On Voting Rights

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When the Supreme Court struck down a key section of the Voting Rights Act and kicked it back to Congress, the Republican-controlled House of Representatives handed the first hearing on the matter off to the Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on the Constitution and Civil Justice. That means the next incarnation of the law that finally dismantled the most tenacious statutes and practices interfering with African Americans’ right to vote will be shaped by a team of right-wing legislators who are not only skeptical of key provisions of the law but who also routinely support new attempts at voter suppression.

The Voting Rights Act was last reauthorized in 2006, earning unanimous Senate support and “ayes” from an impressive 390 House members. Although the 33 members who voted against reauthorization were all Republicans, passage was overwhelmingly bipartisan; at the time, the White House and both houses of Congress were controlled by Republicans. Troublingly, however, two of those “nay” votes now sit on the subcommittee tasked with reexamining the VRA — including Chairman Trent Franks (R-AZ). He and other members of the subcommittee have also been reliable proponents of voter ID laws and other measures designed to make voting more difficult.

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The Conservative Crusade To Decrease Voting

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It’s no coincidence that conservative state legislatures launched an unprecedented wave of measures to make it harder to vote in the wake of the GOP’s sweeping state-level victories in 2010. With the dexterous hand of the American Legislative Exchange Council providing coordination, and the will to suppress the vote that’s animated the right for decades, the assault on ballot access isn’t really surprising either. But it is based on a deeply flawed premise: Claims of voter fraud are chronically exaggerated, and when organizations actually follow up on initial reports they almost always prove inaccurate or inflated. (President Bush’s DOJ, for all its zeal, turned up fewer than 100 convictions out of 300,000,000 votes cast.) However, for a movement that’s openly declared its hostility toward efforts to increase voter turnout in American elections, it doesn’t matter that there’s no fire behind all that smoke.

With Help From ALEC, GOP’s 2010 Wave Produced Voting Laws That Could Disenfranchise 5 Million Mostly Poor, Young, And Minority Voters

State-Level GOP Gains In 2010 Elections Led To Vast, Unprecedented Push To Restrict Voting Access. From the Brennan Center for Justice’s report on “Voting Law Changes In 2012”: “This year, at least thirty-four states introduced a record number of bills to require photo ID to vote. As Jenny Bowser, senior fellow at the National Conference of State Legislatures, observed, ‘It’s remarkable … I very rarely see one single issue come up in so many state legislatures in a single session.’ […] There are at least two major reasons for this change. The first is the stark shift in the partisan makeup of state legislatures after 2010. As noted, there is typically a sharp partisan divide over the issue of strict voter ID requirements, with Republicans generally pushing more restrictive measures and Democrats generally opposing them. This year, in every case but one, strict voter ID bills were introduced by Republican legislators. Newly elected legislators introduced about a quarter of these bills. As a result of Republican electoral success in state houses across the country in 2010, proponents of strict voter ID bills were able to garner much greater legislative support than in the past. In the 2010 elections, Republicans picked up at least 675 state legislative seats across the country. Republicans therefore controlled both legislative chambers in twenty-six states, up from fourteen earlier in 2010.” [Brennan Center for Justice, “Voting Law Changes In 2012,” 2011, internal citations removed, emphasis added]

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