Does the American Legislative Exchange Council promote new bills yearly?

March 23, 2014 6:14 PM

The American Legislative Exchange Council is an organization that creates "model bills" that reflect the interest of big business and encourages state legislators to adopt those bills as legislation to introduce to their legislatures. ALEC promotes these model bills to legislators who attend one or all of three annual meetings each year.

I have information provided by ALEC, and I have information provided by watchdog websites like those supported by the Center for Media and Democracy (PR Watch, ALEC Exposed, etc.). And I've listened to interviews by Mr. Nichols and Mr. Pilkington regarding their investigative work on ALEC. My question is does ALEC continue to promote bills from past years or does it focus mostly on pushing new legislation for current years? Or might ALEC propose a bill in some year and if, in some subsequent year, a legislator sees an opportunity to revive it, that can be their focus, not the focus of ALEC?

posted by CollectiveMind to Law & Government (2 answers total)

Best answer: This is just a guess based on my own lobbying work, but I am sure that they would continue to promote their model bills over multiple years as the political opportunity arose. Lobbying is not a one-and-done deal unless you get lucky; lots of bills get re-introduced in subsequent sessions.
posted by yarly at 6:23 PM on March 23, 2014 [2 favorites]

It would help a little more to know the reason you're asking this. As yarly says, that's not really the way most lobbying works, especially at the state level, because ideally you want all 50 states to pass your preferred legislation when you're a group with a scope as broad as ALEC's.

A small organization with limited funds might give up on something, particularly if there's an expiration date, and move on to something else, but ALEC doesn't really have those constraints.
posted by Conrad Cornelius o'Donald o'Dell at 9:39 PM on March 23, 2014