The 1970s—A Right-Wing Organization Takes Flight

The American Legislative Exchange Council was originally the brainchild of conservative activist and culture warrior Paul Weyrich, a onetime journalist who later coined the term “Moral Majority” for evangelist Jerry Falwell. Weyrich’s original vision was to bring together state legislators who were energized by such social issues as the Equal Rights Amendment and abortion rights and concerned about what they saw as an overbearing, over-regulating, and over-taxing government.

As Weyrich saw it, liberals had spent decades building up their own infrastructure of foundations, think tanks, and academicians; conservatives had not. And so he simply borrowed their techniques. “I always look at what the enemy is doing and, if they’re winning, copy it,” he told an interviewer at the time. “You know, conservatives are notoriously difficult to organize.”(28) After establishing ALEC in September 1973, Weyrich went on to help form such organizations as the Council for National Policy, Coalitions for America, the International Policy Forum, the National Council for Democracy, and the Free Congress Foundation. In the beginning, ALEC consisted of two volunteer staff members, thirteen state legislators, and an annual budget of $2,700. ALEC’s first annual meeting, held at a hotel near Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport, had twenty-seven participants and a budget of $250.

ALEC was not officially organized as a notforprofit corporation until more than two years later. The three original incorporators of record, listed on papers filed in Illinois on December 8, 1975, were Donald Totten, a Republican state representative from Illinois (ALEC was initially run out of Totten’s home or office in Schaumburg); Donald Lukens, a Republican state senator from Ohio, and Louis “Woody” Jenkins, a Democratic state representative from Louisiana.

Totten, a fierce partisan who came to run a Republican political machine that rivaled some of Chicago’s most sophisticated Democratic organizations, had developed a close friendship with Ronald Reagan and would later serve as a key leader and strategist in his presidential campaigns.

Lukens and Jenkins had considerably more checkered — and controversial — political careers. Lukens, for example, was ousted from the U.S. House of Representatives in 1990 after being convicted for having sex with a 16-year-old girl and was later convicted on bribery and conspiracy charges relating to his congressional service.(29) Lukens was also implicated in the “Koreagate” and House bank scandals.30 Jenkins never made it to Washington, but he nonetheless achieved national notoriety for his role in the Iran-contra affair. In 1984 Jenkins and his wife, perhaps borrowing a page from the ALEC book, founded a not-for-profit organization, Friends of the Americas, whose ostensible purpose was to aid Honduran refugees during the conflict with the Sandinistas in Nicaragua; it was later revealed that former National Security Agency aide Oliver North funneled $125,000 to the group as part of his effort to aid the Nicaraguan contras.(31)

Today, ALEC has removed Weyrich’s name from its own accounts of its beginnings; gone, too, are the names of Totten, Lukens, and Jenkins. Here, drawn from ALEC’s 2000 Annual Report, is a typically revisionist history: “More than a quarter century ago, a small group of state legislators and conservative policy advocates met in Chicago to implement a vision: A bipartisan membership association for conservative state lawmakers who shared a common belief in limited government, free markets, federalism, and individual liberty. Their vision and initiative resulted in the creation of a voluntary membership association for people who believed that the government closest to the people was fundamentally more effective, more just, and a better guarantor of freedom than the distant, bloated federal government in Washington, D.C. “At that meeting in September 1973, state legislators, such as then-Illinois State Representative Henry Hyde, and Lou Barnett, a veteran of then-Governor Ronald Reagan’s 1968 presidential campaign, together with a handful of others, launched the American Legislative Exchange Council. Among those who were involved with ALEC in its formative years were: Robert Kasten and Tommy Thompson of Wisconsin; John Engler of Michigan; Terry Branstad of Iowa; and John Kasich of Ohio, all of whom moved on to become governors or members of Congress. Congressional members who were active during this same period included James Buckley of New York and Jesse Helms of North Carolina, and Congressmen Phil Crane of Illinois and Jack Kemp of New York.”

ALEC received its 501(c)(3) determination letter from the Internal Revenue Service on April 15, 1977. ALEC’s corporate bylaws spell out the organization’s mission as follows: “Assist legislators in the states by sharing research information and staff support facilities; establish a clearinghouse for bills at the state level, and provide for a bill exchange program; disseminate model legislation and promote the introduction of companion bills in Congress and state legislatures; formulate legislative action programs.”

Throughout most of its first decade, ALEC focused on such hot-button social issues as abortion rights, ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment, and the drive to give the District of Columbia full voting rights in Congress. In 1978, for example, Donna Carlson, a state representative from Arizona who served as ALEC’s first vice chairman, testified on Capitol Hill in opposition to an effort to extend by seven years the time for ratifying the ERA. “Whether or not it is legal to extend the time period to fourteen years, it seems grievously unfair to put the ERA monkey on the backs of state legislators for fourteen years,” Carlson told members of the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Civil and Constitutional Rights. “What would you think of a football coach who demanded a fifth quarter because his team was behind?”

That same year, ALEC co-sponsored what was billed as the nation’s first national tax-limitation conference. Conservative economist Milton Friedman, who was identified in literature for the event as one of ALEC’s founders (he wasn’t), was one of the guest participants. At the conference, David Copeland, a state representative from Tennessee who was among ALEC’s original organizers, predicted that a movement to abolish the property tax as a source of revenue would be started in his lifetime. “The property tax is not a good common denominator for taxes,” he said. “There is no relation between property taxes and government spending.”

In December 1978, ALEC reportedly spent $15,000 to bring about 50 state legislators to Washington for a workshop on how to defeat a proposed constitutional amendment that would have given the District of Columbia full voting representation in Congress. The legislators, who came from thirty-six different states, also heard right-wing activist Phyllis Schlafly predict that the Equal Rights Amendment would still be defeated. While ALEC had clearly developed some organizational muscle — “While opponents coalesce behind the fine-tuned leadership of ALEC,” The Washington Post reported, “backers of the amendment flounder in disunity, bogged down by debates about who will direct the ratification effort and what is the best strategy to employ”— to some it seemed largely wasted on litmus-test issues of the Far Right.

By this time, ALEC reportedly had 700 conservative state legislators as members and a $300,000 annual budget that it said had been raised mostly from a mailing list of 23,000 conservative donors. In fact, however, much of ALEC’s money came from such ultraconservative foundations as Richard Mellon Scaife’s Allegheny Foundation.(32)

ALEC’s full-bore campaign against the proposed constitutional amendment to give the District of Columbia full voting rights in Congress also revealed the tactics it would refine to an art form over the next two decades. It sent each of the nation’s 7,000 or so state legislators a blue loose-leaf binder that contained newspaper articles, essays, and a draft resolution opposing the amendment. This may, in fact, have been the organization’s first use of “model” legislation to advance its various causes.

In February 1978, ALEC forged an alliance with Gun Owners of America — an organization that has been described as “eight lanes to the right of the National Rifle Association”— to promote a “quick-kill” strategy for defeating the proposed constitutional amendment. The strategy, unveiled at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington, aimed to get at least 13 state legislatures to send formal resolutions of disapproval to the federal government, thus making it impossible for the amendment to win approval of the 38states needed for ratification. 

The relationship between the two organizations is telling. The executive director of Gun Owners of America, Larry Pratt, had founded the organization in 1975 with H. L. Richardson, a prominent benefactor of the Religious Right. Pratt, who at one time served on ALEC’s board of directors, is credited by the Southern Poverty Law Center with having introduced the concept of militias to the right-wing underground. In 1992, for example, Pratt was invited to speak at a meeting organized by Pete Peters, the leader of Christian Identity, a movement that supports violence to promote white supremacy, and he was also a regular guest on Peters’s public-access cable-television show. Pratt also outlined the militia model in his 1990 book, “Armed People Victorious.” In 1996 he was forced to step down as a top official of Patrick J. Buchanan’s presidential campaign when his ties to whitesupremacist organizations were publicized. 

From its inception, ALEC aggressively solicited large contributions both from ultraconservative foundations and from major U.S. corporations. (An early direct-mail fund-raising effort aimed at individual contributors apparently flopped.) Its financial affairs, however, were mostly shrouded in secrecy. In the middle of ALEC’s drive to defeat the proposed constitutional amendment to give the District of Columbia full voting rights in Congress, D.C. Delegate Walter E. Fauntroy told reporters, “I’d like to know where they’re getting their money.” He wasn’t alone.

The 1980s—ALEC Rides the Reagan Revolution

Throughout most of the 1980s, Ronald Reagan would be ALEC’s biggest booster and, to some degree, its ticket to political respectability. In his second month in office, Reagan met at the White House with Richard A. Viguerie—the “King Midas of the Right,” as The Atlantic Monthly dubbed him — and representatives of 21 conservative organizations, including ALEC, the National Right To Work Committee, the Eagle Forum (Phyllis Schlafly’s group), and the National Pro-Life Political Action Committee. It would be the first of many occasions over the years during which Reagan hosted representatives of ALEC at the White House.

From the beginning, however, ALEC’s extremist tendencies irritated some officials in the Reagan administration. Just days after President Reagan nominated Sandra Day O’Connor, a relatively obscure Arizona judge and mother of three, to be the Supreme Court’s first woman justice, for example, ALEC joined other conservative organizations in raising questions about votes she had cast as a state senator in favor of abortion rights and the Equal Rights Amendment. In particular, ALEC and its allies charged that there may have been a “cover-up” of her abortion record — an allegation based on a Justice Department memorandum in which O’Connor was quoted as saying that she “had no recollection of how she voted” on an abortion

“The information we have on her abortion record, when compared with the information contained in a memorandum prepared by Kenneth W. Starr on July 7, 1981, shows an apparent prima facie cover-up either on the part of Mrs. O’Connor or on the part of the attorney general’s office or both, of her voting record on abortion,” Kathleen Teague, ALEC’s executive director, said at a press conference. Teague added that ALEC was merely “providing information” on the nomination, not taking a stand on it, though the disclaimer rang hollow. Later the same day, Republican Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona, who had vowed to campaign in support of O’Connor’s nomination, called Teague’s allegations “a lot of foolish claptrap” from “people who do not know what they are talking about.”

Soon, though, some of ALEC’s key employees landed assignments in the Reagan administration. In May 1982, for example, President Reagan named Penny Pullen, chairman of ALEC’s Task Force on Education, to the National Council on Education Research, the policy-making committee of the Education Department’s National Institute of Education. Pullen’s task force had developed ALEC’s “model” legislation on textbook standards, which critics branded a “book-banning law.”

Months later ALEC convened its eighth annual “Leadership Conference” (the original name of its annual meetings) in Chattanooga, Tennessee, with a handful of high-ranking members of the Reagan administration as guest participants. The theme of the meeting, “Energy Turns the World,” was designed to parallel the theme of the 1982 World’s Fair in Knoxville, Tennessee, and the 150 or so state lawmakers in attendance were scheduled to tour the Sequoyah Nuclear Power facility as well as a number of other energy projects in the Tennessee Valley Authority area.

By this time ALEC was trying to more closely align itself with corporate America. According to a news release, ALEC’s annual meeting in Knoxville was to feature “legislative working sessions designed to bring together administration policy officials, state legislative leaders, and business representatives to develop and exchange ideas on how to resolve modern federal and state problems.”

But many large corporations might have been understandably jittery about aligning themselves with an organization whose leaders so frequently seemed to be on the outermost fringes of American politics. In July 1982, for example, Kathleen Teague repeatedly walked the far-right plank, rhetorically at least, on PBS’s MacNeil-Lehrer Report. After calling the National Women’s Political Caucus, which had just concluded a three-day convention in San Antonio, Texas, “a tiny majority of radical women,” she said, “I think that they are basically sour-grapes losers who supported President Carter for reelection in 1980.” Teague then went on to tell Jim Lehrer: “I really don’t believe that we have as much of a gender gap problem as some people seem to believe we do,” adding: “I take exception that there are inequities in the workplace for women.”

(Today, ALEC seems to studiously avoid any mention of Kathleen Teague Rothschild, who was the organization’s executive director through most of President Reagan’s first term in office. Little wonder. “If a man doesn’t feel needed by his wife, he’ll go out and find another woman who does need him,” she once told author Barbara Ehrenreich, as Ehrenreich recounts in her book, “The Hearts of Men.” “Take the case of a woman who’s been a housewife, then she gets women-libberized and goes into the work force. No matter what, her husband isn’t going to feel he’s number one in her life anymore. So she will lose him to a more conservative woman.”)

By 1984 ALEC’s annual revenues had hit nearly $750,000, with ultraconservative foundations contributing more than $215,000 and corporations supplying most of the balance. That year, in what may be the first major profile of ALEC, Neal Peirce and Robert Guskind of National Journal, while pointing out that ALEC had declined to disclose how much money it received from corporate donors, identified Adolph Coors Company, Atlantic Richfield Company, Edison Electric Institute, Hoffmann-LaRoche, Inc., Eli Lilly and Company, Mary Kay Cosmetics, Inc., and Procter & Gamble Company as being among them. They quoted Teague as saying, “I have more big corporations who want to see me, get involved, and become members than we can practically cope with.”(33)

From the early to mid-1980s, ALEC operated a political action committee (“ALEC-PAC”) for the purpose of making contributions to conservative candidates for public office. The PAC was notable in that it apparently engaged exclusively in “nonfederal” political activities, thus shielding it from many reporting requirements, keeping it out of the regulatory reach of the Federal Election Commission, and allowing it to raise and spend “soft money” in near-total secrecy.

In their profile of ALEC, Pierce and Guskind wrote that ALEC-PAC had targeted 24 state Senate and 60 state House races — out of 5,960 state legislative seats up for election—that it maintained were “pivotal to conservative challenges to the liberal control” of 19 legislative chambers in 15 states. “In Congress, you’ve got only one legislative body and they will either pass or kill your bill,” Teague told National Journal. “In the states, if you’re trying to get banking deregulation passed and you’ve lost in Kansas, Nebraska, and Texas, it’s not a total failure. You may well win in Arizona, California, and New York that year. You’ve got fifty shots.”

There was no mention of the relevant language in ALEC’s articles of incorporation — namely, that “the corporation shall not participate in, or intervene in (including publishing or distribution of statements), any political campaign on behalf of any candidate for public office.”

Peirce and Guskind also stated that some of the organization’s corporate sponsors had grown uncomfortable with its activism on social issues. They quoted a corporate government affairs officer (who asked not to be identified) as saying: “We like ALEC’s conservatism and pro-business attitude. But abortion, school prayer, and the like are just not issues for us. We nod and accept the rest of it but we aren’t supportive of it. You have to grin and bear it.” 

In 1985, ALEC assumed a high-profile role in the high-stakes and eventually successful campaign to unseat Rose Elizabeth Bird, the chief justice of the California Supreme Court, in a yes-or-no confirmation election. Bird’s opponents argued that she should be removed from the bench because of her opposition to the death penalty. “It’s a political battle in a new battlefield for us,” Michael Steinmetz, the president of ALEC’s political action committee, told a reporter for The Christian Science Monitor. “If we find that we can motivate people in this race, then we will take a much more serious look at other states.’”

In 1987, Paul Weyrich, ALEC’s founder and a spiritual godfather of the New Right, warned his fellow conservatives nationwide that they were all but ignoring the important political battlegrounds of the 50 state legislatures. “The Great Society may be over in Washington,” he wrote in the Heritage Foundation’s Policy Review, “but it has just begun in the states.” 

Constance C. Heckman, ALEC’s executive director at the time, publicly branded Weyrich’s dire assessment “a joke.” In just four years, she said, ALEC has doubled its budget, staff, and programs. “We are moving the agenda,” she said, on issues from tax policy to tort reform.

Through all this time ALEC was closely aligned with Ronald Reagan, who as president publicly embraced the organization’s activities and frequently invited its leaders and members to political pep talks in the Old Executive Office Building. But the late 1980s marked a major turning point for ALEC, with the organization shifting away from some of the “hot button” political issues of its past and ending, for the most part, its alliances with the likes of Larry Pratt, Kathleen Teague, Phyllis Schlafly, and other ultraconservative social activists. Its political action committee, which was highly controversial even within the organization, was apparently dismantled before the 1988 elections. At the same time, ALEC moved to vigorously embrace a wide range of issues of greater interest to its most generous corporate sponsors – chief among them energy, pharmaceutical, and tobacco companies.

The 1990s—The “Corporatization” of ALEC

In May 1990, Samuel Brunelli, a former linebacker for the Denver Broncos football team who had taken over as ALEC’s executive director two years earlier, laid out his vision for the organization in a publication of the Heritage Foundation:

“The liberals are winning in the states because too many conservatives have not yet realized that they have been outflanked,” Brunelli wrote. “While we have concentrated our fire on positions that have already been taken, the liberals have exploited our weakness in the states and opened up a new front. As we might expect, they have read and understood Mao’s dictum: take the countryside and the capital will fall. Ronald Reagan and the conservatives defeated the Left in Washington. So the Left moved the battlefield to Albany and Austin, Sacramento and Springfield.

“We must not underestimate the cost of our losses in the states. The objective of conservative government is not to localize socialism. Bad government which is close to the people is still bad government. Winning in Washington but losing in the states means just one thing: we are losing. 

“ALEC’s goal is to ensure that these [conservative] state legislators are so well informed, so well armed, that they can set the terms of the public policy debate, that they can change the agenda, that they can lead. This is the infrastructure that will reclaim the states for our movement; these are the people who will make conservative policy; this is our army that we must prepare and support for the battles at hand. If we ever hope to govern America, it is critical that the conservative movement achieve this goal.”

By the following year, Fred C. Noye, ALEC’s incoming national chairman, was sounding much more upbeat in assessing the organization’s successes in the battlefields to which Brunelli had referred. “In the 1990-91 session, a total of 240 of our model bills were introduced throughout the nation,” Noye wrote. “At least one ALEC model bill was introduced in all 49 states in session. (Kentucky was not in session.) Ninety-two ALEC bills were enacted in states, for a passage rate of 38 percent. That’s 20 percent higher than the average for state legislation, and 33 percent higher than the federal level. Seven states enacted four or more bills, while 21 enacted two or more. Our success at moving legislation in the states confirms that conservative policies can and will receive the public and political support necessary for enactment if there is a strong publicprivate partnership pushing the issue. The partnership between the public and private sectors is the strength of ALEC and the secret to our success.” 

Ironically, the election of Bill Clinton as president in 1992 may have given ALEC its biggest boost ever. With a Democrat in the White House, the organization prospered as never before. Faced with perceived new threats at the federal level, the nation’s tobacco companies poured record contributions into ALEC. So did health-care and pharmaceutical companies; oil, natural gas, and other energy companies; and a broad array of anti-union interests. 

ALEC’s annual revenues soared from about $2 million in 1992 to about $5 million in 1995.

Underneath it all, however, ALEC apparently was in financial trouble. In September 1995, after months of internal strife and an independent audit of the organization’s finances, ALEC’s legislative and corporate boards of directors fired Brunelli amid charges that the organization was hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt and was facing growing financial difficulties.(34) 

These issues seem to have precipitated significant fissures within ALEC’s power structure. The minutes of a meeting of ALEC’s “Joint Board of Directors” in Kansas City on March 21, 1997, for example, contain references to issues that arose during Brunelli’s tenure as ALEC’s executive director. The document suggests that Duane Parde, Brunelli’s successor as ALEC’s executive director, inherited more than $400,000 in debt and a host of other financial and management problems. At the beginning of the meeting, State Representative Bonnie Sue Cooper of Missouri, who was then ALEC’s national chairman, pointed out that ALEC’s primary goal for the year was to achieve financial security, and in that regard she “thanked Koch Industries and E&M Charities for their loans.” (ALEC’s tax returns show that in 1996 it borrowed $500,000 from the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation.)

Les Goldberg, the American Express Company’s representative at the meeting, expressed his concern that the business plan drafted by Parde “did not address the issue of ‘buying access.’” The minutes go on to note: “Parde said he shares that concern and outlined the following as ways ALEC is steering clear of that charge: 1) fundraising for general, rather than specific, support, and 2) task force operating procedures have been changed to limit exposure in that area, such as fundraising is now done yearly, rather than per event.” In other words, the appearance was to change, but not the reality.

In the four years since then, Parde seems to have ushered ALEC into a new, wide-open era of “pay to play.”

Sometime in this mid-1990s, for example, the Church of Scientology became one of ALEC’s underwriters, for the apparent purpose of interacting with state lawmakers on mentalhealth-care issues. Here’s an excerpt from a 1998 fundraising letter written by Bruce Wiseman, the president of the Citizens Commission on Human Rights International, a highly controversial offshoot of the Church of Scientology. “Two years ago we started a similar project with the American Legislative Exchange Council,” Wiseman writes. “ALEC is a national organization made up of legislators from every state as well as some federal legislators who meet and draft ‘model legislation’ for every state. The bean return for that has been enormous! CCHR has worked its way up the conditions at ALEC and recently got an article published by ALEC in opposition to mandated mental-health parity, which went to key state legislators who deal with health issues in their respective states. In addition, the ALEC membership has opened the door to meeting numerous legislators and other opinion leaders from around the country. . . .”

ALEC’s “pay-to-play” orientation was in sharp focus at the organization’s annual convention in New York City in August 2001. Consider a workshop titled “Free-Market Health Care Reform: Expanding Coverage Without Expanding Government,” at which Ben Cutler, the president and chief executive officer of Milwaukee-based Fortis Health, spoke to a captive audience of state legislators. Fortis, whose products include medical savings accounts and “temporary” health-insurance policies, was wellrewarded for being a major underwriter of ALEC’s annual meeting; aside from Cutler’s place at the podium, Fortis’s corporate logo was displayed on a large screen during the entire workshop and its literature was stacked on tables at the entrance to the conference room. This, of course, was “business as usual” at ALEC’s annual meetings.