Meet the ALEC Staffers Who Help Corporations Write Our Laws

Saturday, 07 April 2012 13:52  
By Zaid Jilani, Republic Report | Report 

The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) is the most powerful corporate front group you’ve never heard of. The group, sponsored by some of America’s largest corporations, writes legislation that tends to benefit its donors and ships these template bills to state legislatures for compliant lawmakers to pass. ALEC has pushed for legislation doing everything from attacking workers’ collective bargaining rights, to making it harder for low-income Americans to vote, to the Stand Your Ground law that could prevent justice in the Trayvon Martin case.

One of the reasons ALEC is able to do this is because it’s extremely secretive. ALEC does not openly brand the legislation it passes off to legislators, and its staff is mostly hidden from the public eye. Until now. We dug into ALEC’s personnel to make a short profile of just some of the key Washington, D.C.-based ALEC staffers who help write the laws that pollute our communities, deny Americans access to health care, suppress our right to vote, and generally harm Americans. Their corporate-written bills may be secretly passed on to legislators, but these staffers can’t hide behind ALEC’s veil and avoid taking responsibility for the laws they produce and advance.