Organization funded by powerful special interests writing legislation for Missouri Republicans

For the last few years, The Turner Report has written about ALEC and its insidious influence on Missouri legislation. Missouri legislators, and as far as I have been able to tell nearly all of them involved with the organization are Republicans, have been spoon fed so-called model legislation, which benefits the special interests that fund ALEC.

In recent years, such legislation has included the health care bill submitted last year by Sen. Jane Cunningham, R-Chesterfield.

The spotlight has been turning on ALEC. The following news release comes from Progress Missouri:

Earlier this month, the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) made available over 800 model bills and resolutions secretly voted on by corporate and legislative members of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). According to The Nation, which recently published an in depth review of the documents


ALEC’s model legislation reflects long-term goals…making it harder to hold the economically and politically powerful to account. Corporate donors retain veto power over the language, which is developed by the secretive task forces. The task forces cover issues from education to health policy. ALEC’s priorities for the 2011 session included bills to privatize education, break unions, deregulate major industries, pass voter ID laws and more.

Until now, it has been difficult to trace the origins of controversial bills popping up in legislatures across the country with curiously similar language. But with the Center for Media and Democracy’s ALEC Exposed website, Missourians can see exactly how secret corporate working groups are writing our laws.

A Progress Missouri investigation of the previously secret documents at ALECExposed.com finds that conservative legislators in Missouri were more than happy to turn over their legislating powers to these unaccountable corporate interests. Sen. Luann Ridgeway’s right-to-work-for-less law (SB1), championed by Senate President Pro Tem Rob Mayer, is a carbon copy of ALEC’s model, written behind closed doors as part of a national campaign to attack working families. ALEC takes full credit for 2010’s Proposition C, allegedly written by Sen. Jane Cunningham. Additionally, legislation ostensibly authored by House Leader Tim Jones and Rep. Scott Dieckhaus to privatize schools is actually taken directly from ALEC.

“Missouri’s laws should be written by Missourians -- not in secret by Exxon Mobil, Koch Industries and other corporations, in board rooms thousands of miles away,” said Sean Soendker Nicholson, executive director of Progress Missouri. “Representatives and Senators who have used our public funds to schmooze with corporate lobbyists and pocketed gifts on ALEC junkets to come clean on who has really written the legislation they’ve put forward as their own.”

For more on ALEC corporations’ direct access to Missouri’s laws, please visit ProgressMissouri.org/ALEC and ALECExposed.com.