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Telcos Calling
Outside the lunch, 10-foot-high panels feature the logos of the conference’s sponsors, among them UnitedHealthcare, J&J, and Altria. ALEC is certainly not the only organization to secure conference sponsorships or to have companies pay for lunch. Still, when bloggers from a liberal website, ThinkProgress, tried to photograph the panels, they were hustled out of the conference by security guards. Another blogger from the website AlterNet was denied credentials and then kicked out of the hotel’s public lobby two days in a row for tweeting the names of ALEC members who passed by him.
Back in the grand ballroom, the PhRMA executive yields to Bobby Jindal, the governor of Louisiana. Jindal dismisses conspiracy theories about Obama’s birth certificate, then draws applause when he says, “Defeating the President is crucial to defending our economy” and “Obama has been a disaster.” He plugs a balanced-budget amendment. More applause.
After lunch, Nancy Collins from Tupelo has trouble getting a seat in “Rationing By Any Other Name,” a workshop about a feature of 2009’s health-care legislation that will limit growth in Medicare benefits. She moves next door, to education reform. “I never thought I’d be sitting in front of a room like this,” says Derrell Bradford as he takes the floor. “I’m a Democrat. But I’m crazy about school reform.” This gets wild applause. Bradford, an education reform advocate from New Jersey, explains that he will defend Chris Christie, the state’s governor, “to the death” on education. “I have watched Democratic governors,” he says, “throw kids under the bus.”
In the back of the room, Collins takes notes like she’s in college. She shushes some latecomers. By the end of the workshop she has marked in her schedule the next day’s education subcommittee meeting, which will consider moving some legislation from Indiana into the model bill library. An ALEC staffer reminds the room about travel scholarships for a meeting on education reform to be held in San Francisco in the fall.
Collins and Bradford confirm ALEC’s preferred vision of itself. The council is, as its mission statement attests, preparing a new generation of political leaders and encouraging impassioned conversation about policy. Its workshops are open to the press.
The council’s task force meetings, however, are closed. There, corporate members were busy. Macquarie Group, an Australian investment advisory firm that specializes in energy and infrastructure, proposed two bills that would encourage more government investment in infrastructure, while the U.S. Chamber of Commerce proposed requiring that all high school students take a class in “free enterprise” as a condition of graduation. At last year’s meeting the energy task force passed a resolution proposed by the Edison Electric Institute, a trade group representing electric utilities, to urge the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency not to define coal ash as a hazardous waste. Wayne Niederhauser, a state senator from Utah, brought a proposal to the tax and fiscal policy task force meeting in New Orleans that would impose the same state sales tax on both brick-and-mortar and online retailers. According to Niederhauser, representatives from Wal-Mart Stores and Amazon.com failed to reach an agreement after an animated debate, and the bill was tabled.
ALEC points out that task force legislation can be called a “model bill” only after ALEC’s board of directors—composed exclusively of legislators—approves it. The council is so keen to stress this that it’s hard to phrase questions about the bill-writing process that aren’t answered with an explanation of the board’s role. Even with that fine distinction, a corporate counterpart, the same size as ALEC’s board of directors, meets when the legislative board meets.
