ALEC: The Model Legislation Factory

The American Legislative Exchange Council was founded in 1973 by Paul Weyrich — the same conservative activist who co-founded the Heritage Foundation, the Moral Majority, and the Council for National Policy. The man who, in 1980, told a gathering of evangelical Christians: "I don't want everybody to vote... our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down."

ALEC's operating structure is simple and devastatingly effective. It convenes closed "task forces" where corporate lobbyists and state legislators draft legislation together, with both groups voting as equals on model bills. The drafted bills are then distributed to ALEC's 2,000+ legislative members across all 50 states for introduction in their chambers — under the legislator's own name.

When a bill lands in your state legislature, you see your elected representative's name on it. You do not see the corporations that wrote it. ProPublica documented the process in detail. Corporations — ExxonMobil, Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer, Walmart, AT&T, Koch Industries, Corrections Corporation of America — pay dues of up to $25,000 per year to sit at the table. ALEC calls itself "nonpartisan." Its legislative membership is overwhelmingly Republican.

The output is staggering in volume. Between 2010 and 2018 alone: ~2,900 ALEC model bills introduced in state legislatures, 600+ enacted into law. On average, roughly 1,000 ALEC model bills are introduced per year — about 200 enacted annually. For fifty years.

Weyrich's insight — the founding insight — was that real power lives at the state level where no one is watching. The national press watches Congress. Cable news watches the White House. State legislatures write the laws that govern your life, your vote, your workplace, your environment, your healthcare. Almost no one covers them. ALEC covered them, for the corporations that paid for access.

ALEC's "Voter ID Act" is a model bill requiring specific government-issued photo identification to vote — identification disproportionately unavailable to elderly, low-income, minority, and student voters who have been registered for decades. In 2011, the year after the Supreme Court's Crawford v. Marion County upheld Indiana's voter ID law, ALEC flooded state legislatures: voter ID bills introduced in 34 states in a single year, passed in 8.

After the 2020 election, ALEC accelerated. The Center for Media and Democracy documented that more than 100 Republican legislators connected to ALEC in just six battleground states became lead sponsors or co-sponsors of voter restriction bills. The Brennan Center found 360+ voter restriction bills introduced in 47 states in the first half of 2021 alone.

ALEC partnered with the Honest Elections Project (HEP) — a dark money operation founded in February 2020 specifically to push voting restrictions. ALEC gave HEP exclusive access to its legislative membership starting July 2020. They co-hosted three "voter suppression summits" through 2022. A leaked Heritage Action internal memo named ALEC a "key policy and lobbying partner" in a multi-year national campaign to restrict voting.

At its 2021 annual conference, ALEC claimed credit for the voter restriction laws that had passed that year. It did not describe them as suppression. It described them as victories.

In 2005, Florida passed its "Stand Your Ground" law. Within months, NRA lobbyist Marion Hammer presented the bill to ALEC's Criminal Justice Task Force. The task force — composed of corporate members and state legislators — voted unanimously to adopt it as the national model bill, officially named the "Castle Doctrine Act." ALEC then distributed it to legislators across the country.

By 2012, at least 24 states had passed versions of the law. Today, more than 30 states have Stand Your Ground laws applicable in all public places. The majority trace directly to the ALEC model.

On February 26, 2012, Trayvon Martin — a 17-year-old Black teenager walking home from a 7-Eleven — was shot and killed by George Zimmerman in Sanford, Florida. Florida's Stand Your Ground law was initially cited to prevent Zimmerman's arrest. The NRA-drafted, ALEC-distributed law was its legal context.

Public outrage over the connection caused dozens of major corporations to flee ALEC: Coca-Cola, Pepsi, Kraft, McDonald's, Wendy's, Intuit, Mars, Yum! Brands. In April 2012, ALEC announced it was disbanding its Public Safety and Elections Task Force — the same task force that had produced both Stand Your Ground and the voter ID bills — claiming it was stepping back from "social issues."

The laws it had seeded into 30+ state codes did not step back. They remain.

ALEC's Energy, Environment and Agriculture Task Force is funded by ExxonMobil, Koch Industries, and other fossil fuel interests. In 2013, the task force adopted a model resolution stating that the role of human activity in causing climate change was "uncertain," that man-made climate change could be "deleterious, neutral or possibly beneficial," and that regulating greenhouse gas emissions could cause "great economic dislocation."

This is not a policy disagreement. Climate scientists have established the human-caused warming consensus at 97%+ across peer-reviewed literature. The ALEC model resolution is a lie — written by fossil fuel companies, adopted by a task force those companies fund, distributed as model policy to legislatures those companies' money helped elect.

ALEC also promoted the "Electricity Freedom Act" — a model bill designed to repeal state renewable energy portfolio standards requiring utilities to source a percentage of power from clean sources. As states were building the infrastructure for the energy transition, ALEC provided the legislative template to stop it.

The companies that profit from fossil fuel extraction wrote the model legislation that delays the clean energy transition. They did it inside ALEC's closed task forces. Their lobbyists voted alongside the legislators who introduced the bills. All of it is legal. All of it is documented.

The private prison pipeline: Corrections Corporation of America — now CoreCivic — is an ALEC member and sat on the same task forces that draft criminal justice legislation: mandatory minimums, "truth in sentencing," enhanced penalty categories. The corporations that profit from mass incarceration help write the laws that fill the prisons that generate the profits. This is legal. This is ALEC.

Ag-gag laws: ALEC's model "Animal and Ecological Terrorism Act" criminalizes filming, photographing, or recording inside livestock facilities — designed to prevent journalists and activists from documenting animal cruelty, worker safety violations, and environmental contamination at factory farms. Multiple states passed versions of it. Several courts later struck down ag-gag laws as First Amendment violations.

Preemption bills: ALEC pioneered model "preemption" legislation stripping cities and counties of the power to enact their own minimum wage, paid leave, or worker protection laws. If a city votes to raise the minimum wage, a Republican state legislature — guided by the ALEC template — can simply nullify the vote. By 2017, ALEC-backed preemption laws had been enacted in more than 25 states.

Workers' compensation rollbacks: ALEC has produced model legislation weakening workers' compensation systems in multiple states — reducing benefits, capping payouts, limiting legal recourse for injured workers. The companies that employ those workers helped write the legislation.

Between 2017 and 2021, ALEC received $41.7 million in documented contributions. DonorsTrust — the Koch network's preferred dark money conduit — contributed $2.2M. The Bradley Foundation: $3.4M. Koch foundations: at least $600K documented. Corporate members pay dues up to $25,000 per year to participate in task forces where legislation is written.

The structural loop: corporations fund ALEC → ALEC convenes closed task forces → corporations and legislators co-draft bills → bills distribute to 2,000 legislative members → legislators introduce bills as their own → bills pass → corporations benefit directly from the laws they wrote. The public sees an elected official's legislation. They do not see the task force.

After the Trayvon Martin killing, corporations fled and ALEC shrank. By 2014, most had quietly returned. After the post-2020 voter suppression push, 300+ organizations called on Anheuser-Busch, Blue Cross Blue Shield, Eli Lilly, UPS, FedEx, and others to cut ties with ALEC. Most did not.

All of this is legal under Citizens United. The Supreme Court — built in part by the Federalist Society, funded by the same donor networks, insulated from ethics enforcement — ruled that spending money to shape laws is protected speech. The court that enabled the system is insulated by the system it enabled.

Paul Weyrich knew this in 1973. He built the plumbing first: ALEC for the legislation, Heritage for the ideas, Moral Majority for the voters, CNP for coordination. Fifty years later, the plumbing runs at full pressure. The argument that any individual piece of it is "just how the system works" — is the system working exactly as designed.