Organization
See also: List of members of the American Legislative Exchange CouncilALEC currently has more than 2,000 legislative members representing all 50 states, amounting to nearly one-third of all sitting legislators, as well as more than 85 members of Congress and 14 sitting or former governors who are considered "alumni". The vast majority of ALEC's legislative members belong to the Republican Party. ALEC also claims approximately 300 corporate, foundation, and other private-sector members. The chairmanship of ALEC is a rotating position, with a new legislator appointed to the position each year. The current chair of ALEC is David Frizzell, a member of the Indiana House of Representatives.
Day-to-day operations are run from ALEC's Washington, D.C. office by an executive director and a staff of approximately 30. ALEC By-Laws specify that, "...full membership shall be open to persons dedicated to the preservation of individual liberty, basic American values and institutions, productive free enterprise, and limited representative government, who support the purposes of ALEC, and who serve, or formerly serve, as members of a state or territorial legislature, the United States Congress, or similar bodies outside the United States."
In addition to the staff and members, ALEC has a board of scholars that advises and alerts the staff and members to upcoming issues. The board is composed of economics consultant Arthur Laffer, economics writer Stephen Moore, public law policy expert Victor Schwartz, economics professor Richard Vedder, and public policy activist Bob Williams.
Common Cause states that ALEC is comprised of nine “task forces”: 1) Public Safety and Elections; 2) Civil Justice; 3) Education; 4) Energy, Environment and Agriculture; 5) Commerce, Insurance and Economic Development; 6) Telecommunications and Information Technology; 7) Health and Human Services; 8) Tax and Fiscal Policy; and 9) International Relations. Public and private sector members comprise each of the task forces—the public sector members are state legislators and the private sector members typically corporate lobbyists or sometimes right wing think tank representatives. These task forces generate the “model” legislation, which is then taken back to the states by ALEC’s legislative members.
According to Common Cause, ALEC receives 98% of its funding from corporations and foundations and 2% comes from membership dues paid by legislators and miscellaneous income. In 2010 NPR reported that tax records showed that corporations had collectively paid as much as $6 million a year.
Read more about this topic: American Legislative Exchange Council
Famous quotes containing the word organization:
“I would wish that the women of our country could embrace ... [the responsibilities] of citizenship as peculiarly their own. If they could apply their higher sense of service and responsibility, their freshness of enthusiasm, their capacity for organization to this problem, it would become, as it should become, an issue of profound patriotism. The whole plane of political life would be lifted.”
—Herbert Hoover (1874–1964)
“The organization controlling the material equipment of our everyday life is such that what in itself would enable us to construct it richly plunges us instead into a poverty of abundance, making alienation all the more intolerable as each convenience promises liberation and turns out to be only one more burden. We are condemned to slavery to the means of liberation.”
—Raoul Vaneigem (b. 1934)
“Unless a group of workers know their work is under surveillance, that they are being rated as fairly as human beings, with the fallibility that goes with human judgment, can rate them, and that at least an attempt is made to measure their worth to an organization in relative terms, they are likely to sink back on length of service as the sole reason for retention and promotion.”
—Mary Barnett Gilson (1877–?)