Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

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No. What I'm saying is, to the extent that happens, "model legislation" doesn't enable it; in fact, if anything, it (marginally) increases transparency by making at least some of those influence attempts traceable (this happens by design, since the point of ALEC-style model legislation is to write it once and then present it in multiple state houses).

If the question is, "do you like ALEC", the answer in my case is "obviously no" (I wasted a bunch of money in the last election cycle if my goal was to support ALEC). But I don't see what's problematic about this particular mechanism ALEC uses, and I think it would probably be better if more interest groups --- nonprofit, public, corporate, what have you) adopted it.

Sort of like the conversations people have about the Federalist Society (the back-bench for potential conservative federal judicial candidates) --- seeing the Federalist Society as a shadowy malign influence just seems silly to me. It seems obvious that the proper response to the Federalists is to stand up a countervailing progressive judicial network --- and, of course, that exists (it's the ACS); it's just much worse at marketing itself.

Meanwhile, it's not as if anyone is unclear on who these organizations are! No Democratic Senator endorses a Federalist Society pick because it came from the Federalists! No Democratic state representative swoons over an ALEC bill! If your local state senator doesn't know who ALEC is, they're incompetent and need to be booted out of office.

Model legislation by ALEC or similar orgs is less traceable in influence, because ALEC per se is not subject to procedural openness, lobbying (directed at ALEC), or other controls intended to provide transparency in lawmaking and influences on it. ALEC has also been credibly accused of being a venue for evasion of state transparency laws by it's legislator members.

I guess I just start from the premise that a bill originating in ALEC is (a) going to be hard-partisan conservative and (b) overwhelmingly likely to serve the interests of an ALEC sponsor corporation; once you know the bill comes from ALEC, you know most of what you need to know, don't you? What do I care who's "lobbying" ALEC?

On the flip side, if Purdue Pharma spends several years and several tens of thousands of dollars lobbying a conservative congressperson, who later amends a health care bill to serve Purdue, what indicator do I have that the amendment they sponsored was "sponsored" by Purdue?

> overwhelmingly likely to serve the interests of an ALEC sponsor corporation

In a number of cases, corporations have only been publicly identified as having ties with ALEC when they publicly cut ties with ALEC.

Aside from corporations that seek recognition as sponsors or have people in active public roles on ALEC committees, there's no systematic disclosure of ALEC ties. ALEC membership is confidential.

> On the flip side, if Purdue Pharma spends several years and several tens of thousands of dollars lobbying a conservative congressperson, who later amends a health care bill to serve Purdue, what indicator do I have that the amendment they sponsored was "sponsored" by Purdue?

The documentation of the duration and expenditures on lobbying (and any donations), a thing we don't have systematically, with legal penalties for failure to report, with regard to corporate involvement with ALEC.

The whole point of making it transparent and traceable is to end the influence of money on politics. ALEC's efforts are transparent because they are so certain that they will get away with it. If people are successful in fighting them, they will just use their resources to hide their work better, which they can do because they still have a lot of money behind them.

Again, the problem is that we are letting money decide our laws instead of real measures of goodness. I'm glad that progressive groups are fighting ALEC--it's the best solution we have so far--but on a macro scale fighting money with more money is surrendering to the problem.

"Get away with" what, exactly? They're drafting conservative, business-friendly bills, which is what Republicans generally do. How does an ALEC origin "hide" the merits and demerits of a bill? Doesn't it in fact make them far clearer?

Where are you getting the idea that ALEC is trying to be transparent about about writing these laws? The article is clear that it takes some digging to uncover these bills:

USA TODAY and the Republic found at least 10,000 bills almost entirely copied from model legislation were introduced nationwide in the past eight years, and more than 2,100 of those bills were signed into law.

The investigation examined nearly 1 million bills in all 50 states and Congress using a computer algorithm developed to detect similarities in language. That search – powered by the equivalent of 150 computers that ran nonstop for months – compared known model legislation with bills introduced by lawmakers.

There isn't some tagline "this bill contributed by ALEC!"

Right, if you look elsewhere on the thread I've made this point already: the whole idea behind ALEC model legislation is to have it introduced in multiple state houses. There's no similarity search you can run for legislation "authentically" drafted by different congressional offices, and yet it's an article of faith on HN that corrupt bills are authored that way all the time.

FWIW - ALEC does make all their model bills available online: https://www.alec.org/model-policy/

But they are hardly the only player, we were interested in not only identifying how far these known model bills are going but also surface bills from groups we don't know about!

Also, not all model bills are necessarily malicious - we found hundreds of bills that were almost identical but were just trying to standardize things like how we license nurses or other healthcare practitioners.

  more than 2,100 of those bills were signed into law

In other words, such bills have a failure rate of 78%.

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