Investigating Power
The billionaire fossil fuel executive and GOP megadonor has spent his entire adult life financing partisan politics, right-wing think tanks, and ideological education programs. At 85, that’s unlikely to change.
The tax-exempt corporate bill mill’s gift of sophisticated voter software to its almost exclusively Republican legislative members may run afoul of federal and state laws.
ALEC’s leaders, legislative members, and alumni played a major role in promoting Trump’s stolen-election disinformation campaign, attempting to overturn the election, and inciting the resulting violent invasion of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. Will its corporate backers hold it accountable?
ALEC’s 2020 Legislator of the Year, Pennsylvania Sen. Chris Dush, signed a Jan. 5 letter asking Vice President Pence to stop certification of the presidential election results, just one day before the violent Capitol insurrection, and compared Gov. Wolf’s administration to the Nazi Party.
Two current and two recent members of the American Legislative Exchange Council, including one state chair, spent weeks lying about voter fraud and then participated in the events directly preceding the bloody coup attempt.
Documents obtained by CMD show that ALEC forged a new partnership in December with radical pro-Trump group Talking Points USA, a coalition partner in the #StoptheSteal rally that led to the violent invasion at the U.S. Capitol.
The Pennsylvania state chairs of the American Legislative Exchange Council are leading a GOP effort to overturn the state’s presidential election results when Congress convenes in January to certify the Electoral College’s election of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.
After canceling its plans for an in-person meeting, ALEC opened its annual policy summit online yesterday to consider a wide variety of measures to limit governors’ power to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic, stop a bailout for hard-hit states, and lock in a nine-member Supreme Court, provide trainings to help its overwhelmingly Republican members run better campaigns.
The preferred funding conduits of the Koch political donor network gave out $165 million in grants in 2019, $90 million of which went to right-wing think tanks, advocacy groups, litigation centers, media outlets, extremists, and climate deniers.
The GOP, ALEC, and right-wing justices at the Supreme Court are pushing a legal theory that could disqualify hundreds of thousands of votes in states like Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Minnesota that come in after legislative deadlines but before Covid-19 extensions granted by state courts or the executive branch.