The American Legislative Exchange Council met in Washington last week, and Democrats in Tennessee and elsewhere want to be sure everyone knows it.
Organizing for Action, the successor group to President Barack Obama’s campaign, put together a press conference Friday in Legislative Plaza in a bid to call attention to ALEC, an organization for conservative state lawmakers that has drawn fire for the “model bills” it gives to its members to take home to their statehouses.
Tennessee’s chapter of OFA described its event as the “Sportsmen for Climate Action Press Conference” and promised to offer the details on “climate denier” legislation being promoted by ALEC. But, sadly, there were sportsmen, so instead a pair of Nashville Democrats — state Reps. Sherry Jones and Mike Stewart — did the deed of ripping into ALEC.
“Once again this front group, ALEC, is planning to unleash a wave of bad legislation in Tennessee,” Stewart said. “It’s important for the people of Tennessee to understand … that these bills just weren’t thought up here by Tennesseans in this plaza but rather were drafted in corporate board rooms far from Tennessee, handed over to this front group ALEC and then handed over the people of Tennessee in the form of bills.”
Despite the scattershot planning, the OFA/Sportsmen for Climate Action/Jones-Stewart press conference was part of a fairly sophisticated national public relations campaign put together by Democratic-leaning groups to throw a spotlight on their foes. Similar press conferences were held in other statehouses, protesters gathered at ALEC’s meeting place in DC, and a report published by the Guardian newspaper purports to show the state-by-state agenda of conservative groups.
In Tennessee, the Guardian says the Beacon Center plans to push reforms to the state’s “cap on public expenditures.” Presumably they mean the Copeland Cap, a nominal limit on spending growth that Tennessee routinely busts.
Up in DC, Tennessee lawmakers who attended the ALEC conference shrugged off all the attention. State Rep. Ryan Haynes, R-Knoxville, told the News Sentinel that the group offers ideas, but lawmakers don’t parrot their arguments.
“Do we necessarily take the (model) bill back word for word? No,” Haynes said. “And I don’t think it would be wise to do that. But obviously, there have been a great many ideas that have come from here.”
