The Independent View: Conservatives Have "ALEC" and Now Liberals Will Have "SiX"

The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) is a nonprofit organization of conservative state legislators and private sector representatives that drafts and shares model state-level legislation for distribution among the United States. According to its website, ALEC "works to advance the fundamental principles of free-market enterprise, limited government, and federalism at the state level through a nonpartisan public-private partnership of America's state legislators, members of the private sector and the general public."

ALEC provides a forum for state legislators and private sector members to collaborate on model bills draft legislation that members can customize and introduce for debate in their own state legislatures. ALEC has produced model bills on a broad range of issues such as reducing corporate regulation and taxation, combating illegal immigration, loosening environmental regulations, tightening voter identification rules, and promoting gun rights. ALEC also serves as a networking tool among state legislators, allowing them to research conservative policies implemented in other states. Some of these bills dominate legislative agendas in states such as Arizona, Wisconsin, Colorado, Michigan, New Hampshire, and Maine. Approximately 200 model bills become law each year. Many ALEC legislators also laud the organization for converting campaign rhetoric and nascent policy ideas into legislative language.

Liberal activists this week will ask top donors to support a plan to reverse the precipitous Democratic decline in state governments, where the party was trounced yet again on last Tuesday's General Election.

President Barack Obama’s former liaison to the states, Nick Rathod who also directed state campaigns for former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s gun safety group, will launch a major new state focused organization called the State Innovation Exchange (SiX) before donors on Friday at the annual winter meeting of the Democracy Alliance liberal funding club.

SiX’s goal is an ambitious one to compete with a well-financed network of conservative groups, including the American Legislative Exchange Council that for years have dominated state policy battles, advancing pro-business, anti-regulation bills at the state level.

SiX ultimately plans to raise as much as $10 million a year to boost progressive state lawmakers and their causes, partly by drafting model legislation in state capitols to increase environmental protections, expand voting rights, and raise the minimum wage, while also using bare-knuckle tactics like opposition research and video tracking to derail Republicans and their initiatives.

“Progressives are looking around to figure out where to go to push back, and there has not been a vehicle to do that at the state level — it’s the biggest missing piece in the progressive infrastructure,” said Nick Rathod.

Rathod’s supporters contend that Democrats, having essentially ceded state-level battles in recent years, are approaching a tipping point. If they don’t mount an effective and well-funded response soon, liberals fear Republicans could use their state-level supremacy to severely damage the political clout of Democrats and some of their key constituencies, including organized labor and African-Americans.

With strong, deep-pocketed assistance from ALEC and its allies, Republican lawmakers in dozens of states in recent years have pushed legislation to roll back union power and enact voting restrictions that disproportionately affect African Americans. ALEC also helped craft GOP base-revving legislation like the controversial Stand Your Ground measures, which are now law in 30 states.

Such state policy fights likely will help shape the agenda of the 2016 presidential election, as they did in 2008 and 2012, and, perhaps more importantly, the redrawing of congressional district boundaries after the 2020 census.

The national political parties have increasingly targeted the once-a-decade redistricting process as a chance to fundamentally shape the balance of power in Washington for at least the next decade. Democrats got clobbered in the 2010 redistricting, which Rathod called “a wake-up call to progressives that legislatures matter, not only in state policymaking but inevitably at the federal level. We effectively gave away the House of Representatives for a decade.”

Rathod spent the summer traveling the country quietly holding meetings with state lawmakers, union officials and rich donors,using a PowerPoint presentation to illustrate the spread of GOP control and conservative legislation across the country. He appears to have won support from some influential and deep-pocketed liberals, but a receptive audience from the Democracy Alliance this week would go a long way toward determining whether the group can meet its ambitious goals.

The Democracy Alliance’s member donors in the past decade have given more than $500 million to club-recommended groups. And SiX appears to be on track to score a coveted endorsement, depending on how it’s received at this week’s annual winter meeting, which starts Wednesday and lasts four days, with most of the proceedings held behind closed doors at Washington’s Mandarin Oriental hotel.

The Republican State Leadership Committee, which invests in key state races and is considered a major player in a national network of deep-pocketed groups conceived by Karl Rove and Ed Gillespie, raised $26 million in 2014. That compares to $9 million raised by its Democratic counterpart, the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, which has sometimes struggled to win support from national donors.

SiX’s emergence comes as major players in big-money Democratic politics are increasingly turning their attention to the states. David Brock, who helms a raft of liberal groups that focus on national politics, has had conversations with major donors and allies about deploying his opposition research group, American Bridge, and his ethics watchdog, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, to target Republican state lawmakers ahead of the 2020 redistricting process.

Rathod hopes to be able to raise between $3 million and $5 million for SiX’s first year to demonstrate that the concept can be effective, and then plans on expanding in subsequent years to a budget of between $8 million and $10 million.

That would fund a team of policy experts from universities, think tanks, law firms and liberal organizations who could craft legislation for state lawmakers on a range of progressive issues, including reducing carbon emissions, expanding voting rights and increasing the minimum wage and union power.

SiX is inviting several hundred progressive state lawmakers to a December conference at a Northwest Washington hotel to receive communications training and policy assistance. That effort, which mirrors ALEC’s strategy on the right, will be backed up by sharper attacks on state conservatives. SiX plans to bring together a team of opposition researchers, trackers and rapid response pros to undercut conservative opponents. Such an approach, reminiscent of the tactics of Brock’s national groups, some of which are also supported by Democracy Alliance, is harder-hitting than has traditionally been deployed in inter-state politics.

But past efforts to boost Democratic prospects at the state level have floundered. In recent years, liberal groups and academic think tanks have failed to mount a unified push across states, struggling to gain traction in the states or raise the funds necessary to sustain organizations of any heft and often cannibalizing one another.

Lisa B. Nelson, ALEC’s chief executive, wrote on the creation of SiX, calling it “an indicator that states matter and the ALEC model of engagement is sound.”

Rathod said his group is open to raising corporate money, though many publicly traded corporations have grown leery of backing political organizations, thanks partly to liberal attacks on ALEC.

“We do not want to unilaterally disarm and not work with the business community,” Rathod said. “However, we will have strict rules on who we take money from and why,” he said,asserting his group would pursue “a people’s agenda … not a corporate one.”

Like ALEC, SiX is not be required to disclose its donors, but Rathod said it plans to do so voluntarily, partly to differentiate it from ALEC.

SiX’s lawyers plan to file paperwork this week with the Internal Revenue Service to officially create the group as a two-pronged outfit by changing the names of two of the groups it annexed to the State Innovation Exchange. Since the groups were registered under different sections of the Tax Code — ALICE under 501(c)(3) and Progressive States Action under 501(c)(4) – SiX will be able to engage in both policy and political advocacy.

While SiX initially does not intend to play directly in state legislative elections, Rathod said that, if all goes well, his group will do so in subsequent year by forming a political action committee called — cleverly — SiX PAC.

CLICK HERE for more information about the State Innovation Exchange (SiX).