Government and Politics Issues

ALEC Is Restoring The 50 Laboratories Of Government


Seventy years ago, Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis defined the states as "laboratories of government." But since then power has increasingly been centralized in Washington, leaving the states less and less leeway to experiment.

The American Legislative Exchange Council was founded 25 years ago to reverse that trend and promote the Jeffersonian concept of small government.

  • Some 3,000 of the nation's 7,500 state legislators are now members of ALEC.

  • Its specialty is crafting model legislation that can be adapted to individual state needs.

  • In 1996, 639 bills that followed ALEC models were introduced in various state legislatures -- with 20 percent eventually becoming law.

  • Tax cuts are reportedly the number one legislative priority of most ALEC legislators -- especially in an environment of mounting state surpluses.

But individual ALEC members have other interests as well. One is to force Congress to strip federal judges of their jurisdiction over purely local concerns -- such as schools and prisons. Members from Colorado and Oregon have been successful in having their legislatures pass resolutions calling on Washington to allow states to formulate their own retirement plans for workers, as an alternative to Social Security.

Although its outlook is conservative, the membership is politically mixed -- with 30 percent of members being Democrats.

Source: Editorial, "Meanwhile, Back in the States...," Wall Street Journal, August 27, 1998.

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