A Tennessee walking horse looks out from his stall in Chattanooga.Tennessee’s Legislature and its ruling Republicans rely far more on the rich corporate collaborators that fund and guide ALEC – the American Legislative Exchange Council – than most Tennesseans will ever know.
As in most of the nation’s GOP-controlled legislatures nowadays, most of the Tennessee Legislature’s business-friendly giveaways, cash incentives for development, partisan and anti-worker reforms of worker compensation and insurance laws, and school voucher and charter school legislation, is concocted or driven by ALEC’s deeply partisan, pro-business backers.
So are our legislators’ recently adopted campaign financing loopholes, which now make it so easy for elected officials to scoop up lobbyists’ cash and to rely entirely on cash campaign donations – the previous limit was 50 percent – from business-funded Political Action Committees. Similarly, ALEC’s GOP/tea party loyalists have helped gin up the union-killer bills (think teachers, firemen and police unions) seen broadly among Republican state legislatures the past several years.
And to keep their partisan loyalists and supporting voters in tow, ALEC and its National Rifle Association niche supporters also help circulate pro-gun, anti-abortion, anti-gay and anti-health-care reform measures – measures, again, widely circulated and advocated in Nashville.
The ubiquitous use of such ALEC-spawned bills has become so prevalent in Nashville that lawmakers in a previous session adopted a rule forbidding their use of such bills to be identified publicly in the legislative process as ALEC model bills. But it’s not hard to spot ALEC-backed legislation once one questions the source or reasoning behind specific bills.