Candidates in the 26th Legislative District state Senate race
have both made comments publicly about state Rep. Jan Angel’s ties
with the American Legislative Exchange
Council.
You might not be surprised to know that both Angel, the
Republican, and state Sen. Nathan Schlicher, the Democrat, have
said things that are factually wrong at worst or unprovable at
best.
In the Eggs & Issues debate on Sept.
3 Schlicher said a bill Angel sponsored that would have required
drug testing for welfare recipients was a bill originally written
by the American Legislative Exchange Council, often referred to in
shorthand as ALEC.
ALEC is unquestionably conservative in its orientation, as is
Angel. The organization can call itself “non partisan” without
smirking, because it does have Democrats who take part. But most of
the legislation it favors leans rightward. Angel leans to the
right, so it shouldn’t be a shock that she serves as ALEC’s
co-chair in this Washington.
The organization does write model bills. So do the National
Hispanic Caucus of State Legislatures and the Council of State
Governments. So do lobbyists, political party staff members and
lawyers representing organizations that want to see legislation.
Legislators and their staffs write bills, too. I have no way of
knowing what percentage of legislation is written by actual elected
officials, but if you were thinking it was the vast majority, you
are probably way off.
What scares those on the left about ALEC is that it is funded
mostly by the likes of executives from Koch Industries and Exxon
Mobil and much of its model legislation serves those
companies’ interests.
ALEC has been fighting against the Affordable Care Act and
counts as members of its Private Enterprise Council
executives from GlaxoSmithKline and PhRMA, companies that
contributed to Angel’s state Senate campaign. Also backing Angel’s
campaign and serving on the council is Altria Client Services, the
parent company to Philip Morris and two other tobacco
companies.
Sclicher contended initially that the drug testing for welfare
recipients bill was an ALEC model. I’ve scoured the web and can’t
find proof. There are articles that make the same claim, but they
don’t substantiate it. And I’ve found news pieces in which
legislators deny the link. The organization has written several
bills dealing with welfare and others for drug tests, but I can’t
find the organization’s fingerprints on either of Angel’s drug
testing for welfare recipients bills. As you will read later,
though, this doesn’t mean her bills were not someone’s model
bill.
Angel, in her letter to the editor
defending her affiliation with ALEC, made what to many would seem
to be a solid point about model bills. “If a bill gets through
committees, passes the House and the Senate and is signed by the
governor, perhaps it is a good bill!” she wrote.
“Good” might not be the right word for many people, but if a
bill ends up getting signed by the governor then you can at least
say it reflects the values of the people elected to represent its
citizens, no matter who wrote it. “Good” depends on your position
in relation to those values.
Angel wrote in her defense, “Mr. Bullock accuses me of
sponsoring model bills, which is absolutely not true. My bill on
drug testing for welfare benefits was written by me and my staff,
and I can prove that.”
There’s ample evidence that if Angel and her staff wrote either
of the two drug test for welfare recipients laws, they probably at
least borrowed language from bills in other states.
In 2012 Angel sponsored a bill, HB 2424, that would require
drug tests for all welfare applicants. The applicants would have
had to pay for their drug tests. By that year at least 27 other
states had proposed similar legislation. I did not search
legislation from all 27 states, but it didn’t take much searching
to find four — Florida, Oklahoma, Mississippi and Alabama — that
used virtually identical language throughout their bills as Angel
did in hers.
In 2013 Angel proposed a new bill, HB 1190, one that would
require suspicion of drug usage before a test would be required.
The language in that bill contained similar language to legislation
in Utah that had passed prior to Angel’s legislation
introduction.
Another part of Angel’s letter refuting the ALEC allegations
stated that to her knowledge only two ALEC bills were proposed in
the most recent legislative session, one of them being SB 5802, a bill requested by
Gov. Jay Inslee. I contacted the governor’s office to see if that
was true. I received the following response from David Postman,
Inslee’s spokesman.
“That bill actually had nothing to do with ALEC. I asked
the governor’s energy advisory — who did a lot of work on the bill
— and he said he had never seen the ALEC bill. When he went to look
at it at my request, he said that the ALEC bill is a very different
approach to the issue. Among other things, the ALEC bill would
study ‘benefits’ of climate change and calls for creation of an
interstate research commission. They are both studies and both
about climate change. But our bill was drafted with input from a
variety of people and the staff’s experience in previous
five-corner efforts here. We ended up with what we thought was a
good bill. We were glad it got bipartisan support, though many of
Rep. Angel’s Republican colleagues opposed it in the
House.”
Angel voted for Inslee’s bill.
UPDATE: This post has generated responses that merit inclusion
here.
First, Todd Myers with the Washington Policy Center responded to
the statement from the governor’s office. The short version is that
some of the governor’s bill did probably originate with an ALEC
bill. Here is Myers’ response:
The statement from the Governor’s office is both incorrect
and misleading, requiring people to believe in an extremely
unlikely coincidence.
First, his description of the ALEC bill is incorrect. It
does not look at “benefits” of climate change, nor does it set up
an interstate commission. The “Environmental Priorities Act”
examines the costs and benefits of environmental policy,
prioritizing those which provide the greatest benefit for each
dollar.
Similarly, at the center of the Governor’s climate bill, his
signature legislation this year, is a study of environmental
approaches that examines the “effectiveness” of climate policies
measuring “the cost per ton of emission reduction.” This mirrors
exactly ALEC’s bill, which the Washington Policy Center suggested
to the Governor.
In a piece I wrote to the Governor in January, we
recommended that his bill mirror ALEC’s Environmental Priorities
Act, which we noted “is a way to make sure we aren’t spending huge
sums of money on trendy, but ineffective, environmental policies
that starve needed funding for projects with significant potential
to help the environment.” Like the Governor, we emphasized the need
for effectiveness and ensuring we measure based on how much it
costs to reduce one ton of carbon. It was confirmed to us that
the
Governor’s office read the piece. When the Governor released his
bill later that month, this idea was specifically included. The
inclusion of that language is why WPC testified in favor of the
bill.
It is unlikely the inclusion of the language we suggested is
a coincidence. Although the Governor wrote a book on climate
policy, nowhere in the more than 200 pages of his book did he
mention this particular approach. His bill was the first time this
concept appeared. It is possible the Governor’s office did not know
the language came from ALEC legislation, but that does not change
the fact that the approach is the same.
Perhaps, however, it is merely a happy coincidence that the
exact same metric and approach suggested by ALEC was used by the
Governor in his bill. This would mean that Gov. Inslee and ALEC
independently came up with the same idea. You would think that such
a thing would be celebrated as a bi-partisan agreement on climate
policy. Instead, the Governor won’t take “yes” for an answer and
choose partisanship over agreement.
If climate policy is as serious as the Governor says, we
should not let political games get in the way of good policy and
good ideas should be praised, no matter what the source.
Todd Myers
Environmental Director | Washington Policy Center
It seems the governor’s office is not referring to the ALEC
model legislation that Angel would have been referencing. The model
bill the governor’s office referred to is the one listed on the
ALEC website as model climate change
legislation. That bill does call for a study that
calls for an “Interstate Commission on Climate Change,” charged
with studying the effects of climate change, stipulating that
“These influences may be beneficial or deleterious, and the
Commission will specifically address both hypothetical
eventualities in an evenhanded manner.”
The ALEC bill Myers is referring to is the Environmental Priorities
Act.
Second, Angel said at the Eggs & Issues she has never sponsored
an ALEC model bill. I haven’t found evidence otherwise. But Collin
Jergens from Fuse Washington, the organization behind some of the
ads against Angel, pointed to one bill that she co-sponsored, a
bill that was an ALEC model. Co-sponsoring means your name is not
the first on a list of sponsors, that the bill probably didn’t get
to the Legislature through your office. I say “probably,” because
legislators do sometimes hand off legislation from their office to
other legislators.
The bill Jergens referenced was HB 2772 in 2010 and has the
identical language as ALEC’s Climate Accountability Act.
Angel is a co-sponsor.
Jergens provided a list of Washington bills that he described as
“ALEC bills that have been introduced.” The one bill Jan Angel was
the prime sponsor of was HB 2268. That bill would have
required public school students to take a course in financial
literacy in order to graduate. There were at least three Democrats
who co-sponsored the bill from 2012 and it got a hearing in the House Committee on
Education. While the intent of the bill seems to match
the ALEC model, the language of the bill is not the same.
