page_title: American Legislative Exchange Council
section_title: Organization
hierarchical_section_title: American Legislative Exchange Council / Organization
caption_attribution_description: English: 2900 Crystal Drive, Arlington VA
context_page_description: The American Legislative Exchange Council is a nonprofit organization of conservative state legislators and private sector representatives who draft and share model state-level legislation for distribution among state governments in the United States.
  ALEC provides a forum for state legislators and private sector members to collaborate on model bills—draft legislation that members may customize and introduce for debate in their own state legislatures. ALEC has produced model bills on a broad range of issues, such as reducing regulation and individual and corporate taxation, combating illegal immigration, loosening environmental regulations, tightening voter identification rules, weakening labor unions, and opposing gun control. 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. ALEC also serves as a networking tool among certain state legislators, allowing them to research conservative policies implemented in other states. Many ALEC legislators say the organization converts campaign rhetoric and nascent policy ideas into legislative language.
context_section_description: As of December 2013, ALEC had more than 85 members of Congress and 14 sitting or former governors who were considered "alumni". The majority of the ALEC legislative members belong to the Republican Party. Membership statistics presented at an ALEC board meeting in 2013 indicated that the 1,810 members represented 24% of all state legislative seats across the U.S., and that ALEC members represented 100% of the legislative seats in Iowa and South Dakota. It also has approximately 300 corporate, foundation, and other private-sector members. The chairmanship of ALEC is a rotating position, with a new legislator appointed to the position each year. As of 2012, 28 out of 33 of its chairs had been Republicans.
  ALEC has nine "task forces" that generate model bills that members may customize and introduce for debate in their own state legislatures. Private sector members effectively have veto power over model bills drafted by the task forces.
  The ALEC Public Safety and Elections Task Force, which promoted stand your ground gun laws and voter identification requirements, was disbanded in April 2012. Thereafter, the National Center for Public Policy Research announced the creation of a voter ID task force to replace the one discontinued by ALEC.
  Bills drafted by the task forces must be approved by the ALEC board of directors, composed exclusively of legislators, before they are designated as model bills. ALEC also has a "Private Enterprise Advisory Council", which meets whenever the board of directors meets. Council members include representatives from prominent corporations such as ExxonMobil, Pfizer, AT&T, SAP SE, State Farm Insurance, and Koch Industries. ALEC statements assert that the council provides advice to the board of directors. Former ALEC co-chairman Noble Ellington said in 2011, "I really kind of think of us as one board," although he added, "It’s certainly not our goal to sit there and do everything that business wants to have done."
  Day-to-day operations are run from ALEC's Arlington, Virginia, office by an executive director and a staff of approximately 30. ALEC's bylaws specify that, "... full membership shall be open to persons dedicated to the preservation of individual liberty, basic American values and institutions, productive free enterprise, and limited representative government, who support the purposes of ALEC, and who serve, or formerly serve, as members of a state or territorial legislature, the United States Congress, or similar bodies outside the United States."
  ALEC also has a "Board of Scholars" that advises staff and members. The board is composed of Arthur Laffer, an economist who served on Ronald Reagan's Economic Policy Advisory Board; Victor Schwartz, chair of Public Policy at Shook, Hardy & Bacon; Richard Vedder, economics professor emeritus at Ohio University and adjunct scholar at the American Enterprise Institute; and Bob Williams, founder of the Evergreen Freedom Foundation.
  ALEC also has ties to the State Policy Network (SPN), a national association of conservative and libertarian think-tanks. SPN is a member of ALEC, and ALEC is an associate member of the SPN. SPN encourages its members to join ALEC, and many members of SPN are also members of ALEC. Some of the think tanks in the SPN write model legislation, which then is introduced at ALEC private meetings. ALEC is "SPN's sister organisation" according to The Guardian.
  ALEC is registered as a charity in 37 states.
  In 2003, Donald Ray Kennard, then a Louisiana state representative and ALEC national chairman, said, "We are a very, very conservative organization... We're just espousing what we really believe in." Craig Horn, a North Carolina state representative and ALEC member, said of ALEC in 2013, "It's a lightning rod organization because it has a decidedly conservative bent—there’s no doubt about it."
caption: ALEC's headquarters in Crystal City, Arlington, Virginia
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