You might remember the dust-up between Speaker Bill Howell and the local representative of ProgressVA over accusations that the American Legislative Exchange Council is an evil, conservative Svengali that must run out of River City post-haste.
ALEC is still around, of course, but according to this piece in the Free Beacon, the left has its own share of “secretive” groups plotting strategies, writing model legislation and generally seeking to do their paymaster’s bidding:
One explicitly liberal group that pushes model legislation is the Progressive States Network. In 2009, the Soros Fund made a grant of $300,000 to the organization. In 2010, members of the Progressive States Network Board included Wes Boyd, President and co-founder of MoveOn.org; David Brock, President and CEO of Media Matters for America; and John Podesta, President and CEO, the Center for American Progress.
The Progressive States Network’s mission is to “engage and build the capacity of state and national leaders to advance public policy solutions that uphold America’s promise to be a just and equitable democracy.”
It pushes legislation such as anti-smoking measures and provides talking points to legislators opposing laws on illegal immigration.
“We don’t publish our funders,” Progressive States Network communication director Charles Monaco told the Free Beacon. “That’s not material we make public on our website.”
Another new group has also been formed—the American Legislative and Issue Campaign Exchange (ALICE), which Nation editor Katrina vanden Heuvel called the “centerpiece” of a growing progressive legislative pushback against ALEC. ALICE would offer model laws “based on the values of equity, sustainability, and responsible government.”
Quick! Someone tell Anita Kumar about all this!
The article circles back to Bill Howell, who points out that ALEC isn’t the only outside, agenda-driven, model legislation writing group the General Assembly has dealings with:
ALEC’s influence in the state legislature has been overblown, and the money paid to ALEC by the Virginia legislature to attend conferences paled in comparison with the amount paid to other groups such as the National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL) and Council of State Governments, which also craft hundreds of model bills a year, Howell told the Free Beacon.
“The amount the state was paying to the two other organizations was 10 times as much for each,” Howell said. “We paid about $2.5 million over the past 10 years for dues, yet at the same time [critics] are accusing ALEC of taking $230,000 over the past decade from the state.”
The horror of it all.
But then we come to ProgessVA, which demands accountability for others, but not for itself:
ProgressVA is a Virginia organization that launched attacks against ALEC and Howell earlier in April, releasing a report supposedly documenting ALEC’s influence over the state legislature.
“The American Legislative Exchange Council, a secretive organization funded by big corporations, has been writing bills that Virginia legislators are passing off as their own work on everything from education to health care to voting rights,” Anna Scholl, executive director of ProgressVA, told the Washington Post.
Scholl declined to tell the Free Beacon who funds ProgressVA.
Progress Now, the national arm of ProgressVA, did not return requests for comment.
“There’s nothing more mysterious than ProgressVA,” Speaker Howell said.
Perhaps. But it is deeply entertaining to see the group that brayed so loudly about secret conservative/corporate cabals trying to have their way in the General Assembly become so tight-lipped when its own sources of funding are questioned.
Maybe they are the ones who actually have something to hide.
