We wrote here about ALEC (the American Legislative Exchange Council), a hard-right, corporate-funded, members-only group of Republican state lawmakers who gather to write laws they could all take back to their states.

Well, the legislators don’t actually write the laws; the corps do that for them. That’s what “Exchange” in the title means. Billionaires (like the Koch Brothers) and corporations hand over pre-written laws and money in exchange for state-by-state policy support.

The part where the laws are taken back to the states is correct though; the lawmakers eagerly spread that legislation on their return. Case in point, the Browns-to-Prison-for-Profit law, Arizona Immigration bill SB-1070, was drafted by private prisons corporation CCA “at an ALEC conference last year.”

In that article, I mentioned William Cronon, a distinguished Wisconsin professor who has started writing about the Wisconsin wickedness and ALEC.

Well, ALEC may or may not have struck back, but its minions sure have, through their agent, Wisconsin Republicans. Paul Krugman:

And what happened next? Wisconsin Republicans have demanded access to his personal email records. Yes, personal. Cronon has a wisconsin.edu email address — but nobody, and I mean nobody, considers such academic email addresses something specially reserved for university business. Actually, according to Cronon he has been especially careful, maintaining a separate personal account — but nobody would have considered it out of the ordinary if he mingled personal correspondence with official business on the dot edu address. … But then, we know perfectly well what’s going on here. Republicans aren’t looking for some abuse of Cronon’s position; they’re hoping to find some statement that can be quoted out of context to discredit him. At the very least, they hope that other academics will henceforth feel intimidated. And somehow, we can be sure that people like, say, Richard Vedder of Ohio University wouldn’t be subject to equivalent scrutiny. As usual, the nakedness of the thing is what’s surprising.

I’ll be writing more about ALEC in the future, including some startling information about their funding. (Hint: It isn’t the lawmakers’ dues that keeps them afloat.)

GP