American Legislative Exchange Council
The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), founded 1973 by Paul Weyrich and others, is a corporate-funded organization that drafts model legislation for state legislatures — a "bill mill" pairing corporate donors with conservative lawmakers behind closed doors.
Operation
- Corporate members sit on task forces with state legislators and vote jointly on model bills; drafts then circulate in statehouses nationwide (Stand Your Ground laws, voter ID, anti-union "right to work," tax caps, school privatization).
- Exposed by reporting (e.g., 2011-2013 campaigns after the Trayvon Martin shooting tied ALEC to Stand Your Ground); over 100 corporations quit under pressure, but the apparatus persists.
Significance
ALEC is the paradigm of right-wing long-march institutional strategy: policy produced centrally, laundered through federalism, invisible to the public — the mirror image of what the left has failed to build. Infrared cites it when discussing how the right actually exercises power versus the left's protest-entrepreneurship.