Conservative House Democrat Jon Brien of Woonsocket is not only a card carrying member of ALEC, the right wing group backed by some of America’s most powerful corporations that writes model legislation for use in state houses around the country, but he’s also the lone Democrat on the group’s 17 member board of directors.
“I don’t feel it’s largely Republican but I think it’s a conservative group,” he said, noting that ALEC stands up for low taxes and free market policies which are also core values of his. “I’m a conservative, I make no bones about that.
He added, “It’s a collaboration between business and legislators. It’s no different than a U.S. senator getting a donation from a corporation.”
Brien said he was just named to the group’s “governing body” in the past month. He said he was introduced to ALEC by former Woonsocket lawmaker and majority leader Jerry Martineau, a past state chair of ALEC who served jail time for political corruption for using his position in the General Assembly to curry business favors with CVS and Blue Cross.
“Jerry and I have always been friends,” Brien said. “I wanted to pick up that mantle.”
Brien will be attending ALEC’s spring task force meeting in Charlotte this May where, he said, “we’ll probably be talking about everything that is going on in the court of public opinion.”
ALEC, which has for years flown below the mainstream media’s radar, has been in the news of late for authoring the Stand Your Ground law in Florida that came under fire when it almost allowed George Zimmerman to go un-prosecuted for the killing of Trayvon Martin. Brien said last week ALEC decided to no longer work on non-economic policy after several large corporations dropped their membership
More recently, Common Cause has accused ALEC of tax evasion because the group is registered as an educational non-profit when it engages in lobbying efforts.
“It’s a corporate front group that is cheating the tax payers,” said John Marion, the executive director of Common Cause RI. Marion and Brien exchanged tweets on the issue yesterday afternoon. “They should own up to the fact that they are lobbyists and register as every other group has to do.”
Brien denied the allegations, saying ALEC has done nothing wrong with its taxes. He said Common Cause has targeted ALEC not because the group is flouting its tax obligation but because ALEC, like Brien, support Voter ID laws, which Common Cause works against.
“They can’t beat us legislatively, so they are coming after us in another way,” Brien said.”Do you think Common Cause is mad about taxes or because we are beating them on Voter ID?”
While he referred to himself as the “godfather of Voter ID in Rhode Island,” he said he did not use the ALEC model bill for Voter ID. He said he has never proposed an ALEC model bill in the House but he often proposes legislative issues that are also near and dear to ALEC such as anti-tax bills, education reform efforts and others.
Brien said since becoming the state co-chair of ALEC he has signed up some 10 new members from the legislature. He named Reps. Lisa Baldelli-Hunt, Dan Reilly, Doreen Costa, Lisa Tomasso, and Samuel Azzinaro. He said he hopes many of them join him at the annual meeting this August in Salt Lake City.
At that meeting, he will appoint Rhode Island legislators to ALEC task forces. The task forces, he said, pairs legislative members with corporate sponsors to hammer out new model legislation.
[...] now, Bob Plain of RI’s Future reports on how state Representative Jon Brien of Woonsocket, who has a leadership role with the [...]
A survey of Rhode Island voters showed 74% overall support for a national popular vote for President.
Support was 78% among independents, 86% among liberal Democrats, 85% among moderate Democrats, 60% among conservative Democrats, 71% among liberal Republicans, 63% among moderate Republicans, and 35% among conservative Republicans.
By age, support was 77% among 18-29 year olds, 80% among 30-45 year olds, 70% among 46-65 year olds, and 76% for those older than 65.
By gender, support was 84% among women and 63% among men.
On September 7, 2007, ALEC’s National Board Members gave final approval to a resolution, passed by its members, in support of the current Electoral College system used to elect the President of the United States. http://www.alec.org/docs/Electoral_College_PR.pdf
ALEC’s First Vice Chairman, State Sen. Steve Faris (AR), introduced the resolution after his state came close to passing a bill that would have awarded the state’s Electoral College votes to the winner of the national popular vote instead of the winner of the state’s popular vote. He said “I am proud ALEC has endorsed this resolution and is committed to oppose all national popular vote legislation.”
The National Popular Vote bill would guarantee the Presidency to the candidate who receives the most popular votes in all 50 states (and DC).
Every vote, everywhere, would be politically relevant and equal in presidential elections. No more distorting and divisive red and blue state maps. There would no longer be a handful of ‘battleground’ states where voters and policies are more important than those of the voters in more than 3/4ths of the states, like Rhode Island, that now are just ‘spectators’ and ignored after the primaries.
When the bill is enacted by states possessing a majority of the electoral votes– enough electoral votes to elect a President (270 of 538), all the electoral votes from the enacting states would be awarded to the presidential candidate who receives the most popular votes in all 50 states and DC.
The bill uses the power given to each state by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution to change how they award their electoral votes for President. Historically, virtually all of the major changes in the method of electing the President, including ending the requirement that only men who owned substantial property could vote and 48 current state-by-state winner-take-all laws, have come about by state legislative action.
In Gallup polls since 1944, only about 20% of the public has supported the current system of awarding all of a state’s electoral votes to the presidential candidate who receives the most votes in each separate state (with about 70% opposed and about 10% undecided). Support for a national popular vote is strong among Republicans, Democrats, and Independent voters, as well as every demographic group in virtually every state surveyed in recent polls.
Americans believe that the candidate who receives the most votes should win.
Despite ALEC’s opposition and influence, the bill has passed 31 state legislative chambers in 21 states. The bill has been enacted by 9 jurisdictions possessing 132 electoral votes – 49% of the 270 necessary to go into effect.
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[...] Bob Plain has spent the week reporting on ALEC and he found that not only is state Rep. Jon Brien now on the group’s national board, but one in five members of the General Assembly is affiliated with the [...]
[...] group has a very clear agenda for dealing with state budgets. It wants to shrink them. Although Brien has denied that he is applying the ALEC philosophy to his small city, it looks, in fact, as if that’s [...]
[...] offers its own “state budget reform toolkit.” The NYT columnist adds: “Although Brien has denied that he is applying the ALEC philosophy to his small city, it looks, in fact, as if that’s [...]