The Real Truth, the Actual Year and those Responsible for Creating Republican’s American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), is a very Different Story than what ALEC has Posted on Their Website

I‘ve read the history of Alec of when it said it was created and like everything ALEC says that information is false and wrong. ALEC has been around much further than thought. ALEC was actually instituted in October 1969. The reason why it was instituted because the ACU was afraid of the power the Democrats had gain. All of that is stated in a collection located at Brigham Youngs Library.

The American Conservative Union is the nations oldest lobbying group from the Right and it was founded by William F. Buckey in 1964. It would be in 1969 when the American Legislative Exectutive Council was founded.

The following comes from a document called the “Register of the American Conservative Union, 1964-1980”
that is located in Brigham Young University. The information is part of the “L. Tom Perry Special Collections”

“The ACU kept a close eye on the Nixon Administration. It issued a report on the President’s first year, and also issued critical reports on his welfare reform proposals, Vietnam policies, and foreign policy in general. Combatting the Nixon Administration necessitated new methods and the ACU responded with a vigorous new lobbying program. The ACU’s first serious lobbying effort was begun in 1969 when the Board of Directors committed their organizaion to an all-out fight against Nixon’s Family Assistance Program (FAP). This effort included the publication of a critical report on FAP, a mailing and petition drive that generated 75,000 letters to Congress, and the distribution of over one-million anti-FAP brochures. Working with other conservative groups, the ACU laid down what was described by one reporter as a “barrage” against the Nixon bill. In another lobbying effort, the ACU played a key role in the defeat of a proposed amendment which would have abolished the Electoral College system. The ACU attack was foucused on those states which stood to lose representation if the amendment passed. To combat the proposal on a local level, the ACU instituted the “American Legislative Exchange Council” (ALEC) in October 1969. ALEC was composed of state legislators who were interested in sharing information and coordinating strategies. The ACU staff served as the intermediary for the legislators. After the amendment was defeated, enough interest in teh Council remained to make it a permanent organization under the direction of the ACU.”

Series XII: Legislative Department

Series XII: Legislative Department

The lobbying efforts of the ACU were directed by the Legislative Department. In addition to the issue files (which are found in series XIII), the staff in this department prepared reports to support their lobbying activities and those of other like-minded groups and individuals. This series contains those reports, staff correspondence, staff personal files, and general department files.

Box Folder Contents
71 1 [American Legislative Executive Council] General file–correspondence, finances, etc. 4 items
71 2 [American Legislative Executive Council] Publications. 8 items

Box Folder Contents
76 2 [D.C. Amendment] American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) activity, 1978-79. 17 items

Box Contents
113
1965-1974

1. Vietnam Seminar–Eldridge Durbrow, Frank Severs
2. 1971 Conservative Awads Dinner
3. Interview with Ambassador James Shen of Taiwan–James Shen
4. ALEC–A: Donald Trotten, Mark Roads, M. Stanton Evans–B: Woody Jenkins, Bob Carlson
http://files.lib.byu.edu/ead/XML/MSS176.xml

The Following comes from the American Conservative Union website
The American Conservative Union was founded I 1964 and is the oldest conservative lobbying organization in the country.
By this time, the honeymoon between conservatives, as spearheaded by ACU, and the Nixon Administration was over. ACU’s first authentic lobbying program, in 1969, had been an all-out battle against Nixon’s Family Assistance Plan (FAP) welfare proposal. ACU fought Nixon’s revenue-sharing scheme and also played a key role in defeating a proposal to abolish the electoral college. That initiative led to the creation in October 1969 of an ad hoc ACU project, later dubbed the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), composed of conservative state legislators interested in sharing information and coordinating strategy on the electoral college issue. The project was so successful that ALEC continued after the electoral college fight was over. ALEC was officially established as a formal ACU project at a Chicago meeting in 1975 under the leadership of Illinois state legislator Donald Totten. A few years later, ALEC became an independent organization.

Read More :: http://conservative.org/about-acu/history/#ixzz1uYncSkWB

Read More :: http://conservative.org/about-acu/history/#ixzz1uwJYLvF1

American Legislative Exectutive Council (ALEC) websites says something quite different. Perhaps there is something ALEC wishes to hide and perhaps they don’t want to be look at any closer, because the 1960s did represent a turbelent area. Perhaps there is something in learning about some of the member they don’t wish for us to see. Perhaps it the word lobbying that is involved that they are running from, because it is clearly documented the ACU were involved in lobbying. What ever the reason, the who and the time when American Legislative Exectutive Council (ALEC) was established in which they give is not true.

More than 30 years ago, a small group of state legislators and conservative policy advocates met in Chicago to implement a vision:

A nonpartisan membership association for conservative state lawmakers who shared a common belief in limited government, free markets, federalism, and individual liberty. Their vision and initiative resulted in the creation of a voluntary membership association for people who believed that government closest to the people was fundamentally more effective, more just, and a better guarantor of freedom than the distant, bloated federal government in Washington, D.C.

At that meeting, in September 1973, state legislators, including then Illinois State Rep. Henry Hyde, conservative activist Paul Weyrich, and Lou Barnett, a veteran of then Gov. Ronald Reagan’s 1968 presidential campaign, together with a handful of others, launched the American Legislative Exchange Council. Among those who were involved with ALEC in its formative years were: Robert Kasten and Tommy Thompson of Wisconsin; John Engler of Michigan; Terry Branstad of Iowa, and John Kasich of Ohio, all of whom moved on to become governors or members of Congress. Congressional members who were active during this same period included Senators John Buckley of New York and Jesse Helms of North Carolina, and Congressmen Phil Crane of Illinois and Jack Kemp of New York.

The Birth of ALEC Task Forces

The concept of ALEC task forces dates back to the early days of the first Reagan administration when, in 1981, the President formed a national Task Force on Federalism, which was headed by U.S. Senator Paul Laxalt of Nevada. Also on the President’s Task Force was ALEC National Chairman Tom Stivers of Idaho.

The President’s Task Force on Federalism would come to rely heavily upon members of ALEC for expert testimony. Then State Senator John Kasich of Ohio and Senate President Robert Monier of New Hampshire regularly met in front of the committee. As a result of the interaction between ALEC members and Reagan Administration officials, ALEC established seven first-generation Task Forces, then called Cabinet Task Forces, which worked directly with the administration on policy development issues.

Almost immediately, the impact of this interaction was evident: In 1981, ALEC published and distributed 10,000 copies of Reagan and the States, detailing methods for decentralizing government from the federal to the state level. In 1982, ALEC began developing its first health care initiatives. In 1983, ALEC responded to the Reagan Administration’s landmark study, A Nation at Risk, with a two-part report on Education which laid the blame for the nation’s educational decline squarely where it belonged-on centralization, declining values, and an increasingly liberal social agenda that had pervaded schools since the 1960s-and which offered such “radical” ideas as a voucher system, merit pay for teachers and higher academic and behavioral standards for students as possible solutions to the problems.

ALEC represents themselves to be a non-partisan organization when clearly they were created by a partisan Conservative political organization. That is something they probably don’t want revealed.