‘Copycat’ bills
State legislatures surrender responsibilities to special interests.
States, it is said, are the laboratories of democracy. With 50 of them experimenting with different approaches to everything from education to litter control, one or more are apt to stumble onto some good ideas, which can filter to other states or to Washington, D.C.
These days, however, states are less the laboratories of democracy than the playgrounds of special interests. That is certainly the impression you get from an investigative report by USA TODAY, The Arizona Republic and the Center for Public Integrity. It exposed how many of the laws that state legislatures enacted had been written by special interest groups and then adopted by multiple states with little or no changes.
The report found that at least 10,000 bills nationwide were almost entirely copied from models, and more than 2,100 were signed into law in the past eight years. If state legislators took the same approach to their speeches, they’d be accused of plagiarism.
Some of these copycat laws were written by progressive groups pushing issues like gun control. Some were authored by groups that are hard to categorize. But the great majority were the work of corporate interests, such as auto dealers, and conservative groups.
One prominent source of “model” bills, the decades-old American Legislative Exchange Council, promotes a broad array of conservative and probusiness legislation, as well as some measures that are purely partisan, such as efforts to restrict voting. Another such group is the Goldwater Institute, named for the late senator and presidential candidate, which also works on a variety of causes but has a special interest in school vouchers and charter schools.
Often, the legislative handiwork of these groups comes with names that sound like they’re straight from George Orwell’s pen. For example, the HOPE Act, introduced in nine state legislatures, was written by a conservative advocacy group and made it harder to qualify for food stamps. The Asbestos Transparency Act was the work of corporate interests that made it more difficult for victims to recoup money.
Many of the copycat laws are not only generic, they also are blatant power grabs designed to override the will of the people. Urban communities typically are more progressive than the states in which they are located. Business groups upset by, say, a city’s hike in the minimum wage or ban on plastic bags simply run to the state capitol to have it undone.
Conservative groups have often been the champions of local government, seeing it as more noble and closer to the people than the politicians and bureaucrats in far off Washington, so their role in neutering municipal autonomy comes with an abundance of irony. What to do?
Any individual or institution has a right to petition government, including drafting proposed legislation. Trying to ban the practice of copy-and-paste legislating is probably as unconstitutional as it is unwise.
Even so, voters have a right to know who actually wrote the bills under consideration, and whether those bills are identical in whole or in part to measures enacted or under consideration in other states.
The best remedy is transparency — requiring lawmakers to fully disclose the origins of the measures that they’re introducing.
State legislators are supposed to carefully debate bills tailor-made for their special circumstances. It should not take a lengthy investigative report — powered by the equivalent of 150 computers running nonstop for months — to reveal that they are outsourcing their jobs to special interests.