ALEC Retreats Under Pressure, Ends Push For 'Stand Your Ground,' Voter ID Laws
by Dan Froomkin
04/17/2012
WASHINGTON -- The American Legislative Exchange Council, the controversial corporate-sponsored lobbying group whose push for "stand your ground" gun laws and voter ID legislation ignited grassroots protests, announced Tuesday that it is getting out of the social policy field to focus on core economic issues.
Corporations associated with ALEC had been under siege from public interest and civil rights groups who demanded they cut ties with ALEC, most recently because of its successful push to pass "stand your ground" legislation in multiple states. Florida's version of that law has been cited as a reason why neighborhood watch volunteer George Zimmerman was not initially charged in the deadly shooting of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin.
Several companies -- including Coca-Cola, Pepsi, McDonald's, Kraft and Intuit -- had already distanced themselves from ALEC before Tuesday's surprise announcement.
"We are eliminating the ALEC Public Safety and Elections task force that dealt with non-economic issues, and reinvesting these resources in the task forces that focus on the economy," David Frizzell, an Indiana state representative and current ALEC chairman, said in a statement.
Rashad Robinson, executive director of ColorofChange, a civil rights group in the forefront of the campaign against ALEC, stopped short of declaring victory -- at least initially.
"I'm reading their statement as we speak," he told HuffPost. "It will be interesting as we parse out what that actually means, because ALEC sometimes says one thing and does something very different."
Robinson said he wants to see how the statement translates into action.
"This is good news in the sense that they have recognized that those ["stand your ground" and voter ID] bills represent an extreme agenda," said Lisa Graves, executive director of the Center for Media and Democracy, which published an exposé of ALEC this past fall.
"Corporate members were obviously telling them they weren't interested in underwriting that extreme agenda," Graves said. She called ALEC's announcement "a positive sign of the power of the grassroots campaign to hold ALEC and its corporate funders to account for these extreme bills."...
For the full article, go to:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/17/alec-retreats-stand-your-ground-laws-voter-id_n_1431531.html
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