A Minor Musing About The South Dakota Legislature And ALEC

Today's Argus had a he said/she said article about the South Dakota Legislature's executive board's decision to pay legislators' memberships in the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). The Democrats point out that the group is pro large corporation advocacy group funded by the Koch brothers and other conservatives. Republicans take issue with the assertion that the Koch brothers use ALEC to push their agenda and claim that the group educates legislators.

Then there's this bit of reasoning:

Sen. Ryan Maher, R-Isabel, said interactions with corporations at ALEC meetings are positive.

“Yes, there’s corporate people there, too. But you can learn from them,” Maher said. “What better opportunity than to sit down with these people and have a discussion and promote the state of South Dakota as a tax-friendly state?”

So, ALEC isn't about a right-wing agenda; the group merely allows legislators to convince ALEC's corporate members that South Dakota is a tax friendly state. Corporations should have their own bean counters to determine that fact, so the corporations shouldn't need much convincing.

If it's not about the Koch brothers and it seems unlikely South Dakota needs ALEC meetings to prove the state's low tax bona fides,  then it seems that these meetings are ways for ALEC's corporate members to convince legislators which corporations should be winners and which should losers. Given that ALEC purports to support free enterprise capitalism, attempts to have the government pick winners and losers seems either ironic or more than a little disingenuous.

Quotation Of The Day: Unicameral Legislature Edition

From Justin Green and Matt Yglesias:

Matt Yglesias urges states to slim down their legislatures:

At the national level, we have a bicameral legislature because of the overall workings of the federal system. But the non-Nebraska states have bicameral legislatures for no real reason. If you simply eliminated the lower houses, you'd end up with substantially fewer state legislators. Then you could pay them more and offer them more staff. It'd also be easier for citizens to keep track of who their elected officials actually are (can you name who represents you in your state legislature?) and make the electoral competition for the seats more fearsome.

Open question: why do states have two chambers? (Seriously).

The U.S. Senate is the product of a compromise between the states. Why do states need to emulate that model?

I wonder what this would mean for South Dakota. The State has a lot of legislators for its population. It certainly seems as if the unicameral would be cheaper.

At Least South Dakota Is Not Idaho

I will thank the South Dakota Legislature for not proposing anything this inane:

John Goedde, chairman of the Idaho Senate’s Education Committee, introduced legislation Tuesday to require every Idaho high school student to read Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged” and pass a test on it to graduate from high school.

Goedde likes the book because it made his son a Republican. He also doesn't intend to push the legislation. Instead he is using the bill to threaten to those who have opposed other education initiatives that he has proposed. One could praise Goedde for living the values that Rand preaches, but that would also praise a foolish consistency.

Lest some South Dakota legislator begins to fear that Republicans are a minority or somehow thinks Rand's lengthy paean to selfishness a necessary read, The Daily Beast provides a reminder of review of Rand's magnum opus that I heartily endorse:

Writing in the pages of William F. Buckley’s National Review, Whittaker Chambers, a former communist turned vigorous anti-communist, offered what would become the most famous criticism of novelist Ayn Rand: “From almost any page of Atlas Shrugged, a voice can be heard, from painful necessity, commanding: ‘To a gas chamber—go!’”

Creationists Don't Like Bill Mandating The Teaching Of Creation

I guess South Dakota will get to this legislation next year.  From the Discovery Institute,

Indianapolis – A bill approved today by the Indiana Senate to allow the teaching of creationism in public schools is being criticized as bad science education by Discovery Institute, the nation’s leading intelligent design think tank.

If made law, Indiana Senate Bill 89 (SB89) would allow creationism, a religious view on the origin of species, into the Hoosier state’s biology classrooms. In 1987, the Supreme Court struck down similar legislation as an unconstitutional establishment of religion. Instead of scrapping SB89 in deference to legal precedent, the Indiana Senate has amended the bill to allow more religious views on origins, as if more religion could cure the original problem.

“Instead of injecting religion into biology classes, legislators should be working to promote the inclusion of more science,” said Joshua Youngkin, a law and policy analyst at Discovery Institute’s Center for Science & Culture. “There are plenty of scientific criticisms of Darwin’s theory today, and science students should be able to hear about them, not about religion.”

The original bill was amended to mandate that science classes teach the creation stories of many cultures in biology classes.