IF I WAS DICTATOR FOR A DAY… I’d get rid of Copy Cat Bills
Note: This is the written text on which the Dictator for a Day Podcast of the same name is based.
The Podcast is more fun! You’ll get to meet a state legislator responsible for a lot of copy cat bills… and my side kick Sounder will be there to chime in on occasion.
You can listen to the Podcast by clicking on this link or scroll past for the article:
Copy Cat Bills – The Article
When I was an adjunct professor teaching crisis management public relations at a small college in Wisconsin, I nearly flunked two students for plagiarism. Reading through a stack of about two-dozen assignments one evening at home, the two papers stuck out like a pair of vultures at a canary convention. The two students were working in tandem. The first paper plagiarized an online article. The second paper was a plagiarized work of the first plagiary.
After class the following day, I confronted them. They feigned innocence.
I interrogated. They denied.
I persisted. They weakened.
I showed them the evidence; identical phrases, sentences, entire paragraphs identical in their papers to the online article I’d discovered whose author had originated the concept, thoughts, and verbiage, and which had been written about the time these two students would have been in grade school.
They caved.
They cried.
They promised endless reparations (beyond eternity.)
Alas, being a kinder, gentler person at the time, I caved as well, and did not fail them for the course. Their grades suffered but they remained.
I admit now, I was wrong. In retrospect, I did them no favor. They still passed the course because the rest of their work was well executed. They should have been tossed out. Flunked. Plagiarism is a capital offense in academia and I should not have let a soft heart triumph over logic.
I never heard from them again so I don’t know whether they went on to write best sellers or are currently editing for the New York Times.
They’re not alone. There are plagiarists everywhere. As it turns out, many of them are working in a state capitol near you. They are the legislative plagiarists, and they may be a plague upon our land.
You thought the legislators you elected in your state are going to work and talking to voters and looking around to find out what your state really needs, and then crafting laws to make it happen. They’re toiling the midnight oil writing their fingers to the bone to get that special law just right before offering it up to their legislative colleagues for a vote.
But that’s not what’s happening. It may not even be close.
In many states – most of them if you believe the article I’m about to quote – a phenomenon called copy and paste legislation has taken hold, and is spreading across our fair land.
State legislators are being lobbied – not just to push special interest legislation – but to not even write the bills on their own. They are handed the bills. Virtually identical bills are making it through legislature after legislature that have been drafted by someone else, often a special interest group, then handed to the legislator.
There’s an outfit called The Center for Public Integrity. Its tagline is “Investigating inequality,” (a tagline which should, understandably, raise eyebrows.)
In 2019 The Center for Public Integrity reported having completed a 2 year investigation with USA TODAY and The Arizona Republic, in which they report that each year, state lawmakers across the US introduce thousands of bills that are actually the creative work of corporations, industry groups and think tanks.
According to The Center the bills are called “model bills” because they are models copied by lawmakers in state after state. If the bills are passed in enough states it’s like getting a federal law passed without ever going thru the US House and Senate and being signed into law by the President. The bills also bypass a lot of public scrutiny and regulation.
Center for Public Integrity says the investigation used computers running algorithm to examine nearly 1 million bills in all 50 states and Congress, and found at least 10,000 bills copied almost entirely from model bills and introduced in state legislatures over an 8-year period. It says more than 2,100 were signed into law!
While it appears these so-called model bills are coming from both liberal and conservative causes, the Center’s report shows the majority are spawned by corporations and special interest groups, ostensibly, from the right.
The Center claims model bills - in reality copy and paste bills – that have been passed into law have, for example:
Made it harder for injured consumers to sue corporations
Called for taxes on sugar-laden drinks
Limited access to abortion
Restricted rights of protesters
Here’s the real danger, as I see it:
State legislators who use these copy-and-paste or “copy cat” bills aren’t doing their jobs.
The result is perhaps the country’s biggest special interest campaign – that goes entirely unreported in the manner most special interest groups have to report – with the bills driving agendas in statehouses across the country and touching many, many areas of public policy.
Meet “Copy Cat” Bill, noted state law-maker, legislative plagiarist and bane of voters all across his state, by listening to the Podcast “Copy Cat Bills,” posted earlier on Dictator for a Day.
For lawmakers, the Center reports:
“…copying model legislation is an easy way to get fully formed bills to put their names on, while building relationships with lobbyists and other potential campaign donors.
“For special interests seeking to stay under the radar, model legislation also offers distinct advantages. Copycat bills don’t appear on expense reports, or campaign finance forms. They don’t require someone to register as a lobbyist or sign in at committee hearings. Once injected into the lawmaking process, they can go viral, spreading from state to state, executing an agenda to the letter.”
The Center says USA TODAY’s investigation found:
“Models are drafted with deceptive titles and descriptions to disguise their true intent. The Asbestos Transparency Act didn’t help people exposed to asbestos. It was written by corporations who wanted to make it harder for victims to recoup money. ‘The “HOPE Act,’ introduced in nine states, was written by a conservative advocacy group to make it more difficult for people to get food stamps.”
“Special interests sometimes work to create the illusion of expert endorsements, public consensus or grassroots support. One man testified as an expert in 13 states to support a bill that makes it more difficult to sue for asbestos exposure. In several states, lawmakers weren’t told that he was a member of the organization that wrote the model legislation on behalf of the asbestos industry, the American Legislative Exchange Council.”
“Copied bills have been used to override the will of local voters and their elected leaders. Cities and counties have raised their minimum wage, banned plastics bags and destroyed seized guns, only to have industry groups that oppose such measures make them illegal with model bills passed in state legislatures. Among them: Airbnb has supported the conservative Arizona-based Goldwater Institute, which pushed model bills to strike down local laws limiting short-term rentals in residential neighborhoods in four states.”
“Industry groups have had extraordinary success pushing copycat bills that benefit themselves. More than 4,000 such measures were introduced during the period analyzed by USA TODAY/Arizona Republic. One that passed in Wisconsin limited pain-and-suffering compensation for injured nursing-home residents, restricting payouts to lost wages, Ok – let me read directly from the report. It says “Copied bills have been used to override the will of local voters and their elected leaders.”
To be fair, some of the copy cat bills might be beneficial.
According to the report, “Some bills were written to require sex offenders to register with law enforcement, while others have made it easier for members of the military to vote or increased penalties for human trafficking.”
Somehow that just doesn’t seem like enough, given that taxpayers are paying legislators to do a job. A job a lot of them have been outsourcing.
Letting others do it for them and – in exchange – developing cushy relationships with lobbyists, potential campaign donors, and better prospects for a well-paying job or consultancy after political life with the very industries they are supposed to be watching out for on behalf of taxpayers, seems very wrong, and a broach of public trust.
If I were to become Dictator for a Day I’d get rid of copy and paste legislation. No more copy cat bills. Term limits would help. It could eliminate or at least cut back on abuses like these because if you only serve one term, you don’t have as much incentive to be paying attention to lobbyists and special interest groups.
Read our Term Limits column and listen to or Term Limits podcast.
To read the article I’ve been quoting go to:
To listen to the Podcast go to the link below, and have more fun!
Dennis Dean
October 5th, 2022