I addressed this matter more than a year ago in my Capitol Notebook newspaper column (Nov. 29, 2008, editions and after), and it’s good to see another major news organization in our state take it up again. Reporter Jonathan Ellis has a strong pair of stories in the Sunday editions of the Sioux Falls Argus Leader about travel by state legislators to out-of-state meetings.
Still unresolved is the specific matter of state-paid travel to American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) meetings which was addressed in the 2008 column. ALEC has a clearly conservative political philosophy and cleary expresses it. The Legislature’s Executive Board has continued to allow payment for legislators’ trips to ALEC meetings. Some legislators have tried to curtail or stop the practice but have hit dead ends.
The issue isn’t specifically disagreement with ALEC’s positions (although in a notable example, ALEC opposed collection of sales tax on Internet-transacted sales, while our Legislature specifically supports the collection of those taxes and has paid many thousands of dollars annually for travel by legislators to streamlined-sales tax meetings). Rather, the ALEC travel is under question because public funds collected from all citizens are being used to underwrite travel to a group with a specific agenda that runs counter to many of South Dakotans’ political values. This would be no different if legislators were being paid to travel to a liberal organization’s meetings on a regular basis.
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