State Innovation Exchange-- New Hope For Grassroots Progressives?

A new progressive organization that aims to counter big-money conservative groups and move forward a proactive progressive agenda at state and local levels has just held its inaugural conference in Washington. There were more than 200 state legislators in attendance. The inaugural meeting of the State Innovation Exchange (SiX), featured addresses by Senior Administration officials, members of Congress and prominent progressive leaders including Sen. Bernie Sanders, Howard Dean, Secretary of Labor Tom Perez, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, activist Saru Jayaraman and former White House s Special Advisor for Green Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation Van Jones.

Legislators were "surprisingly upbeat," despite last month’s election results. There’s "no tension between great progressive ideas and what voters want," said Adam Green to BloombergPolitics, co-founder of Progressive Change Campaign Committee and an adviser to SiX. His presentation highlighted the popularity of making college more affordable and expanding Social Security and Medicaid.

Other speakers pointed to widespread victories on ballot initiatives, including in traditionally "red" states, from minimum wage increases in Arkansas, South Dakota and Nebraska to closing (at least part ) of the gun show loophole in Washington state, to rejecting "personhood" amendments in Colorado and North Dakota. Nationwide, voters also passed ballot initiatives to impose limits on fracking, decriminalize marijuana and keep petty drug offenders out of prison.

The new group aims to provide a counterweight to the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), the conservative group funded by the Koch brothers and other major corporations that gained attention as it helped Republican lawmakers pass the Stand Your Ground self-defense laws that became notorious following the shooting of Trayvon Martin in Florida and voter ID restrictions scathingly described by Judge Richard Posner of the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals as "a means of voter suppression rather than of fraud prevention."

But Executive Director Nick Rathod says SiX will not be merely an ALEC look-alike on the Left. "It's stupid to create an organization that is mimicking something else," HuffPo quotes him as saying to applause. "We're going to be better than that. We're different from them because we're going to be transparent: We won't go behind closed doors and vote with corporate America."

SiX hopes eventually to raise $10 million to help progressive state lawmakers advance legislation that would increase environmental protections, raise the minimum wage, promote criminal justice and election reform, among other priorities.

Monday, Tom Hamburger introduced the new group to Washington Post readers.

"There is a hunger and a need for an organization like this," said SiX executive director Nick Rathod, an Obama campaign and White House veteran.

Rathod, who served as White House liaison to the states during Obama’s first term, said he hopes SiX will eventually have a budget of $10 million a year, raised from individual donors, unions, progressive foundations, and corporations.

The new group effectively combines other recently formed organizations on the left, including the Progressive States Network and the Center for State Innovation.

Rathod, who most recently worked at the liberal Center for American Progress, has been informally studying the success that ALEC has had in developing model bills for state legislatures: The 42-year-old nonprofit has long linked state legislators with corporate and interest group lobbyists to discuss and draft legislation behind closed doors.

ALEC has produced hundreds of model bills that have become law on topics ranging from voter identification to environmental and education policy. Recently, ALEC stepped away from controversial social issues such as gun laws and immigration to concentrate more on federal-state economic issues.

At ALEC’s recent winter policy meeting in Washington, conservative state legislators met to talk strategy for rolling back the reach of federal agencies, with special emphasis on Environmental Protection Agency pushback.  State legislators met with lobbyists for coal, utility, oil and gas firms to discuss and draft model bills, which go to the ALEC board for approval and dissemination.

In contrast, the SiX meeting featured speeches and workshops from environmental advocates, including representatives of Blue Green Alliance, the American Lung Association and political consultants dissecting new polling on climate and energy issues. Many of the workshops were closed to the press.

...In an introductory packet provided to attendees, SiX leaders offered a statement of purpose. “Progressives suffer from a power deficit in state government," it read. "This deficit is primarily the result of a well organized and highly capitalized network of conservative organizations that develops, disseminates, and promotes state legislation in service to a large group of corporate funders and special interests."

To counter this, SiX says that the new organization will “advance a progressive policy and messaging agenda in the states by providing training and other policy , communications and technical support to state legislators, serving as the campaign war room and organizational hub for multi-state legislative campaigns.”

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