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Mitchell E. Daniels, Jr.
From SourceWatch
Mitch Daniels (Mitchell E. Daniels, Jr.) is the Republican governor of Indiana since 2005. Previously he served as the first Director, Office of Management and Budget under President George Walker Bush. He was replaced in that position by Joshua B. Bolten. [1]
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2012 State of the Union GOP Response
Governor Daniels was chosen to offer the Republican response to President Barack Obama's 2012 State of the Union address. This came in the midst of his push to change labor laws to make Indiana a so-called "Right to Work" state.
Right-to-Work Legislation
Daniels attempted in 2011 and 2012 to stifle labor rights in the state; in 2011, Democratic lawmakers left Indiana to prevent a vote on the legislation. At that time, Daniels said “I think if you're going to try to do something that fundamental, you owe it to the public to have that kind of an airing first, and that has not happened here.”
A year later, Daniels pushed the same legislation. The bill is inspired by model legislation provided by the American Legislative Exchange Council.
ALEC is not a lobby; it is not a front group. It is much more powerful than that. Through ALEC, behind closed doors, corporations hand state legislators the changes to the law they desire that directly benefit their bottom line. Along with legislators, corporations have membership in ALEC. Corporations sit on all nine ALEC task forces and vote with legislators to approve “model” bills. They have their own corporate governing board which meets jointly with the legislative board. (ALEC says that corporations do not vote on the board.) They fund almost all of ALEC's operations. Participating legislators, overwhelmingly conservative Republicans, then bring those proposals home and introduce them in statehouses across the land as their own brilliant ideas and important public policy innovations—without disclosing that corporations crafted and voted on the bills. ALEC boasts that it has over 1,000 of these bills introduced by legislative members every year, with one in every five of them enacted into law. ALEC describes itself as a “unique,” “unparalleled” and “unmatched” organization. It might be right. It is as if a state legislature had been reconstituted, yet corporations had pushed the people out the door. Learn more at ALECexposed.org.
In 2012, Daniels also wrote the introduction to ALEC's annual report on the status of free-market education in the United States.
Other affiliations
- Trustee Emeriti, Fund for American Studies
Contact details
Office of the Governor
Statehouse
Indianapolis, Indiana 46204-2797
Phone: 317-232-4567
Web: http://www.in.gov/gov
Resources and articles
Related SourceWatch articles
References
- ↑ Mitchell E. Daniels Jr. profile, The Washington Post, accessed January 2011.
External articles
- Nicholas Thompson, "Dick Cheney's Dick Cheney. Meet OMB Director Mitch Daniels: The most powerful man in the Bush administration you have never heard," Washington Monthly, July/August 2001.
- Brendan Nyhan, "Mitch Daniels' fuzzy math. The Bush budget director has a little problem with the truth," Salon, February 12, 2002.
- Report: Mitch Daniels Among 32 Subpoenaed in Securities Probe, Associated Press (truthout), May 7, 2003.
- "The Architects of War: Where Are They Now?" Think Progress, July 2007.
