John Oliver revealed on Sunday’s “Last Week Tonight” just how much power state representatives wield while Americans aren’t watching.
“Look, state legislatures are hilarious. There’s only one problem,” the HBO host began. “Increasingly, they’re the places where most legislation is actually taking place.”
While the U.S. Congress has only passed 185 laws this session, the satirist pointed out that state houses have passed over 24,000 bills.
Oliver then launched into an extended lecture on the influence of the local lawmakers on issues from abortion rights to environmental policy to gun control.
One additional player is the notorious “conservative bill mill,” the American Legislative Exchange Council.
“In fact, I’m going to list ALEC in the credits for our show as associate producer of creating-horrifying-things-for-us-to-talk-about,” he said.
“Great work, ALEC! See you at the end of season wrap party, you pieces of shit!”
The lesson: “All those conspiracy theories about a shadow government are actually true,” he said.
“Only it’s not a group of billionaires meeting in a mountain lair in Zurich, it’s a bunch of pasty bureaucrats meeting in a windowless committee room in Lansing, Michigan.”
Watch the clip below:
Oliver nails it again. Pathetic! We are so screwed.
I will be watching tonight, but I hope he mentioned ALEC. If he didn’t, he wasted a real opportunity.
Yea, John’s funny but Chris Rock’s digs on the Freedom Tower or the I Ain’t Never Going In There Tower on the dying SNL is what got noticed in Zurich lairs.
Boy, howdy!
The age of ALEC.
Oliver does it with humor, but history experts of the future will not be so kind in their expose’ of this Koch-financed conspiracy.
And anyone who doesn’t agree that it is a vast right wing conspiracy has never studied ALEC, which can quite accurately be labeled the offspring of The John Birch Society.
It only takes two to create a conspiracy, but in this case we are talking about thousands of state reps and senators, more than a few Governors and hundreds of lower level statewide officers like Kobach and Tursi, all of them bought and paid for via campaign contributions and promises of future reward.
It is hard to know exactly how many of them are now owned lock stock and barrel of oil, by Koch Industries or one of their nefarious PAC limbs. But anyone who is a member of ALEC is certainly suspect.