# Tommy Thompson — "Disguise them a little bit, and declare 'It's mine'" > [!quote] "Myself, I always loved going to these meetings because I always found new ideas. Then I'd take them back to Wisconsin, disguise them a little bit, and declare that 'It's mine.'" > — Tommy Thompson, ALEC luncheon speech, 2002 ## Context Delivered at a 2002 luncheon address to ALEC's annual meeting by Tommy Thompson — at that point freshly installed as Secretary of Health and Human Services in the [[George W. Bush]] administration, having just stepped down from a record-setting four-term run as Governor of Wisconsin (1987–2001). Thompson was speaking to a sympathetic in-house audience: ALEC's task-force participants and corporate funders, the very people whose model bills he was confessing to having pocketed and re-branded for fourteen years as governor. The remark was not intended as a candid disclosure to the public; it was a piece of *credentialing* — Thompson establishing his ALEC bona fides for an audience that already knew exactly what he meant. It became a public quote because the Center for Media and Democracy and other transparency operations later surfaced ALEC documents — including this one — through the *ALEC Exposed* leak. ## Why this matters This is the **smoking-gun receipt** for the entire ALEC mechanism, from the consumer side. The standard ALEC defense — repeated by [[Lisa Nelson]] and her predecessors over five decades — is that ALEC merely "provides ideas" and that "legislators customize" model bills to fit local needs. Thompson's quote is the inside-the-room confirmation that: 1. Legislators arrive at ALEC meetings looking specifically for *bills they can take home*, not abstract policy concepts 2. The "customization" step is *cosmetic by design* — "disguise them a little bit" 3. The legislator-introducer takes ownership credit — "It's mine" — for legislation drafted jointly with corporate lobbyists at a resort 4. The disguise is essential to the political theater — voters and journalists must not perceive the bill as corporate-drafted, even though it is Thompson, talking to friends, gave away the structural lie that protects the ALEC model from political backlash. The same mechanism — model bill drafted in private corporate-legislator meeting → minor cosmetic edits → introduced under a legislator's name as if original → voted on as if it were the legislator's own work — is the operating procedure for the ~200 ALEC-derived bills that pass into state law every year. For receipts use: this is the quote that breaks the "ALEC just provides ideas" framing. It is short, undisputed, and from the mouth of a Republican governor and Bush cabinet secretary — not a partisan critic. Thompson's specific Wisconsin record makes the receipt heavier still: his "Truth in Sentencing" law (1998), welfare-reform initiatives (the W-2 program that became Clinton's PRWORA template), and tort-reform agenda all closely tracked ALEC model legislation that he had picked up at exactly the meetings he was reminiscing about. ## Verification - **Documented source:** [SourceWatch — Interesting ALEC Quotes](https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Interesting_ALEC_Quotes), citing 2002 ALEC annual meeting luncheon address - **Contemporaneous reporting:** Bruce Murphy, "The Man From ALEC," [Urban Milwaukee, November 5, 2012](https://urbanmilwaukee.com/2012/11/05/the-man-from-alec/) — places the quote in context of Thompson's broader ALEC record - **Status:** Verbatim. Undisputed. Thompson never recanted or contextualized. ## Related quotes - [[Paul Weyrich - I don't want everybody to vote]] — Weyrich engineered the institutional mechanism Thompson is describing