Steve Corbin is Professor Emeritus of Marketing at the University of Northern Iowa.
Plagiarism (noun): the practice of taking someone else’s work or ideas and passing them off as one’s own.
Voters may be surprised to know a few years ago investigators revealed 10,163 legislative bills were plagiarized during an eight year time period with over 2,100 of the copycat bills signed into law.
An investigation of law origination was conducted by over 30 USA Today and Arizona Republic reporters. They examined about one million bills throughout America and the U.S. Congress via 150 computers programmed to detect similarities in language. The Center for Public Integrity “identified tens of thousands of bills with identical phrases, [and] then traced the origins of that language in dozens of those bills across the country.”
Shockingly, 54 percent of the 2,100 copycat bills signed into law were given to legislators by industry lobbyists. `Copy-paste-legislate’ has become an accepted practice by our state and federal lawmakers. However, legislative transparency has been ignored and voters have been – most likely -- hoodwinked.
Where do the model legislation bills originate? Of the 10,163 copycat bills lawmakers introduced, 4,301 (42 percent) came from industry, 4,012 (40 percent) from right-wing conservative groups, 1,602 (16 percent) from liberal-oriented groups and 248 (2 percent) from other sources.
Stand-your-ground gun laws were authored by the National Rifle Association and the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a right-wing organization.
The law that limits people to use bathrooms correlated to their birth certificate sex designation was model legislation introduced by the Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative religious rights organization.
USA Today and Arizona Republic note, “the Washington, D.C.-based public-interest law firm Americans United for Life has for the past decade been the nation’s most prolific author of copycat abortion legislation.”
According to the National Press Foundation, right-wing conservative groups are the most prolific in writing copycat bills and include ALEC, Goldwater Institute, Heritage Action, Congressional Prayer Caucus Foundation and Alliance Defending Freedom. State Innovation Exchange is the predominant left-wing bill writer (March 28, 2022).
The previously mentioned investigation found “special interests give lawmakers fully conceived bills they can put their names on and take credit for. And those special interests can become dependable donors to the [legislators’] campaigns.”
As Shakespeare said in the play Hamlet, “something is rotten in the state of Denmark.”
`Copy-paste-legislate’ permits special interest groups to stay under the radar. They could arguably be called America’s third party who rule the roost and control our lawmakers.
When legislators throughout America were interviewed by USA Today, only about 50 percent knew the source of the bill they affixed their name to.
For the sake of transparency – critical to maintaining a democracy – there are two solutions to America’s third party writing the vast majority of legislation.
- First, any group who submits a model bill to any legislator MUST be required to register as a lobbyist in every state and U.S. House and Senate or face a $10 million fine per violation.
- Secondly, any state or federal legislator who introduces a bill, resolution or amendment MUST make a public proclamation noting if any phrase or language is the result of a special interest group’s input or face a $1 million fine and 30-days incarcerated per incident.
Ask your state and federal legislators of all the bills they sponsored or voted on, how many were written by lawmakers and how many were plagiarized from another source? Don’t be surprised by the blank look on their face or their stammering for words.
With legislators’ anticipated answer to your inquiry, the phrase used by the late Paul Harvey (1918-2009) at the end of his news-oriented radio show will most likely apply, “now you know the REST of the story. Good day.”
Lawmakers’ integrity and transparency is desperately needed in today’s divisive political world. Let’s clean up the copy-paste-legislate debacle.
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.