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.
A golden tray sits on the Resolute Desk as President Donald Trump speaks during an announcement on American nuclear innovation in the Oval Office at the White House on July 24, 2026, in Washington, D.C. Trump is signing multiple executive orders targeting the nuclear energy sector and easing rules for new reactors and nuclear fuel supply chains.
Trump’s hubris rivals the fallen heroes of ancient Greek mythology
In January, the New York Times asked President Donald Trump if there were any limits on his global powers.
“Yeah,” the president responded, “there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”
That was eight months ago, but fortunately Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster adaptation of “The Odyssey” has made ancient Greek literature newly relevant. Before that window closes, I’d like to talk about hubris.
Today, the term mostly means excessive pride or arrogance. That’s part of what the Greeks meant by it too, but the meaning was a bit richer and more specific. Hubris was an insolent or outrageous act that offended the gods, often because the transgressor was claiming abilities or authorities that solely belonged to supreme beings.
Nolan renamed and slightly modified the concept of xenia for the film, calling it “Zeus’ law.” In the director’s telling, mortals should follow the rules laid out by the gods, specifically the requirement to treat strangers with respect lest they be gods in disguise.
In a sense, hubris is the opposite, or at least the rejection, of xenia. The hubris of the suitors, and at times Odysseus himself, invites punishment by the gods and their mortal instruments.
Which brings me back to Donald Trump. His claim that there are no constraints on his personal power to dictate events on the global stage was one of the greatest expressions of hubris ever uttered by a political leader.
Trump’s claim was obviously false when he made it.
He vowed that he could end the Russia-Ukraine war in 24 hours. He’s proved powerless to make that happen. If he had divine powers to work his will, why would he have balked at implementing his tariffs so often that Wall Street adopted the “TACO trade” term for his deals? “TACO” stands for “Trump always chickens out.”
And why would Trump have made so many embarrassing concessions to China — from rescinding tariffs on Chinese goods to allowing them to buy crucial and incredibly valuable computer chips?
But Trump saw his success at capturing Venezuelan strongman Nicolas Maduro as proof of his ability to launch missiles to the same effect as Zeus’ lightning bolts. Trump believed he was the most powerful man who ever lived.
This is no exaggeration. In March, when the Iran invasion seemed successful, Trump gave a document penned by“Presidential Historian David King” to New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan purporting to prove that Trump was “the most powerful person to have EVER walked this planet.” King was, in fact, a businessman and occasional caddy for legendary golfer Gary Player.
King compared Trump favorably to many of history’s most powerful, and often heinous, figures: Alexander the Great, Attila the Hun, William the Conqueror, Napoleon Bonaparte, Joseph Stalin, Genghis Khan, Mao Tse Tung, Adolf Hitler and Vladimir Lenin. Many of these men thought they were the most powerful person in the world, too. And many were defeated precisely because they believed it.
At least Napoleon and Hitler had a string of truly impressive victories before they learned the folly of hubris. The limits on Trump’s power have been exposed by far less august forces than the combined might of the allies in World War II or the fearsome Russian winter.
Iran is a comparatively middling power. But the regime’s ability to absorb punishment while imposing its will on the Strait of Hormuz has proved to be a greater constraint on Trump’s power than his morality or mind. We should note that, at least rhetorically, his morality has not proved much of a constraint. He has repeatedly promised to destroy Iranian “civilization” if the regime refuses to capitulate.
But they haven’t — and won’t anytime soon — because the regime’s tolerance for pain far outstrips Trump’s. The combined fear of skyrocketing oil prices, outrage of Gulf state potentates, diminishing weapon supplies and domestic unpopularity is doing the work that international law, congressional oversight and the collective opinion of foreign policy experts can’t or won’t do.
If I considered Trump more heroic than reason and facts could allow, I would say his Sisyphean predicament has the whiff of Greek tragedy to it. Trump is vexed by the fact that the Iranians won’t honor deals or ratify his countless premature claims of victory — giving new meaning to his vow that his presidency would make people tired of winning. It’s almost like they’re out-Trumping Trump.
Things might have gone better if he’d heeded that great Greek tragedian Sophocles: “For Zeus utterly abhors the boasts of a proud tongue.”
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Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.