But I stood alone: a coward, a fraud.

I arrived at Capitol Hill’s West Lawn on Wednesday afternoon to attend the Rally For Citizenship, which claimed to draw “more than 100,000 immigrant families and their supporters.” I was no mere citizen partaking in a rally, however. I was press. At least that’s what the 5-by-3 inch card dangling from my black lanyard told me.

Except I wasn’t press. Not really. I didn’t have the documents. The Citizen-Now.org website made clear the requirements: “To pick up credentials, press [sic] each registrant must provide photo identification AND a current, valid press ID issued by federal, state, or local government OR a letter from your editor / producer, on letterhead, from a bona fide journalism outlet … those without proper identification will not be admitted.”

I had sent in an application for credentials on Tuesday with the help of a flack. She assured me I could pick up credentials. I had the white and green card issued by Virginia Capitol Police to ensure lawmakers that I was press. But that badge was issued in 2011, before I joined the Washington Free Beacon. It had now expired.

“Misuse of this card constitutes a violation of Section 18.2-204.2 of the Code of Virginia,” it says on the back. So not only was I betraying the trust of the rally organizers, I also could be breaking the law. I balked at presenting the ID to the Capitol policemen guarding the press entrance and opted to proceed through the crowd, a hodge-podge of union members and immigrant families.

“Coming up, coming up, excuse me, I’m press,” a man with a gray blazer draped over his arm declared, brushing aside anyone who stood in his way. He noticed my notebook.

“You press?”

“Yes,” I gulped, following his lead. This man was bona fide, NBC all the way. My coyote. He threw up the rope separating the rabble from the PRESS and ushered me forward. He vanished before I could thank him, leaving me alone at check-in.

“McMorris, here you go,” a volunteer said, dropping the lanyard into my shocked, shaking hands.

“You don’t need my ID, my credentials?” I asked, averting eye contact.

“I trust you,” she said.

Being an undocumented reporter alters the way you cover a story. When my colleagues swarmed Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D., Ill.), I stood in the background, transcribing earth-shattering responses to hard-hitting questions.

“This is one of the make-or-break weeks,” he said, when asked if this was a make-or-break week for Congress.

Gutierrez shared the stage with the rally’s sponsors: presidents of powerful labor unions, including SEIU and UAW, as well as representatives of CASA de Maryland, a nonprofit group that helps immigrants and day-laborers find jobs regardless of immigration status. President Barack Obama tapped former CASA president Tom Perez to head the Department of Labor in March.

Gustavo Torres, president of CASA in Action, fired up the crowd with chants of “Si Se Puede” while SEIU president Mary Kay Henry, UAW president Bob King, and National Education Association vice president Lily Eskelsen rambled on in Spanish.

“We’re going to demand that all workers, immigrant workers, and American workers have collective bargaining rights,” King said to crickets, before adding “Hasta la victoria” to raucous cheers.

Organizers have worked hard to improve the optics of the immigration reform movement. Gone are the days of Mexican flags and Che shirts at rallies. They encouraged attendees to wear or carry at least one piece of patriotic paraphernalia. Several attendees wore American flag button-downs and shorts; most wore white shirts that, one attendee explained, “represented peace.” Four Colombian immigrants I met at the Capitol South Metro stop carried a bag filled with small American flags. They declined an interview because “No English.”

“It just shows us how American the 11 million undocumented workers that live in this country really are,” a nurse in the crowd said.

Attendees were also told to wear red, white, and blue to hammer the point home. Many opted to hammer the point with soccer jerseys. Honduran and Salvadoran national uniforms seemed to be the most popular, along with Real Madrid. The jerseys fulfilled the white and blue requirement, but lacked the red. I asked one Salvadoran teenager to explain his color scheme to me, as a tarp of Central and South American flags stitched together with the stars and stripes passed over our heads. He pointed to his fading orange shoelaces.

Union representatives stood at various Metro exits to provide members with union colors.

A woman wearing an orange vest waved the yellow and purple of SEIU one block from the Capitol South Metro, as a black colleague called for members of 32BJ, the D.C. local, to sign in. Signing the green sheet had its advantages. While a third woman distributed stickers saying “TODOS JUNTOS PARA EL 10 DE ABRIL” to any passersby, members received a purple SEIU t-shirt, as well as a handkerchief to deal with the 80-degree heat.

“You’re doing a good job, hand everything away,” the man said to the third woman. “Any members?”

“No members yet,” she replied.

A man wearing a camouflage backpack approached.

“You a union member? Where you from?” the man asked.

“El Salvador,” he said, winking. He took a 32BJ button as a consolation prize.

My guilt over my undocumented status only grew when I entered the expanse of the press pen. Attendee Aquila Alice Dixon beckoned me with a hard stare and gap-toothed smile, her body testing the tethered ropes organizers used to separate immigrant families from press.

“This is wrong,” she said. “They have no jurisdiction over us. We’re free; we should be able to go wherever we want.”

A toddler to our left crossed the media line and began plucking grass from the West Lawn. His age was a dead give-away: Not only was he not press, he didn’t have a drivers license.

I made my way back into the crowd when John Boardman of UNITE HERE Local 25, which represents 5,000 D.C. hotel and service workers, noticed my badge.

“Labor has been at the forefront of this issue and all civil rights for decades,” he said. “We see what all people see and that’s individuals who contribute, who pay taxes and work hard. To keep them in the shadows hurts the fabric of our country.”

I asked him if the rally would have been better served by inviting Republicans who support immigration reform such as Florida Sen. Marco Rubio and Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul.

“The GOP has come to this issue from a different perspective, from practical politics,” he said. “They realized that they weren’t going to survive.”

Congressional Republicans are not the only ones who realized that. Labor groups have opposed immigration reform in the past on the grounds that it disadvantaged native workers. Half a decade ago, some of the most powerful unions at the rally had come out against George W. Bush’s push for amnesty.

But UNITE HERE and SEIU have seen membership grow by organizing immigrants in the service sector, while traditional labor unions, including the AFL-CIO and UAW, have hemorrhaged members in recent years.

“Did your organizing success have anything to do with other unions coming around on immigration despite past opposition?” I asked.

“People have different perspectives, but it is well known that all of labor now is coalescing around this issue,” he said.

Labor was not the only Democratic constituency to rally behind legalization. Environmentalists say it will stop global warming. A gay advocate took the stage on behalf of “hundreds of thousands of gay, lesbian, and transgendered” immigrants, who live not only in the shadows, but also inside closets within the shadows. A few feminists carried signs proclaiming, “Immigration Reform is Central to Woman’s Equality.”

Reform is evidently the cure for all that ails us, a help to a tired nation, or at least a help to those who lectured from the podium.

“We delivered the votes that delivered Nevada and Colorado and Nuevo Mexico … to the Democratic Party,” Rep. Gutierrez told the rally.

His message was clear. Even to an undocumented reporter like myself.

The AFL-CIO and U.S. Chamber of Commerce endorsed a package of immigration reforms on Friday after months of negotiations. Under the deal, 200,000 work visas would be issued each year, up from 66,000. Companies would be forced to pay those workers “prevailing wages” dictated by the Department of Labor’s regional standards.

Prevailing wages, which were first adopted nationally with the Davis-Bacon Act, require employers to pay workers at industry standards that are often determined by union pay, according to Steve Allen of the Capital Research Center.

“[Prevailing wage is] usually interpreted to be union wages, which gives unions advantages in bidding for contracts,” Allen said. “It raises prices for whoever’s paying for the project and by requiring union wage regardless, you might as well hire the union guy.”

For example, in Prince George’s County Maryland, prevailing wage laws require any employer to pay electricians about $50 per hour in wages and “fringe” benefits for working on highway construction projects, according to the Department of Labor.

Prevailing wages are higher than many wages the nonunion private sector would pay in a competitive bidding environment, said National Black Chamber of Commerce President Harry Alford.

“Prevailing wages are synonymous with union wages … it means you’re going to use union only,” he said.

The immigration deal would advance prevailing wage laws from federal contractors and the construction industry to any employer that applies for a work visa.

Allen said the provisions are a major reason many labor unions have embraced immigration reform, despite historical opposition to bringing in foreign workers to domestic labor markets.

“Without prevailing wages in place you would flood the economy with more workers which could depress wages and take jobs that would otherwise go to union workers,” he said. “They’re setting an artificial [wage] floor to protect themselves from the economic consequence of brining in new workers.”

Neither the Chamber of Commerce nor the AFL-CIO returned requests for comment. 

AFL-CIO head Richard Trumka has been an outspoken advocate for reforming immigration laws on behalf of the nation’s 11 million illegal immigrants and has stepped up efforts to rally the union faithful.

“With your mobilization and hard work, we can win comprehensive immigration reform with a real, workable road map to citizenship for 11 million people who are American in every way except on paper,” he recently told a West Coast gathering of members. “It’s time to win real immigration reform. It will make all of us stronger.” 

Allen said the reform championed by Trumka would enhance union prestige by raising wages for members and would strengthen the political influence of unions

“They’re thinking that those new workers will benefit you by voting for people to carry out your policy goals—what helps the Democratic coalition helps labor,” he said.

The Department of Labor would be in charge of enforcing the prevailing wage standards. Thomas Perez, President Barack Obama’s nominee to head the department, has championed prevailing wage laws throughout his career and was instrumental to making Maryland the nation’s first “living wage” state.

The compromise package will now move on from the negotiating table of the two interest groups to the eight lawmakers who are trying to pass immigration reform, according to Sen. Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.).

“I think we’ve got a deal,” Graham said to CNN’s Candy Crowley on Sunday. “We’ve got to write the legislation, but 2013, I hope, will be the year that we pass bipartisan immigration reform, signed into law with three goals.”

The 2013 World Social Forum (WSF) will take place in Tunis, Tunisia, from March 26 to March 30. The Forum is an annual gathering of radical, leftist, and revolutionary groups.

More than 4,300 organizations are listed as attendees on the conference’s website, 71 of which hail from the United States.

Representatives of the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), which represents more than 11 million unionized workers in the United States and abroad, will attend through the union’s Solidarity Center.

Union officials will brush shoulders with officials from radical organizations such as Code Pink and the Occupy movement, earning a rebuke from critics.

The antiwar radicals of Code Pink were last seen congratulating Sen. Rand Paul (R., Ky.) on his 13-hour talking filibuster of CIA director John Brennan.

“If this reflects [the AFL-CIO’s] understanding of how the world’s economy works, then it’s no wonder they’re losing members,” said Fred Wszolek, a spokesman for the Workforce Fairness Institute.

Wszolek said he thought many of the union’s rank-and-file members “would actually be insulted” by the political tenor of the event, particularly in regards to Israel.

The union is “wasting a huge amount of their members money” attending the conference, Wszolek added.

The WSF has a host of events lined up on the alleged evils of Israel. Many tout the “boycott, divest, sanctions” (BDS) movement, while others focus on the nation’s supposed “war crimes.”

The National Lawyers Guild of the United States will participate in a “people’s tribunal,” where attendees will “try” Israel for its alleged “on-going ethnic cleansing and military repression of the Palestinian people.”

Left-wing activist group Public Citizen will also attend.

Free market capitalism will also be a popular topic at the WSF, with events on capitalism’s “inevitable demise,” hope for an anti-capitalist “transformation” of the global economy, and open hostility to “the obsession of [economic] growth.”

Public Citizen, Code Pink, and the AFL-CIO did not return requests for comment.

The WSF’s website says it was created to devise ideas “to solve the problems of exclusion and social inequality that the process of capitalist globalization with its racist, sexist and environmentally destructive dimensions is creating internationally and within countries.”

The Forum features a number of groups that brand themselves as part of the Occupy movement, the loose affiliation of anti-capitalist protesters who camped out in public spaces for months in 2011 and 2012.

The AFL-CIO, Public Citizen, Code Pink, and the National Lawyers Guild all allied themselves with the Occupy movement, which came under fire for a litany of crimes that took place at encampments nationwide.

“The Occupy movement may have, for the most part, disappeared from our streets, but the extremism they promote is deeply ingrained not only in those who took up their cause, but also in the groups with which they affiliate,” said market researcher Anne Sorock.

Sorock’s company, the Frontier Lab, conducted extensive research on the Occupy movement and its participants.

Sorock said the WSF “signals both the connections between this radical movement and groups with great influence over our republic, such as the AFL-CIO, as well as the growing boldness of their anti-American rhetoric.”

Less hot-button topics will also receive some attention at the WSF.

One event on the evils of meat eating will explore “speciesism/carnism,” and aims to demonstrate that “all forms of oppression are interconnected,” including “oppression” of livestock and household pets.

Requests for comment made through the WSF’s website were not returned. The website states that no individual or group may speak on behalf of the conference as a whole.

Some of the nation’s most influential labor leaders have heaped praise on comprehensive immigration plans that will help grant citizenship to many of the nation’s 11 million illegal immigrants.

The AFL-CIO, one of the nation’s largest labor unions, kicked off a 14-city rally backing the president’s plan on Wednesday.

“This is a top priority for America’s unions because a roadmap to citizenship for those who are American in every way except on paper is critical for all working people” AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka said in a statement. “We understand that solidarity means standing together with predominantly immigrant workforces to improve wages and workplace safety.”

Some labor and immigration experts say Big Labor’s enthusiasm for legalization efforts stems from solidifying political support for the Democratic Party, as well as declining union membership.

“Organized labor is a wing of the Democratic Party now, even tighter than it was in the past, and Democrats are heavily invested in open immigration,” said Vincent Cannato, professor at University of Massachusetts Boston. “Organized labor is hoping that this creates a strong Democratic Party, which will play into their own interests.”

The vast majority of illegal immigrants who would be amnestied are Hispanic; Obama won between 70 and 75 percent of Hispanic voters according to 2012 exit polls. That voting bloc is even more reliably Democratic than unions; AFL-CIO exit polls showed that 65 percent of union members cast ballots for the president’s reelection.

Peter List, a former union member turned anti-labor activist, said that if Democrats retain that level of support from illegal immigrants, it could secure even more union influence on labor policy. Hoped-for future initiatives include controversial proposals such as doing away with secret ballots in union elections.

“The unions are doing it to shore up their political base,” he said. “They’re trying to make conservatives a permanent minority because they need to get these labor reforms through.”

Illegal immigrants could also help reverse sagging union rates. If the nation’s resident aliens unionize at the same rate as citizens—11.3 percent—labor groups stand to add more than 1.2 million people to its membership rolls. The gains could be even higher because of the trades that employ illegal immigrants, according to Cannato.

“Unions see their future growth in organizing service industries—Wal-Mart, janitors, restaurants—jobs that are largely held by immigrants,” he said.

The blue collar manufacturing jobs that have traditionally served as organized labor’s base has disappeared over the last 30 years thanks to technological innovation and outsourcing.

The Heritage Foundation found that nearly 80 percent of union manufacturing jobs vanished between 1975 and 2010, while nonunion manufacturing held steady at 11.8 million workers. Organizing service workers recognizes the realities of a globalized economy, according to List.

“[Unions] recognize that structural changes to the economy have made blue collar union manufacturing jobs go away, so they’ve had to adapt,” List said. “Service sector jobs can’t be outsourced, that’s the unions’ target group and it’s made up mostly of immigrants.”

Fewer than 10 percent of Hispanics belonged to unions in 2012. That accounts for the second lowest unionization rate among ethnic groups, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Legalization would take down a major barrier to Hispanic entry into unions, according to Peter Skerry, professor at Boston College.

“Elements of labor union movement, especially service workers, have been championing illegal immigrants and organizing them,” Skerry said. “But it’s not a very feasible task when illegal immigrants are very unstable, very transient, and not planning on sticking around let alone bothering to join a union.”

“There are a lot of barriers to joining, but I think this will make it easier.”

For more than a century labor leaders have been among the most ardent supporters of restrictions on both legal and illegal immigrants “because they were supportive of the idea that immigration was bad for unskilled workers,” said Cannato.

Members are holding the line on opposition while union bosses like Trumka may have allied themselves to the president’s agenda. The majority of union members oppose amnesty for illegal immigrants, according to a January survey from Rasmussen Reports.

“[The bosses are] not representing 100 percent of their members on this, but it is tactical,” Cannato said. “They’re trying to organize service workers, not miners or steel workers. This is their way of reaching out.”

The methods employed by anti-ALEC groups could be described as not unlike extortion, experts say.

Color of Change, a “social justice” nonprofit headed by 9/11 Truther and former Obama green jobs czar Van Jones, has been at the front of the “name-and-shame campaign,” which seeks to pressure ALEC’s corporate sponsors into dropping their membership in the organization.

“To date, we have not publicly highlighted [your] involvement with ALEC,” Color of Change executive director Rashad Robinson wrote to a corporate member of ALEC in a June 25 letter obtained by the Free Beacon. “However, we plan to do so and wanted to make you aware of the next steps in our campaign.”

“We have commissioned a series of radio ads to make consumers aware of [your] relationship with ALEC and the policies it supports,” Robinson continues. “We plan to begin running these ads soon on Black radio stations across the country. We will also make the media aware of this ad campaign.”

“If [redacted] is reconsidering its relationship with ALEC, please contact Color of Change’s Director of Strategy, Gabriel Rey-Goodlatte, as soon as possible,” Robinson warns. “We would appreciate a response within one week.”

Rey-Goodlatte was arrested in 2001 for buying merchandise with counterfeit $20 bills, according to news reports. The Jones lieutenant, then 18, was charged with three felony counts of first-degree criminal possession of a forged substance and misdemeanor counts of petty larceny, the Poughkeepsie Journal reported at the time.

When reached on his cell phone and asked if the news report was true, Rey-Goodlatte said, “No,” and then announced he was heading into a meeting and hung up.

Color of Change did not return numerous requests for comment about its funders or its campaign against ALEC.

The anti-ALEC contingent has been effective. Just days before an anti-ALEC forum last Thursday in Arlington, Va., five more large companies, under pressure from left-wing groups, severed their ties with ALEC, bringing the total that have withdrawn their membership in the organization to 25 so far.

“We want to make ALEC toxic to be a part of,” Diallo Brooks, the director of field mobilization for People for the American Way, told the crowd at the town hall-style forum. Brooks was explaining his organization and its allies’ strategy to dismantle the private-public partnership of state legislators and businesses that works to advance free-market legislation.

Around 100 attendees gathered to listen to Brooks and his fellow panelists decry ALEC’s alleged plans to privatize schools and prisons, roll back environmental regulations, and destroy unions.

According to AFL-CIO state government-relations director Naomi Walker, ALEC’s goal is no less than to “destroy our democracy.”

Groups represented on Thursday’s panel included the National Education Association, Common Cause, ProgressVA, and the AFL-CIO. Several former and current progressive Virginia lawmakers also were on hand.

“Anyone who comes to you and says, ‘We have a great new innovative idea,’ stop and question it,” said Kim Anderson, the advocacy director for the National Education Association. “Because I guarantee they’re not interested in equity and equal access for every kid in America.”

“ALEC’s mechanics are second grade arithmetic,” NEA vice-president Lily Eskelsen said at the Netroots Nation panel. “Deregulate, defund, and privatize.”

While Color of Change works to harass ALEC’s corporate sponsors, Common Cause has been leading the fight on the legal front.

The non-profit group, which presents itself as a strictly non-partisan organization, has filed an IRS whistleblower complaint against ALEC, challenging the group’s tax-exempt status and accusing it of lobbying activities. It has also filed requests with more than 45 state attorneys general to investigate ALEC.

Common Cause’s president, Bob Edgar, is a former Democratic congressman. The law firm working with Common Cause in its complaint, Phillips & Cohen, also has a long history of donating generously to Democrats.

The refrain among progressives is that ALEC is “shady” and crafts its laws in the shadows.

“ALEC is not a transparent organization, no matter what its members tell you,” said Anna Scholl, the executive director of ProgressVA.

However, secrecy is the rule, not the exception, among the many groups who oppose ALEC.

When asked to disclose their funders by the Free Beacon during the Q&A session at Thursday’s event, both ProgressVA and People for the American Way declined to answer.

“As I told you before, as a c4 organization our donors aren’t publicly disclosed,” ProgressVA Executive Director Anna Scholl said. “Our funds come from a mix of individuals who support our work and grants funds. We don’t disclose names because that’s what our donors understand when they give us money.”

ProgressVA is part of the national ProgressNow network. The umbrella organization promotes a variety of liberal causes, such as socialized healthcare and higher taxes on the wealthy.

Brooks declined to respond. People for the American Way does not disclose its donors on its website.

As previously reported by the Free Beacon, Color of Change does not disclose its donors, and its tax filings are so vague that the scope of its operations and funding are impossible to determine.

Legally required disclosures show Color of Change is funded by a number of liberal philanthropy groups such as the George Soros-funded Open Society, which gave $250,000 to the Citizen Engagement Laboratory in 2010 “to support Color of Change.”

AFL-CIO Executive Vice President Arlene Holt Baker told reporters on Tuesday that the labor federation will have boots on the ground registering and helping voters in Florida, Michigan, Nevada, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin in coordination with the group’s political program. …

“This year, we will be running the strongest voter protection program ever. This will be our most aggressive push, and we have never done anything on this scale before because the attacks that we are seeing on the right to vote are unprecedented,” Baker said, calling voter ID laws passed in several states “a modern-day version of a poll tax and a new form of Jim Crow.” …

The AFL-CIO plans to partner in voter-protection efforts with groups like the NAACP, the National Council of La Raza, Generational Alliance and the Labor Council for Latin American Advancement. … Many of the demographic groups that could be adversely affected by the voter ID laws tend to vote Democratic.

This announcement follows two weeks of voter identification debate in key swing state Florida.

On May 31, The Department of Justice threatened to sue Florida for purging its voter rolls. Florida Secretary of State Ken Detzner disagreed with the DOJ’s interpretation, arguing that the voter purge violated no law.

On Monday, Governor Rick Scott announced that the Sunshine State will sue the Department of Homeland Security. In a statement issued alongside the lawsuit, Detzner explained that “for nearly a year, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security has failed to meet its legal obligation to provide us the information necessary to identify and remove ineligible voters from Florida’s voter rolls.”

For Detzner, voter ID laws do not restrict voters, but help him “uphold the integrity of Florida elections.”

“We have found individuals that are registered to vote, they don’t have a right to vote, they’re non-citizens, and they voted,” Scott told Fox News. “I have a job to defend the right of legitimate voters.”

DeWitt confirmed to National Review reporter Katrina Trinko that she is the woman in the video:

I just got off the phone with DeWitt, who confirmed she was the woman in the video. Did she have any regrets? “I don’t regret it,” she says.

“As you can see, I’m not vicious, I’m not hateful,” DeWitt adds. “I think if we’d had a donkey and played pin the tail on the donkey with her face on it, I guess, it’s a children’s game and I guess people would have gotten upset about that. There was certainly no viciousness. It was all in fun. Although she has bashed unions for quite some time.”

The participants, including representatives from such far-left groups as Common Cause, Color of Change, and ProgressNow, met for lunch in a conference room at the AFL-CIO headquarters in Washington, D.C.

The New Organizing Institute, a group that provides support and technology for political organizers, sponsored the forum.

“Never relent, never let up pressure, and always increase,” said Aniello Alioto of ProgressNow Colorado, summing up the strategy.

ALEC is a private-public partnership of state legislators and businesses that works to advance free-market legislation. ALEC’s members craft model legislation that is introduced roughly 1,000 times a year in state capitals around the country by a group of about 1,600 to 2,000 legislators, most of whom are Republicans.

ALEC has long drawn the ire of labor and leftist groups for its pro-business and limited government politics. Only in the past year, however, has a coordinated effort against the group taken place.

Those efforts picked up steam after the Trayvon Martin shooting, when Florida’s “stand your ground” law was linked to similar state laws crafted by ALEC.

“The Trayvon Martin thing was like a gift,” Common Cause spokeswoman Mary Boyle recently told Businessweek.

At the May 10 summit, Common Cause Deputy Programs Director Doug Clopp called ALEC “a very powerful organizing tool.”

One of the groups that attempted to forge a connection between ALEC and the Trayvon Martin shooting is Color of Change, a nonprofit founded by 9/11 Truther and former Obama green jobs czar Van Jones.

Gabriel Rey-Goodlatte, Color of Change director of strategy, said the group began an online petition and phone-banking effort against companies in December 2011 to “to make sure they understood what it would look like for their brand to be publicly associated with ALEC’s policies.”

Rey-Goodlatte also explained the group’s “escalating” intimidation tactics when companies refuse to leave ALEC.

“There’s a long list of companies that fund ALEC,” Rey-Goodlatte said. “We decided early on it made sense to focus on a few targets at a time. That means we’re able to create a large discussion around a small group of companies, which helps other companies understand what it would look like if their brand is the next to be brought into the public conversation.”

The current targets on Color of Change’s list include AT&T, Johnson & Johnson, State Farm, and Amazon.com, Rey-Goodlatte said.

Color of Change members are flooding these companies with “thousands of phone calls,” and the group will “escalate pressure” with a series of radio ads and possible public actions against the companies, he said.

Fourteen corporations have severed their ties with ALEC to date.

Liberal groups are also challenging ALEC on legal grounds. Common Cause, which describes itself as a “citizen’s lobby” fighting for campaign finance reform and government oversight, recently filed an IRS whistleblower complaint alleging ALEC has skirted lobbying rules to hide its activities.

Common Cause is also asking the attorneys general in all 50 states to investigate ALEC, deputy director Clopp said.

Common Cause presents itself as a strictly non-partisan organization. Its president, Bob Edgar, is a former Democratic congressman. The law firm working with Common Cause in its complaint, Phillips & Cohen, also has a long history of donating generously to Democrats.

Color of Change will be challenging “stand your ground” laws at the state level across the country, Rey-Goodlatte said.

Previous requests by the Free Beacon to obtain information on ProgressNow and Color of Change’s donors were not returned. The groups do not disclose their donors.

The “vast, right-wing conspiracy” was also the subject of much discussion at the forum.

“The one thing I don’t want folks to forget is ALEC is able to exist because of the vast, right-wing conspiracy supporting it,” said Lisa Graves, the executive director of the George Soros-funded Center for Media and Democracy.

Graves cited state policy groups such as the Mackinac Center in Michigan, the Freedom Foundation in Washington state, and the Goldwater Institute in Arizona. “These are groups that do a lot of the policy dirty work of ALEC,” she said.

“When they talk about the vast, right-wing conspiracy, [ALEC] is it,” Clopp said in the headquarters of one of the nation’s largest unions amid a group of non-profits funded by wealthy liberal foundations.

Trumka said he has had conversations with the president and White House staff about the president’s potential second-term agenda, in an interview with the Washington Post’s Peter Wallsten.

PETER WALLSTEN: Have you had specific conversations with President Obama about what his agenda in his second term might be?

RICHARD TRUMKA: We’ve had—I’ve had conversations with the president, I’ve had conversations with his staff, with his cabinet, about things of that sort, yeah.

Trumka said in February that he has daily conversations with the White House.

“I’m at the White House a couple times a week — two or three times a week,” Trumka said. “I have conversations every day with someone in the White House or the administration [...] Every day. And that includes weekends, by the way.”