That’s true, but to create 50 non-trivially different “model” bills, you’re heading towards 50 times as much work. Special interests might be happy to pay for 500 lawyer-hours to create one document that corrupts the entire US, but they might blink at the cost if that jumped to 25,000 lawyer-hours. No one really knows how much special interests would be willing to pay for corruption, because it’s always been horrifyingly cheap.
Plus, there are only so many ways to rewrite a list of specific demands. If “model” bills were actually illegal in some way, I don’t think legislatures would have any problem at all spotting them. If some half-wit state senator shows up for the first time in a month, waving a bill that “he wrote” about asbestos regulation, out of the blue, right after the neighboring state considered a bill on the same topic, you don’t need to be Hercule Poirot to guess what has happened.
The problem, of course, is that this is 100% legal and normal, and legislators are absolutely aware of where these bills come from. It’s abhorrent to voters, but so what? It is very, very easy to prevent voters paying attention to these details, when the whole point of representative democracy is that they don’t have to.
