Category Archives: lobbying

Mike Stern blogs.

The Nation reports.

Timothy LaPira and Herschel F. Thomas III have posted this draft on SSRN.  Here is the abstract:

Former Speaker Newt Gingrich’s choice not to register under the Lobbying Disclosure Act (LDA) for his “historical advice” to Freddie Mac was a controversy in the 2012 Republican primary. The practice of carefully crafting policy advocacy activities to avoid triggering disclosure requirements is commonly referred to as the “Daschle exception” after the former Senate Majority Leader became a leading “strategic adviser” to one of Washington’s biggest lobbying firms. In this paper we ask: how many professionals are engaged in policy advocacy, and how common is it for them to have worked in the federal government? We assume that high-profile cases of Daschle and Gingrich are not isolated, so we seek to account for lobbying and policy advocacy in as large an empirical scope as possible. Using a new data set of professional biographies of both registered lobbyists and unregistered policy advocates, we estimate that there are more professionals engaged in influencing public policy “under the radar” than there are who are transparent about their clients and activities, implying that lobbying disclosure reports provide only a partial view of policy influence in Washington. We also find that, unlike Gingrich and Daschle, unregistered policy advocates are less likely to have gone through the revolving door and are more likely to be general political process experts rather than institutional specialists.

NYT: “As one of the country’s largest and oldest conservative advocacy groups, the American Conservative Union has long fought to rein in federal spending and limit the size of government. But behind the scenes, the group has formed a partnership with business lobbyists to tame the activists who have pushed Republican leaders in Congress to adopt some of the most austere spending limits in decades.”

Must-read NYT:

To make their case as Congress prepares to debate a rewrite of the nation’s tax code, this diverse set of businesses has at least one strategy in common: they have retained firms that employ lobbyists who are former aides to Max Baucus, the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, which will have a crucial role in shaping any legislation.

No other lawmaker on Capitol Hill has such a sizable constellation of former aides working as tax lobbyists, representing blue-chip clients that include telecommunications businesses, oil companies, retailers and financial firms, according to an analysis by LegiStorm, an online database that tracks Congressional staff members and lobbying. At least 28 aides who have worked for Mr. Baucus, Democrat of Montana, since he became the committee chairman in 2001 have lobbied on tax issues during the Obama administration — more than any other current member of Congress, according to the analysis of lobbying filings performed for The New York Times.

See also this related graphic.

USA Today reports.

BuzzFeed:

The European Centre for a Modern Ukraine, an obscure nonprofit based in Belgium, was founded by a former top official in Ukraine’s governing party and appears to be a proxy for the country’s pro-Russian government. In 2012, the group hired a pair of high-powered American lobbying firms to advocate on its behalf.

But what those lobbyists, who include Obama-era Democratic superlobbyist Tony Podesta, are actually doing is a mystery. Unlike the Washington firms hired directly by foreign governments, Ukraine’s leadership has slipped its American agenda through an increasingly popular loophole in the federal law intended to regulate foreign activity in the United States, allowing it to follow the minimal disclosure practices required of domestic corporate lobbies, not the extensive ones demanded of registered foreign agents. It’s a loophole now used by a range of post-communist governments, in particular, with money to burn and no particular love of transparency. And it offers a path to the end of a disclosure regime put in place in 1938, amid American concern over the effects of Nazi propaganda.

Politico reports.

Roll Call:

Nearly half of the lobbyists who were registered with Congress in 2011 and then went “inactive” in 2012 remained with the same employer, and many continued to influence public policy, according to a study released Wednesday.

The finding by the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics illustrates a factor behind the recent decline in federally reported lobbying fees and the number of active lobbyists on K Street: Professionals are taking on roles that leave no public trail because their activities fall outside the scope of disclosure laws.

Roll Call: “K Street shops, many in revenue decline for the past couple of years, can no longer afford the luxury of a high-priced former member. Senators usually don’t entertain offers worth less than $1 million, and House members’ threshold is typically about $700,000. And it’s an investment with no guaranteed payoff. Ever.”

The article does note that Covington landed both Sen. Kyl and Rep. Howard Berman. Quite a coup.

WaPo reports.

Roll Call: “The tepid recovery and a dysfunctional Congress do bear blame [for the K Street business downturn], but a third, much overlooked factor exists: A lot of the work influencing government takes place in the shadows, outside of the view of public disclosures such as the LDA. And with a president who has further stigmatized registered lobbyists, K Streeters and some of their clients have made a practice of keeping their work just under the limits of the lobby laws. In some cases, lobbyists have remained on the job, even with the same firms, but have deregistered, keeping their clients and their work secret. One prominent example is Steve Ricchetti, who stayed with his Ricchetti Inc., although no longer as a registered lobbyist, before joining the Obama administration last year. Lobbyists, of course, can’t work for the executive branch — President Barack Obama banned them — unless granted a waiver. I have looked at this very carefully over the years and thought about it a lot,’ said James Thurber, director of the Center for Congressional and Presidential Studies at American University. ‘I have come to the conclusion that the deregistrations that are going on, because people find out that they don’t really need to register or they’re trying to do a little bit of shadow advocacy  . . .  is the most important factor.’”

Open Secrets reports.

Interesting column:

The problem is not, as the president implied, the opposition of an implacable few to the manifest general interest.

Rather, it is that Washington is besieged by mutually offsetting lobbies representing almost every conceivable segment of society. Some (e.g., teacher unions) collect under the Democratic Party banner; some (e.g., independent oil operators) tilt Republican; and many (Wall Street, agribusiness, hospitals) have their hooks in both parties.

I discuss the connection between Olson’s theory, national welfare, and lobbying reform in this Stanford Law Review article, Lobbying Rent-Seeking, and the Constitution.

Front page NYT report.

CPI reports.