…Dan Eggen explores….

…Roll Call offers this interesting report, which begins: “Over the past decade, many corporations, unions and other groups spent more money on in-house teams of lobbyists, shifting away from hiring outside firms to do their advocacy. As a result, K Street firms’ share of total lobbying spending has fallen from nearly 60 percent at the end of 2005 to just more than 42 percent last quarter, according to a CQ MoneyLine study of lobbying reports.”…

…WaPo reports….

…SCOTUSBlog wraps up oral argument in Borough of Duryea v. Guarnieri. Given my current work on lobbying, I’m very interested to see if the Court will give independent meaning to the Petition Clause in this case….

…Some interesting posts: Trust me, The Rise and Fall of Top Lobbying Firms in the 2000s, and Is It Better for Lobbyists to Be Smart or Well Connected?….

…Politico offers this report. I discuss the “hydraulic” effect of lobbying regulations, including the release of the White House visitors logs, in my forthcoming Stanford Law Review article, “Lobbying, Rent Seeking, and the Constitution.”…

…The NY Times offers this report about some very interesting developments involving this engine–and issue I discuss in some detail in my draft (now forthcoming, Stanford Law Review) on lobbying and rent seeking….

…ssons learned from campaign finance reform to shed light on the problem of lobbying reform. Bruce Cain, for instance, has already done that in a piece forthcoming in Race, Reform, and the Regulation of the Electoral Process (forthcoming from Cambridge University Press). There he argues that what he calls the “usual move” in lobbying reform — giving the lobbyists who represent monied interests less voice — is not as promising a solution as figuring…

…fits naturally with these efforts. Indeed, just as beige is the new black, lobbying may be the new campaign finance. Lobbying has been neglected by most people who write in the field (including me). I believe that Richard Briffault is the only election law professor to have written in depth about the many connections between the two (though others, like Sam Issacharoff and Rick Hasen, have recently moved in this direction). The rest of us, however…

…inform our understanding of the relative importance of these two views of lobbying. We exploit multiple sources of data covering the period 1999 to 2008, including: federal lobbying registration from the Senate Office of Public Records, Federal Election Commission reports, committee and subcommittee assignments for the 106th to 110th Congresses, and background information on individual lobbyists. A pure issue expertise view of lobbying does not f…

…The Hill offers this report….

…ons, petition signing, political speech and debate, communication with and lobbying of officials, and so forth. But is it desirable for citizens to perform such tasks anonymously? Anonymity frees people from social pressures associated with observation and identifiability, but does this freedom produce behavior that is democratically beneficial? What, in short, is the effect of anonymity on the behavior of democratic citizens, and how should we ev…

…Check it out! [Disclosure: I am a member of the task force.]…

…The ABA Section on Administrative Law and Regulatory Practice is holding this event in DC on February 3. Check it out!…

…ill continue. Norm has led the Administration’s initiatives to disclosure, lobbying, campaign finance reform, and ethics. While I do not agree with every step he has taken (I am critical of some of the lobbying measures, for example), there is no question that he made great improvements as the ethics point person, and that his relationship with the President has insured that these issues received a great deal of attention from the Administration….

…BNA offers 2010 Battle Over Citizens United Ruling Still Unresolved as 2012 Campaign Looms and ABA Panel Recommendations Would Break Link Between Lobbying, Campaign Funding….

…nistrative Law and Regulatory Practice, is recommending changes to federal lobbying laws that would broaden disclosure required by those involved in lobbying campaigns, address fundraising participation by lobbyists and strengthen enforcement of current law. The report, “Lobbying Law in the Spotlight: Challenges and Proposed Improvements,” represents the position of the task force, but does not reflect the views of the Section, the American Bar As…

…yists. Part I of this Article provides an overview of the current state of lobbying regulation and lobbying jurisprudence. Part II proposes a new anti-rent-seeking rationale for lobbying regulation. It begins by describing the political science literature on how lobbying works, as well as current statistics on the extent of lobbying on the federal level and the costs of lobbyist-driven rent-seeking on the national economy. Some of the new and prop…