Watchdog Blog

Obama’s Swift Actions Will Hold Government Accountable

Today, Public Citizen president Joan Claybrook lauded President Obama for swift actions to hold the government accountable. The statement follows:

President Obama campaigned with the promise of change, a commitment to government openness and a pledge to uphold high ethical standards. On his first full day in office, the new president showed a willingness to turn rhetoric into action.

After eight years of government in the shadows and preferential treatment of corporate lobbyists under his predecessor, President Obama’s directives and executive orders on presidential records, the Freedom of Information Act, transparency and open government, and ethics are not only important in restoring public access to critical information and holding government accountable, but they serve to reaffirm the hope our nation has in his presidency. By issuing strict rules on the future lobbying activities of his administration, President Obama slowed the revolving door that has allowed so many high-ranking government officials to enrich themselves at the public’s expense. And by emphasizing the openness of government records, the orders help to ensure that abuses of power will not go unnoticed and uncorrected.

Congress Delivers on Lobbying and Ethics Reform!

Finally – real ethics reform passed in Congress!  Yesterday the Senate approved S. 1 – the “Honest Leadership and Open Government Act of 2007” – with a veto-proof majority of 83 to 14. On Tuesday, the House also passed the bill with flying colors by 411 to 8.

This terrific legislation will give the public important new information about the cozy relationships between industry lobbyists and members of Congress, and limit the outrageous gifts and travel junkets that laid the groundwork for the culture of corruption on Capitol Hill.   

Today marks the final chapter of a long struggle. We first kicked off the drive to fix Capitol Hill over three years ago. Back then, our “wish list” of reforms was largely ignored by members of Congress and the media – even laughed at as a political impossibility. Then Jack Abramoff’s world – and that of many prominent members of Congress – started to unravel. 

As the investigations into kickbacks and bribes became indictments, our call for reform – and the increased public disgust with Washington – became more and more difficult to ignore. When Abramoff worked out a plea deal in January 2006 to name those whom he bribed to the FBI, you’d have thought the gig was up. But the leadership of the 109th Congress burrowed into the warm sand like ostriches and ignored the need for reform.  In return for their indifference, the voters changed up the Congress in 2006, citing corruption as a top concern.

But institutional change is hard even for a Congress elected on a promise to “end the culture of corruption.” As the bill moved forward, the “K Street” crowd lobbied hard, warning members not to bite the hands that keep lawmakers fat and happy. Public Citizen’s activists did not back down, sending thousands of faxes, emails and making hundreds of call to the Hill to tell Congress it must see this through. 

House Overwhelmingly Approves Ethics Bill - Next: The Senate

It always amazes me what a roll-call vote can do. Behind the scenes, in back-room negotiations, many members of Congress have been laboring away trying to water down – if not kill – lobbying and ethics reform legislation.

Yet when the same bill was submitted to a roll-call vote, where members go on record voting “yea” or “nay,” the bill on ethics sailed through. The House passed a landmark lobbying and ethics bill today by a vote of 411-to-8. Looking at the floor vote, most of the public would not know that many members of Congress had wished this bill would die a quiet death.

About two weeks ago, the bill had one foot in the grave.

Gillespie, A Revolving Door Lobbyist in the White House

Listen to our own Laura MacCleery discuss Bush’s new counselor, Enron and Viacom lobbyist Ed Gillespie on NPR’s Marketplace.   As Laura notes, Enron indirectly paid Gillespie $700,000 in 2001 alone, through several conservative front groups, enabling Gillespie to publicly flack for the White House Energy plan.  In addition, Public Citizen found that Viacom, the parent company of the CBS and UPN networks, retained Quinn Gillespie for two years – and $720,000 – to push for relaxed rules on the number and reach of television stations a single company could own.

Public Citizen’s Joan Claybrook had this to say about the Gillespie appointment:

We are disappointed that the president has appointed a lobbyist who has represented the narrow interests of business to be White House counselor, rather than someone who could bring a broader perspective to the White House. Given President’s Bush’s abysmal poll results, he needs someone with a different view.

Ed Gillespie has long been part of the Bush money machine, helping to raise hundreds of millions of dollars from business interests for Bush’s 2004 re-election campaign. Gillespie’s lobbying clients have included some of the nation’s business giants. He fought on behalf of Enron against efforts to re-regulate the electricity market, which would have ended Enron’s price-gouging. He pushed for the energy legislation enacted in 2005, which included some $25 billion in corporate subsidies for oil, gas nuclear and coal interests. On behalf of financial service clients, he pushed for watering down accounting reforms. On behalf of Chrysler, he fought against improvement of fuel economy standards. On behalf of the Chamber of Commerce, he fought for limiting citizen access to the courts. In his new position as counselor to the president, he will be forging policy that likely will undermine public needs.

By moving from lobbyist to chair of the Republican National Committee, back to lobbyist and then to White House counselor, he is a prime example of a revolving door that has spun out of control.

Learn more about Gillespie’s lengthy history [pdf] working for corporations to dismantle government oversight and advantage clients in consumer complaints and federal fiscal policy. 

Bush continues to co-opt the government for big corporate interests by appointing cronies and hacks to offices of influence.  The consolidation of private interests in the public domain is hobbling consumer protections for health and safety.  It’s dangerous, and expensive.  In 2006, taxpayers paid $64 billion dollars in earmarks for special interests.

Reform-minded Senators Call for Strong Bill

Eleven senators, led by Senators Russ Feingold (D.-Wisc.) and Barack Obama (D.-Ill.), and all of the freshman Senate Democrats — Senators Brown, Cardin, Casey, Klobuchar, McCaskill, Tester, Webb and Whitehouse — as well as Sen. Bernie Sanders (I.- Vt.), sent a letter to leadership asking them to preserve the strong medicine for corrupt government in S.1, the Senate's landmark lobbying and ethics reform bill. The bill is on its way to conference.

The senators called on the leaders to maintain support in conference for all of the significant achievements of the bill, including:

• A strong gift ban;
• Restrictions on corporate jet flights;
• Disclosure of bundling by lobbyists; 
• The revolving door language that is in the Senate's version of the bill;
• Limits on privately funded travel;
• Restrictions on lavish convention parties; and
• Improvements in legislative transparency.

We applaud these senators for their leadership and vision.

Colbert on Revolving Door

The much touted lobbying & ethics bill is heading to committee to reconcile the differences between the Senate and House versions and one of the key provisions we have been fighting for may not survive.  Is it too much to ask for slightly stricter revolving door provisions?  Can't members of Congress wait one more year before they cash-in on K Street and turn around to lobby their former colleagues?

Apparently not.

Stephen Colbert finds this debate ridiculous.  Let's demand this reasonable and necessary reform.

So Much for the Cleanest Congress in History

Those screwy Democrats - not much good news on the lobbying reform front.

While the Democratic leadership and freshmen Dems clearly want some substantial lobbying and ethics reform legislation, the "old bulls" in the Democratic caucus do not want business-as-usual to change much. These are the members who have been around Congress for 10 or 20 years and now dominate chairs on various committees.

The old bulls made it clear earlier that they would join Republicans and defeat the entire bill. So, leadership worked out a deal this morning: that all the revolving door provisions, including the simple extending the cooling off period from one year to two years, would be removed from the bill, if they would support an amendment to disclose campaign bundling by lobbyists along with the base disclosure bill. That deal went though. It means that the floor rule will be designed to prohibit introduction of the revolving door amendment I had been working on.

Following that deal, Democrats overwhelming defeated amendments to disclose grassroots lobbying, and to prohibit lobbyists from organizing and paying for convention parties and other events honoring Members.

The Republican caucus is quite happy with the bill so far, with Lamar Smith (R-Texas) pointing out that it resembles the lobbying reform bill the Republicans approved in the 109th Congress (but which perished in conference) - and which we denounced as "warm spit."

Not a very impressive performance by a Democratic caucus that promised to make this Congress "the cleanest in history."

The Dizzying Spin of the Revolving Door

On Tuesday, a former congressional staffer on the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, Mark Zachares, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to defraud the public by accepting gifts and promises of a high-paying lobbying job on K Street in exchange for official favors for disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff and his clients.

Zachares's conviction stems from one of the most powerful tools for buying influence on Capitol Hill: the revolving door, in which lucrative lobbying jobs in the private sector are offered to public officials, oftentimes to win legislative favors for clients.

Zachares joins a growing list of congressional and executive branch officials who have been convicted for revolving door corruption such as Tony Rudy and Neil Volz, former senior staffers to retired Rep. Tom DeLay (R-Texas) and imprisoned Rep. Bob Ney (R-Ohio), respectively and an even larger list of former officials shrouded in scandal such as former Rep. Bill Tauzin (R.-Louis.) for immediately spinning through the revolving door after leaving public service.

Despite the fact that there is a one-year cooling-off period in which former officials are not supposed to make lobbying contacts with the former colleagues, the current revolving door restriction is an abysmal failure. Of members of Congress who left office between 1998 and 2004, 43 percent went on to become lobbyists 42 percent of ex-House members and 50 percent of ex-Senators. By July 2005, only six months after the end of the 108th Congress, 18 departed members from that Congress had announced accepting jobs with lobbying firms. Four actually registered as federal lobbyists within their first year of leaving Congress. After the last Administration, about a quarter of senior cabinet officials moved into private employment as lobbyists.

The heart and soul of the problem is that former officials are currently prohibited only from making lobbying contacts picking up the telephone and calling their former colleagues during the cooling off period. All other paid lobbying activity during this period-- the planning, strategizing and supervising lobbying campaigns-- is unrestricted immediately after leaving public office.

Never before have we seen the revolving door spin so wildly out of control. It permeates the culture on Capitol Hill, vastly increasing the opportunities for corruption, and sharply diminishing the publics confidence in the federal government.

Resonable reforms must be put into place. Otherwise the revolving door, which raises so much public suspicion about conflicts of interest, will remain in spin mode.

Zell Miller Gets Stuck in the Revolving Door

Current revolving door rules prohibit ex-Congressmen from lobbying their old colleagues for one year after they leave office. In September 2005, ex-Sen. Zell Miller (D-Ga.) was still within his one year probation period when became a registered lobbyist for the firm of McKenna, Long and Aldridge.  According to disclosure forms, the firm received $60,000 from Lockheed Aeronautical Systems for him and others to lobby the House, Senate and Department of Defense.

If he, in fact, lobbied any Congressmen, he broke the law.  But there is no way of knowing by looking at the disclosure forms, because they don’t say exactly what he did.

Lobbying restrictions are supposed to prevent government employees from stepping through the revolving door between the Capitol and “K Street” and selling out the public by exploiting the contacts they made while in office.  Developments in recent years have shown they need MUCH improvement.

For example, by July 2005, 18 recently departed members of Congress had already accepted jobs at lobbying firms only six months into retirement. As noted by Public Citizen’s advocate Craig Holman in Roll Call today, our research shows that from 1998 through 2004, 43 percent of all retiring Members of Congress (those retiring for reasons other than death or conviction) spun through the revolving door to become lobbyists. Anecdotal evidence indicates very high salaries, sometimes reaching millions.

Last week, Public Citizen sent  a letter [pdf] to Rep. Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Sen. Reid (D-Nev.) asking them to prevent the ethically-questionable activity of former Congressmen by enacting stricter disclosure requirements, a ban on all lobbying activities for a two-year cooling-off period, and the creation of an independent Office of Public Integrity to enforce the ethics rules.

Tell your member of Congress it’s time to prevent public officials from cashing in their public service and selling out the American people.

Public Citizen testifies this morning

Today, Public Citizen advocate Craig Holman is testifying today before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform about ways to improve the Executive Branch Reform Act of 2007, a bill that is currently separate from the House lobbying reform legislation, but would slow the revolving door between the executive branch and industry.

You can read his testimony here: http://www.citizen.org/documents/craigtestimony.pdf

The March Toward Meaningful Lobbying and Ethics Reform

Under the leadership of Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), the House in a single day approved some of the most critical new ethics rules changes seen in a decade. Lobbyists, and organizations that employ them, are now banned from giving gifts of any value to members of Congress and their staff; prohibited from arranging or paying for congressional travel, except for one-day trips to make a speech or attend a conference; and barred from flying on private corporate jets for campaign purposes, personal trips and travel connected to official duties. Further, the growing wave of earmarks in appropriations and tax bills must be identified with a specific congressional sponsor.

Nearly all of these reforms were rebuked by the House and the Senate last year. Following the November elections, the same reforms were adopted by a near-unanimous vote of 430-to-1, with Rep. Dan Burton (R-Ind.) as the lone dissenting vote.

Next on the reform agenda for Pelosi is her legislative package, which regulates the conduct of persons outside the House (i.e., lobbyists and former members). This package is expected to contain an equally impressive set of legislative reforms, such as slowing the revolving door and enhancing disclosure of fundraising activity by lobbyists and Astroturf lobbying.

Democrats must lead

Big ideas win campaigns.

New Speaker-elect Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), has been vocal for weeks about her intentions should the Democrats become the majority in the House, and lobbying and ethics reforms are the first order-of-business on "day one" of the new session. She also promises to set a high bar, saying that "the Democrats intend to lead the most honest, most open, and most ethical Congress in history.'' There is now no excuse not to pass real reform.

Pelosi's bill, H.R. 4682, for the most part, is a very strong bill. It would:

• Increase transparency of lobbyists' activities - enabling searches online showing which lobbyists are talking to which Congressmen;
• Slow the revolving door - the time a Representative must wait before becoming a lobbyist is doubled;
• Prohibit privately-sponsored travel for members and require detailed itineraries on trips;
• Ban gifts from lobbyists to members or staff;
• Expose who is putting earmarks in our bills; and
• Create an Office of Public Integrity (OPI) to monitor and initiate investigations against lobbyists (but not members of Congress).

(Read the full summary here.)

The bill does lack two key items.

First, the ban on gifts from lobbyists is great but should be applied to everyone else as well.  Gift giving has an obviously corrosive effect and must be banned across the board.

Second, we need an OPI for monitoring members of Congress and not just lobbyists. As we have seen in the current Congress, the Ethics Committee is a joke because Congress doesn't, and probably can't, do a very good job of policing itself. (Congress: "I told myself to go to my room!") The OPI must be able to monitor and initiate investigations against Congress members and staff about ethics violations.

This Democratic sweep opens up a huge opportunity to change business-as-usual in Washington. These chances, and this momentum for change, must not be squandered on mere half-measures. The American people have said, loudly and clearly, that they want leadership. Democrats must now answer the call. 

Who ARE they representing?

In "The Lobby is Getting Crowded," New York Newsday has taken a closer look into the explosive growth of federal lobbying - and found many of the culprits in their own backyard.

It turns out that New York has the highest number of former members of Congress turned lobbyists of any state in the nation - 25 ex-House members and one former senator. Overall, the number of registered federal lobbyists has tripled in the past ten years, from 10,798 in 1996 to the current 32,890 who filed last September. (Federal lobbying expenditures jumped 50 percent in just five years, from $1.4 billion in 1999 to $2.1 billion in 2004.)

Most of these ex-members have managed to rack up millions of dollars in fees since making the switch, leading one of them, former Republican Rep. Ray McGrath, to concede that "a 'revolving door' may exist, with lawmakers leaving Congress who lobby for industries that they once regulated...." Gee, you think?

The article goes on to note that "the heftiest payments often come from large corporations and trade associations...[representing]... industries such as energy, health care, oil, banking and telecommunications, which often want changes in federal law, tax code and agency regulations that affect their profits." And these corporations and trade associations know how to recruit.

For instance, former Republican Rep. Bill Carney, who unsuccessfully fought to keep Long Island's unpopular Shoreham nuclear power plant open while in Congress, noted that "I would have enjoyed defense work [as a lobbyist]... but having gone through the Shoreham battle, several [energy] companies offered me an opportunity to work for them." How convenient.

McGrath's lobbying partner, former Democratic Rep. Tom Downey, describes the dynamic a little more directly: "We represent a number of New York firms because we did their business while in the House."

And all this time we thought they were elected to Congress to do the people's business....

-Gordon Clark

DeLay getting a warm welcome in Virginia

While soon-to-be-former Rep. Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) will be experiencing a major change in his environment, moving from conservative Sugarland, Texas to liberal-leaning Alexandria, Virginia, The Hill notes that he is getting a warm welcome from his new Democratic representatives.

Rep. Jim Moran (D-Va.), who represents the state's 8th district, welcomed DeLay to what he called "a progressive, tolerant and open-minded community of caring, diverse and forward-thinking citizens...."

Not to be outdone, Moran's brother Brian, who represents DeLay's new hometown as a delegate in the Virginia state assembly, offered the former House majority leader this support: “I have been an advocate of restoring voting rights to felons for many years,” he told the Alexandria Gazette Packet. “I think DeLay will enjoy my representation.”

-Gordon Clark

Breaking News: Former DeLay Staffer Pleads Guilty

Former Deputy Chief of Staff to Rep. Tom DeLay (R-Texas), Tony Rudy, pleaded guilty this morning to charges of conspiracy to corrupt public officials and defraud his lobbying clients. Rudy has also offered his cooperation in a federal probe that could extend into the halls of Congress, and right through the doorway of Rep. DeLay's office (or so we giddily hope).

SourceWatch reports that Rudy worked for DeLay's office until 2001, when he left for a job alongside Jack Abramoff (thanks to those rapidly turning revolving doors).

"The purpose of the conspiracy was for defendant Rudy and his coconspirators to unjustly enrich themselves,'' Justice Department prosecutors stated in the filing.

Did someone say "coconspirators"?

-Jess Kutch

The Revolving Door Spins for the Nuclear Energy Industry

The "revolving door" that swings between the public and private sector is a major source of corruption and favoritism in our government. Corporate interests often try to plant their own executives in the governmental agencies that have oversight over their company, thus "capturing" that agency. Conversely, corporate interests also often provide employment in the private sector to public officials with oversight over the company, thus influencing their official actions while in office. It is not uncommon for retiring public officials to cash in on their public service by putting their networks and insider knowledge for sale to the highest  bidder as lobbyists.

As was mentioned in our news round-up, MSNBC reported yesterday on the abuse of the revolving door on Capitol Hill as it relates to the nuclear power industry. The report focuses on Alex Flint, a former staff director for the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, where he was a key player in legislation that provided billions of dollars in subsidies to the nuclear industry. Flint swung through the revolving door to become the chief lobbyist for the nuclear industry’s largest trade group, the Nuclear Energy Institute.

This is not the first time Flint used public service for personal gain.  He also served as a legislative assistant for Sen. Pete Domenici (R-N.M.), who in 1996 named him majority staff clerk to the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Energy and Water. Four years later, Flint left to work for the lobbying firm of Johnston and Associates, whose clients then included NEI and many other  nuclear industry interests—only later to return to public service with the  Senate Energy and Natural resources Committee and, as noted above, again cash in through the revolving door.

You can learn more about the revolving door between the public and private sector on our website here.