Congressional lobby reform aims at disclosure

The US House clears a bill that lifts the curtain on contacts between lobbyists, lawmakers.

By Gail Russell Chaddock | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

from the August 1, 2007 edition

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Washington - In a bid to score a quick victory before the August recess, Democratic leaders in Congress are moving ahead on lobby and ethics reform legislation that they say will make sweeping changes in the way business is done in Washington.

At the heart of the measure are new reporting requirements for lobbyists' expenditures on Capitol Hill and protections against conflict of interest for members. The bill also would give the public more information than ever before about contacts between lobbyists and members of Congress, including the names of super-fundraisers whose "bundled" contributions to members' reelection campaigns vastly exceed the $2,300 limit on individual campaign donations.

On Tuesday, the House voted 411-to-8 to approve the bill with only 2 Republicans voting against the bill, despite criticism from GOP leaders. In the Senate, Democrats predict they, too, will have the votes to pass the measure because few lawmakers want to go home to explain a vote against a measure whose title is the Honest Leadership and Open Government Act.

Still, House Republican leaders called the bill a "hollow shell of reform" and complained that they had been blocked from any role in drafting final language, which was released Monday.

"The legislation is far from perfect, but the fact that they were able, finally, after all these efforts, to get it together to do this is highly significant," says Norman Ornstein, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington and a longtime critic of congressional ethics.

The House and Senate have each already voted some version of ethics and lobby reform. In the House, some reforms were adopted as rules, during the first 100 hours of the new Congress. But reformers say it's essential that the new standards be passed as law in both the chambers.

"There was a strong temptation on the part of many to say, 'We've done this, let's move past it,'" says Mr. Ornstein. It's significant that much of the drive to pass a new law came from the former and current chairs of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, Reps. Rahm Emanuel (D) of Illinois and Chris Van Hollen (D) of Maryland, he says.

"What does that tell you? Nobody is closer to the ground [than they are] in understanding what you want your candidates to run on." In the wake of congressional corruption scandals in the last Congress, Democrats knew they needed "a credible case that Congress has cleaned up its act or they couldn't ask voters to send them back," Ornstein adds.

In the run-up to this week's vote, public-interest groups who had rallied behind lobby and ethics reform fell out over whether the reform had gone far enough. A key sticking point is proposed language over how lawmakers will disclose member-sponsored projects, or earmarks.

The legislation requires that earmarks included in bills and conference reports, and their sponsors, be identified on the Internet at least 48 hours before the Senate votes. But the revised bill leaves it to the Senate majority leader or committee chairmen, rather than the Senate parliamentarian, to certify that all earmarks have been identified. The original Senate language allowed members to raise a point of order against individual earmarks on the floor of the Senate. Under the proposed new law, they could raise objections only if the required list were not provided.

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