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TEHRAN, June 19 - Michael Cohen, the president’s personal lawyer and longtime fixer, has recently become the most notorious influence peddler in America, but he is only one man in an army of shadow lobbyists whose power has been growing for years.
TEHRAN, Young Journalists Club (YJC) -Michael Cohen, the president’s personal lawyer and longtime fixer, has recently become the most notorious influence peddler in America, but he is only one man in an army of shadow lobbyists whose power has been growing for years.
Much of Mr. Cohen’s headline-making behavior is outrageous even by K Street standards. But one of the many alleged misdeeds for which he is reportedly under investigation — knowingly failing to register as a lobbyist, a felony — is routine in Washington. There are thousands of unregistered lobbyists operating off the books thanks to loophole-ridden disclosure rules and lax enforcement of the federal laws on lobbying. Unless these rules are tightened, people less infamous than Michael Cohen will continue courting officials of both parties on the behalf of private interests, out of public view.
Federal lobbying is governed by the Lobbying Disclosure Act of 1995. It requires that people who receive more than $5,000 a quarter from lobbying provide basic information about their activities and clients. But there are gaping loopholes in the law. One of its provisions says that you are required to register as a lobbyist only if you spend at least 20 percent of your time over three months directly contacting more than one public official.
Ethics officials loosely interpret that 20 percent rule to include only attempts to persuade. “Routine information gathering” doesn’t count as lobbying, so if you set up a meeting with a member of Congress, but doing so required only a five-minute text-message exchange, did that count toward the 20 percent threshold? You can meet with a cabinet secretary’s aide to discuss policy, but who can say if that meeting was to persuade, rather than to collect information? It’s a subjective call within an entire system dependent on self-reporting.
That points to a related problem: There are few, if any, cops on the beat. Although the disclosure law was updated in 2007 to add criminal penalties for failing to register as a lobbyist, there has never been a comprehensive effort to scrutinize noncompliance. According to Tim LaPira, a professor at James Madison University who studies Washington’s revolving door, there has never been a single case of criminal enforcement for flouting the registration requirement.
The ethics offices on Capitol Hill, the Senate Office of Public Records and the House Legislative Resource Center, are supposed to manage the registration system for lobbyists, but in practice, they are ineffective: The two offices put paralegals and clerks in charge of detecting noncompliance but give them no real authority to initiate investigations.
In 2007 and 2008, when Barack Obama was a presidential candidate, he seized on voters’ frustration with the influence industry. On the campaign trail, he argued that lobbyists for special interests “exercise an effective veto on our progress.” And on his first day in office, Mr. Obama enacted what his White House called the “most sweeping ethics reform in history.” Among other stipulations, it barred registered lobbyists from “work on regulations or contracts directly and substantially related to their prior employer for two years.” (Notably, some waivers were issued.)
Thousands of lobbyists responded by deregistering from the ethics system. Few actually changed careers. Most simply reclassified their companies or created subsidiaries that performed nearly identical services. The American League of Lobbyists, the professional society for the lobbying industry, rebranded itself as the Association of Government Relations Professionals. Figures maintained by the Center for Responsive Politics show that the number of registered lobbyists in the United States peaked in 2007 with 14,824 registrants. The number has steadily declined to a low of about 9,443 lobbyists registered this year.
To avoid registering, shadow lobbyists use euphemistic titles. A South Korean aerospace company that just obtained a large Defense Department contract hired Mr. Cohen, a former personal injury lawyer, as a consultant on American accounting standards. Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker, once claimed that he didn’t need to register as a lobbyist for the government-backed mortgage giant Freddie Mac because the $1.6 million it paid him was for his services as a “historian.” Mr. Gingrich later modified his statement to claim he was hired for “strategic advice.”
Source:nytimes
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