Yesterday evening, John reacted to President Obama's SOTU speech in which the President proposed a ban on lobbyists acting as bundlers. He criticized the proposal as "unlikely to pass Congress, and unlikely to pass muster with the courts." It's true that Congress is unlikely to do much of anything for the remainder of this session, although my bet is that the courts would uphold a bundling ban if it were structured properly. Regardless, focusing on banning lobbyist bundlers is to ignore the elephant in the room: we need to fix who is required to register as a lobbyist in the first place .

Were Congress to act in 2012, the best thing it could do is to tighten the requirement of who must register as a lobbyist so that the Newt Gingriches, Tom Daschles, and other hidden influencers will be brought into the sunlight. There's no doubt that they both have lobbied, at least under the common-sense definition of  "influenc[ing] politicians or public officials on a particular issue." The legal definition says essentially the same thing, but it allows lobbyists to evade registration so long as they avoid either spending 20% of their time lobbying or directly contacting more than 1 covered official. This is incredibly easy to do, and creates loopholes that just about everyone agrees should be closed.

So if we're going to talk about lobbying reform -- and a Pew Charitable Trust survey released Monday says 40% of Americans believe that addressing lobbyist influence is a top priority for 2012 -- the best place to start is with fixing the lobbyist registration and disclosure requirements. President Obama has addressed lobbying reform in the past, most visibly in his 2010 State of the Union speech, and his administration's actions have shown sensitivity to the importance of this issue. But he seems to have gotten sidetracked.

A good place to start is with the Lobbying Disclosure Enhancement Act, introduced by Rep. Quigley, which directly takes on the lobbying disclosure loopholes, as well as Sunlight's recommendations on this issue and the ABA Lobbying Task Force's report. For a primer, watch the Advisory Committee on Transparency's event "Washington's Lobbying Fix," which discusses all of these proposals.

Bill Clinton famously tried to claim he hadn’t lied about his relationship Monica Lewinsky by saying, "It depends on what the meaning of the word 'is' is.” Newt Gingrich similarly contorts the English language by claiming “I was never a lobbyist.” Perhaps Gingrich’s claim depends on what the meaning of the word “lobbyist” is. If it is the loophole ridden, easily evaded legal definition in the Lobbying Disclosure Act that allows power brokers to avoid registering as lobbyists if they spend less than 20 percent of their time lobbying, then maybe, maybe, Gingrich can claim with a straight face that he was not a lobbyist. But if common sense and Miriam Webster are applied, to lobby means, “to conduct activities aimed at influencing public officials and especially members of a legislative body on legislation.” Under that definition, there can be no doubt that Gingrich was a lobbyist, even if he didn’t fill out the paperwork.

The New York Times today correctly notes that people of Gingrich’s stature never register as lobbyists. It’s time to change that. Former members of Congress who trade their political connections for paychecks must be required register and report as lobbyists so that the public knows who is paying them and what positions they are advocating. Sunlight has long supported legislation that would strengthen the definition of lobbyist by eliminating the 20 percent loophole. The law should be clear. Former members of Congress should not be able to call themselves “consultants,” “strategic advisors,” or “historians,” while taking money from corporate clients to advance their causes on Capitol Hill. They are lobbyists.

Anti-lobbyist barbs will continue to fly this election season because they win easy political points. But instead of accusations and denials, name calling and obfuscation, it’s time for real reform that will capture all who lobby and impose much needed accountability on the system.

Here’s a riddle: What do you call it when someone earns millions of dollars from corporate clients, uses his relationships with the most influential officials in government to pursue those clients’ interests, and even has offices on K Street?

Answer: If you are Newt Gingrich, not a lobbyist.

The Washington Post reports that corporate clients paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to the current leader in the Republican primary in exchange for him providing “access to top transformational leadership across industry and government” through his for-profit “think tank.” Apparently they got what they paid for. According to the Post, “Gingrich also bragged about his success in pushing conservative policies and legislation in Washington during his political exile.”

We’ve written many times before about stealth lobbyists, often former Members of Congress who crawl around Capitol Hill and the White House advocating on behalf of fat cat clients, but who skirt disclosure under the lobby laws by claiming they only provide “strategic advice” or spend less than 20% of their time lobbying.

And we’ve advocated—dare I say lobbied—to change all of that.

The specter of Newt Gingrich, former non-lobbyist lobbyist, occupying the White House should galvanize calls for lobbying reform. It’s problematic enough when a former Member of Congress provides his clients with access to his friends and colleagues in the House or the Senate. But if Washington’s revolving door should swing that person into the White House, corporate interests who once paid handsomely for strategic advice will have a direct line to the leader of the country.

The Gingrich example is at the top of the list of why we need a new approach to lobbying disclosure. The most influential people in Washington can easily skirt the rules currently in place. Everyone who is not in that top tier of influence peddlers—including all of the registered lobbyists who follow the rules—should recognize the failure of the current system and work to change it by ensuring that if someone is paid to lobby, they register and report as a lobbyist.

On Wednesday Sunlight released a list of lobbyists tweeting online, allowing for collective insight into their world; who they follow; what they're promoting; and a view of how they operate through the prism of Twitter.

Yesterday Tony Hirst, lecturer in the Department of Communication and Systems at The Open University and author of ouseful.info created a series of visualizations delving deeper into our Twitter lobbyist list.

(Please keep in mind that this is just a sampling of lobbyists active on Twitter and a snapshot of their activity, I find these visualizations more interesting than instructive.)

Public social connections between members of the @SunFoundation/lobbyists list

"Popular" friends of folk on the @SunFoundation/lobbyists twitter list That is, folks who are followed by 20 or more people on the list...

People who follow large numbers of @sunfoundation lobbyists Method: grab the followers of folk on @sunfoundation/lobbyists, generate a net from follower to list member, filter list to nodes of degree>=20, size nodes according to out-degree, colour according to modularity statistic identified cluster.

Snapshot of US politics? So the methodology is a little bit involved and completely made up on this one... For each of the folk on the @sunfoundation/lobbyists list, grab a random sample of 97 their followers (or all their followers if they have less than 97). Find the people from those samples who follow at least 2 members of the list and generate the graph of those followers and all the people they follow. Filter that graph to show nodes with degree >=100, lay it out using a force directed layout in gephi, sizing nodes according to HITS Authority, then filter it again to only show nodes with indegree of 2 or more. The intuition is that this view shows people who are followed by large numbers of people who follow 2 or more of the lobbyists. Bear in mind that there may be all sorts of sampling errors...

If you want to do a bit of sleuthing yourself, please take a look at the Twitter lobbyist list itself or you can download this .csv file of the last 50 tweets from 191 of these lobbyist Twitter accounts to draw a bigger picture.

Yesterday, the TV News-Magazine 60 Minutes aired an interview with disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff. It's worth watching in its entirety, but be forewarned: it will turn your stomach.

The drumbeat continues for the twelve members of the Committee on Deficit Reduction to step up and match their newly acquired power with a new-found commitment to transparency. Today, more than a dozen organizations joined Sunlight on a letter to Super Committee members, urging them to voluntarily disclose the campaign contributions they receive from now until the committee completes its work. Just as important, the groups call for members to disclose information about the special interest meetings Super Committee members take while serving on the committee.

The letter noted that failure to ensure transparency of these fundamental avenues of influence will reinforce the public’s mistrust of the deficit reduction process and risk delegitimizing the Committee’s work.

The Committee’s efforts to make its work transparent by creating a website and making some meetings public only go so far. Real access and influence come from large campaign contributions and when special interests meet with members to plead their case. Yet nothing will be disclosed about either lobbying or campaign contributions until well after the committee makes its recommendations. Too late, in other words, for the public to understand or respond to money and access--factors that may play an oversized role in the decision making process of super committee members.

Already the public, as well as members of Congress who do not serve on the Super Committee, are at a disadvantage. The committee has begun working to find ways to make enormous cuts to defense and social spending—cuts that will affect every one of us. Yet there is no disclosure of who is asking the committee members for help or who is writing large checks to committee members. The Committee’s work is too important for secrecy to be an option.

14 Groups Call for Super Committee Transparency

The Hill’s Congress Blog last week featured an item by Howard Marlowe, president of the American League of Lobbyists, in which Mr. Marlowe called on lobbyists to “break our code of silence and show our true determination to solve the critical problems that are tying the federal government in knots.”

I’m not privy to this code, despite being a registered lobbyist myself. Apparently, Mr. Marlowe’s concern centers on lobbyists acting “as though there was no choice but to silently take the abuse to ourselves and our profession.” Poor us.

But if Marlowe is concerned about the image of lobbyists, rather than dismiss proposals to make the profession more transparent, he should embrace them. Sunlight strongly supports the H.R. 2339, the Lobbyist Disclosure Enhancement Act introduced by Rep. Quigley. The bill would require lobbyists to disclose the names of the covered executive branch officials or Members of Congress lobbied (or the name of the employer if the lobbyist meets with staff), closing a meaningless provision in current law in which lobbyists merely have to report whether they have lobbied the House, the Senate or the Executive branch.

But where is the American League of Lobbyists on this? Firmly opposed. It’s “not realistic” says Marlowe. At the same time, he claims that it was ALL who led the effort two decades ago to enact lobbyist disclosure, noting, “Today anyone can turn to a database on the Internet that tells who is lobbying, what they are lobbying for, and how much they are getting paid to lobby.” Why wouldn’t ALL then want to complete the circle of disclosure and add to that database the names of the people actually being lobbied?

Mr. Marlowe goes on to complain that President Obama’s staff uses a nearby coffee shop to meet with lobbyists, so that their presence isn’t disclosed when White House visitor logs are released. The visitor logs are a security system retooled as a disclosure system, and aren't a replacement for a complete overhaul of the lobbying laws. If lobbyists were required to report their meetings, it would be irrelevant whether the meetings took place in the West Wing or Starbucks. Again, if Mr. Marlow is so concerned that the White House is skirting its own disclosure rules, he should be endorsing greater transparency measures.

As disappointing as Mr. Marlowe’s stance on stronger lobbyist reporting is, we agree that the 20 percent loophole should be closed so that anyone who is paid to lobby must register and report. This is another component of the LDEA.

Lobbyists engage in constitutionally protected activities and should have nothing to hide. The profession would go a long way in assuaging negative assumptions about it if lobbyists break their code silence and loudly cheer greater disclosure.

In the most recent, and possibly most repugnant, turn of the revolving door, FCC commissioner Meredith Attwell Baker will join Comcast just months after approving the Comcast/NBC Universal merger. The move spurred the New York Times to call for expanding the definition of lobbying. We agree. While Baker’s hiring may be a done deal, the lobby laws need to be changed so that we know who she is lobbying, about what, and when.

Rules put in place by the Obama administration mean that Baker will not be allowed to lobby anyone at the FCC for two years. That’s a sliver of an exclusion that leaves her plenty of opportunities to spread the Comcast/NBC message inside the beltway. The day after she starts, this well-connected, high-ranking administration official can start lobbying Congress on any issue, including the Comcast/NBC merger.

The current laws do next to nothing to inform the public about the ways Baker will wield her power on Capitol Hill. Sunlight is calling for changes in the current Lobbying Disclosure Act that would require her and others like her to report the names of the offices she lobbies—whether in person, on the phone, in writing or email—and link the names with the specific issues on which she sought government action. We would require that reporting to happen in real time and online.

We may not be able to close the revolving door, but we can find out what happens whenever people pass through it.

The New York Times ran a story today on the nuclear industry's lobbying efforts over the past decade to revive the industry. The lobbying and PR campaign has been brilliant and effectively catapulted the nuclear industry into the discussion of clean energy in Washington that brought both parties together on a pro-nuclear consensus. That consensus looks to be fraying after the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear reactor disaster currently unfolding in Japan.

The Times story cites and links to a story I wrote earlier this week, so I thought I'd share some of the data directly. Here's the relevant Times quote:

And the industry has spent tens of millions more lately on lobbying. Last year, electric utilities, trade groups and other backers spent $54 million hiring lobbyists, including former members of Congress, to make their case, according to a separate analysis by the Sunlight Foundation, which also tracks money and politics.

And here's the relevant quote from my post:

An analysis of the lobbying expenses of electric utilities operating a majority of the nation’s nuclear reactors and the main industry trade group show a doubling on lobbying spending since 2004. The industry’s lobbying jumped from $27 million prior to the nuclear-friendly Energy Act of 2005 to nearly $54 million in 2010.

In collecting this data I looked at the thirteen major companies operating nuclear reactors and the main industry trade group, the Nuclear Energy Institute. Some reactors are operated by government cooperatives or the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), so these were excluded. I also had to exclude Pacific Gas & Electric because they file their lobbying disclosure reports in a dramatically different way than the other utilities. Including PG&E's numbers would have wildly skewed the data upwards.

PG&E reported spending over $45 million on lobbying in 2010. Only a small fraction of this number was actually spent on lobbying the federal government. The rest was spent on state-level lobbying and campaigns against propositions they opposed. PG&E does list, as a note, a separate amount for federal lobbying on their quarterly filings, however, this is not consistent for the number of years that I covered in reviewing the nuclear industry's lobbying.

Anyway, here's the list of companies and trade group that I looked at and their lobbying spending year over year. (All data came from the Center for Responsive Politics):

The Justice Department just indicted Doug Hampton, a former aide to Sen. John Ensign, for lobbying Ensign's office prior to the conclusion of the one year cooling off period after leaving his congressional position.

This guy is a modern day Job: His boss sleeps with his wife, then helps him circumvent lobbying laws to get clients because Ensign felt bad about cuckolding him, and then Ensign is let off the hook and he gets indicted.

Why the Justice Department won't charge Ensign is beyond me. Ensign helped Hampton violate the lobbying statute with full knowledge that Hampton was not supposed to be in contact with Ensign's office.