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.

The Chicago City Council passed an ordinance sought by Mayor Rahm Emanuel tightening lobbying rules and increasing disclosure of lobbyist activities. Importantly the ordinance creates a searchable online system for registration and reporting allowing disclosures to be posted when they are filed.

Unfortunately, the City Council insisted on language that weakened the ordinance somewhat. For instance, lobbyists’ reports will be filed quarterly, rather than monthly, as the initial ordinance would have required.  In this day of instant access to everything on the Internet, having to wait three months for information about lobbying unnecessary and arcane. Information delayed is information denied.

In addition, the compromise that passed the Council exempted from the definition of lobbyist any “employee, officer or director of a not-for-profit entity who seeks to influence legislative or administrative action solely on behalf of that entity.”  In our opinion, anyone who lobbies as part of his or her paid employment should be defined as a lobbyist. Carve outs lead to gaping holes in disclosure that can be taken advantage of by powerful individuals who want their influence peddling to remain hidden.

Finally, missing from the initial proposal was a requirement that lobbyists disclose the name of the people whom they lobbied. Lobbying disclosure is a three-legged stool that must include information about the person doing the lobbying (including information about the client and details of campaign contributions); what specific government action he is seeking; and the name of the person he is seeking it from. Without that last leg, the stool falls.

The ordinance makes positive steps by requiring disclosure of campaign contributions, codifying revolving door provisions currently in an executive order, and limiting gifts from lobbyists to elected officials.

Still, the City of Chicago had a chance to take great strides toward greater disclosure.  It is disappointing they chose to take baby steps.

Representatives Quigley and Polis took a significant step toward improving what we know about Washington power players by introducing the Lobbyist Disclosure Enhancement Act today. 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), the dates of the meetings and the issues discussed. If enacted, speculation about what lobbyists are doing would be replaced with facts contained in databases of lobbying information. The public would have access to answers to questions about lobbying including: Who was the target of the lobbying? What did the lobbyists discuss? When did the lobbying contact take place?

The legislation also closes a gaping hole in who needs to report. Currently, some of the most powerful players inside the beltway are subject to zero disclosure. Former members of Congress such as Tom Daschle and Norm Colman, CEOs of major corporations like Jeffrey Kindler of Pfizer, and labor leaders such as SEIU’s Andy Stern have significantly more political and financial pull in Congress than many of the mom and pop lobby shops that must report. Yet, because the law says reporting is only necessary if a lobbyist spends more than 20 percent of her time lobbying for any particular client, the public is completely in the dark about many of these "stealth lobbyists" who wield tremendous influence.

The Quigley bill rightly eliminates that loophole. Bravely too, as many of the Congressman’s colleagues might decide to further their careers by becoming “policy advisors” in Washington law firms or lobby shops. Nearly 200 former members have chosen this lucrative path and many rely on the 20 percent loophole to avoid disclosure.

The bill also significantly speeds disclosure of new registrations and reduces delays in reporting of lobbyists’ contributions. Instead the current 45-day lag time for filing a registration when a lobbyist takes on a new client, the bill requires registration within 5 days. This nearly real time, online reporting will hasten public access of information that can be a vital clue as to what issues are trending in Congress and what companies or industries might be facing congressional scrutiny. Under the bill, reporting of contributions lobbyists make to candidates will occur quarterly instead of semi-annually. This aligns contribution reports with required quarterly reporting of lobbyists’ activities, improving the ability to track when lobbyists’ contributions amplify their requests for help from Members of Congress. (Sunlight would go even farther than the Quigley bill and require real time reporting of contributions and lobbying activity to eliminate the risk of the barn door being closed after the cows have escaped.)

Finally, the bill tries to impose some order on the wild west of lobbying disclosure by creating new enforcement mechanisms, including random audits and, eventually, an online whistleblower provision to ensure that lobbyists are accurately registering and reporting.

This is an important piece of legislation. Following the actions of lobbyists by making their work more transparent is one way to track influence and ensure accountability inside the beltway. Improved disclosures will also improve the dialogue in Congress by ensuring that voters can react and respond to the arguments their representatives are hearing from lobbyists. If a voter sees that her Congressman has met with a lobbyist whose views she opposes, she can contact the Congressman's office to make sure her viewpoints are heard, too.

Follow the progress of this bill as well as Sunlight’s work on it by checking in here or following the hashtag #openlobby on Twitter.

Lobbyist Disclosure Enhancement Act

Norm Coleman has decided to join the cadre of former senators now employed as “senior advisers” for Washington lobby shops. We call his ilk non-lobbyist lobbyists. Tom Daschle is the poster child for this group of important influence peddlers in Washington who, due to a quirk in the law, don’t register as lobbyists or report their activities. Others include recent exiles from Congress such as Evan Bayh, Bob Bennett and Gordon Smith.

But what makes Coleman special is that in addition to his role as a non-lobbyist lobbyist, he is the chairman of the American Action Network, a 501(c)(4) group that shielded donors from disclosure while spending $20 million on electioneering ads during last year’s election.

As the chairman of AAN, Coleman knows who donated money to ad campaigns that favored conservative candidates. The public doesn’t. As a non-lobbyist lobbyist, Coleman knows whose interests he represents before Congress. The public doesn’t. He can encourage his corporate clients at his new firm to contribute to ANN. He can decide the political races in which ANN will run ads. He can let his former Senate colleagues know that, either as a favor or as a threat, AAN will spend heavily for or against their re-election campaigns.

Efforts to uncover dark money contributions to elections through legislation failed. Even a modest effort by the Obama administration to require disclosure of dark money by government contractors is being met with vigorous opposition by groups representing corporate donors.

Efforts to uncover more about lobbying activity have only just begun. (You can receive updates to Sunlight’s work on lobbying disclosure here.) The case of Norm Coleman illustrates that when hidden money collides with undisclosed influence a handful of moneyed interests enjoy the benefits while the rest of us are left in the dark.

Sometimes important information about the way Washington works is easily accessible online, but those “in the know” don’t know how to use it. Take this story from the New York Times. Rep. Collin Peterson (D-Minn.), Chairman of the House Committee on Agriculture held a hearing on derivatives legislation. Washington lobbyist Ed Rosen testified on behalf of the 650 organizations that make up the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association.  According to the story, Rep. Peterson was unaware that Rosen lobbied for CDS Dealers Consortium, a group of nine Wall Street leviathans including JP Morgan Chase and Citigroup. CDS Dealers Consortium is a much narrower group that has potentially conflicting interests in derivatives legislation than SIFMA. Had Rep. Peterson known that Rosen represented CDS, “it would have guided his questioning and interpretation of Mr. Rosen’s testimony.” The Times infers that the information was unknown because “those testifying at such hearings are not required to disclose their affiliations.”  This is misleading, as the Times reporters themselves noted earlier in the article that lobbying records clearly show that Mr. Rosen was hired to represent CDS.

Had Rep. Peterson or his staff simply typed Ed Rosen’s name into the LDA disclosure search form on the House Clerk’s web site, the information he needed would have popped up in seconds. He would have had a relatively short time frame before the hearing to discover the information, so we will cut him a little slack and use the example to point out the need for real time online disclosure of lobbyist information. According to the lobbyist registration form, CDS Dealers Consortium hired Mr. Rosen on November 13, 2008. Mr. Rosen delayed filing the registration form until Thursday, January 29, 2009, and he filed his lobbying disclosure report the next day. According to the House Clerk’s office, both documents would have been accessible within one day of filing—a day or two before the February 4th hearing. But the tight timeline points out how the current quarterly reporting regime combined with registration requirements that allow 45 days or more to pass before registration forms need to be filed can be used to game the system, delaying disclosure until after it is useful or relevant. Still, even the best, most timely filing system doesn’t do anyone any good if the people who are in the best position to use the data fail to look for it. In this case, the derivatives hearing and any resulting legislation could have taken an entirely different tone if anyone had done his homework.

Last month, the Treasury Department announced new rules restricting contacts made by lobbyists working for firms receiving bailout funds. Those rules, however, appear to have one easy loophole, lobby Congress to lobby for you. According to Treasury Department officials, the distribution of bailout funds is determined by whom regulators - Office of Thrift Supervision, Federal Deposit Insurance Company - suggest to the Department. Lawmakers can easily lobby the regulators to make suggestions to Treasury. And of course, lobbyists can easily lobby Congress to lobby the regulators. Last week, the Washington Post exposed this practice:

The efforts of lawmakers to secure funding for financial firms are not illegal. But the bailout program has become a sensitive subject in Washington and across the country. The Treasury Department has vowed strict new rules against lobbying its officials for TARP funds. And an angry public has displayed little sympathy for banks that have turned to the government for rescue after contributing to the financial crisis.

"The whole TARP issue is politically charged," said Ray Gustini, a partner at Nixon Peabody, a firm with more than a dozen clients seeking bailout funds. "It's become a touchy subject. People are reevaluating the pitches they are making."

But the pitches are still coming.

Companies seeking bailout money have hired lobbyists and enlisted the help of trade associations. They have lobbied friends inside the government to help their cause. They have increasingly leaned on lawmakers to go to bat for them.

The article goes on to show a number of examples of this occurring with banks contacting and receiving help from a number of senators and congressmen. There is certainly nothing wrong with this, as it falls under their duty serve their constituency. The article shows that many of these banks needed the bailout funds but were unable to get a reception from Treasury and needed a helping hand from a connected individual like a lawmaker.

What is worrying is that these smaller, local banks are now hiring lobbyists and agents in Washington to help them navigate the new system of federal involvement in the banking system. This begins to create a possibility of some of these local banks to play the same games that some local companies play to gain earmarks. Perhaps, they will seek out favors and money that they do not really need, but a lobbyist and a lawmaker can help get them. How will we know when a firm receives federal money because it really needed it or if it was aided by connections and powerful lobbyists?

This is yet another example of why we need tougher lobbyist disclosure rules for contacts with all federal officials, including lawmakers and their staff.

The 2008 presidential campaign featured blistering attacks, particularly from the eventual victor Sen. Barack Obama, on Washington's chief money-making industry. Lobbyists are now trying to assess where they stand in Washington with a reformer in the White House and an economic downturn that is now actually stretching onto K Street.

Most of the change that will occur on K Street relates to the partisan makeup of firms. With Republicans falling further into the minority, lobby firms will need fewer GOP lobbyists and more Democratic ones. Some changes are already underway with Comcast replacing a Republican as chief lobbyist with a former staffer of prominent Obama supporter Tom Daschle.

Despite the Politico's suggestion that, "The repositioning highlights how little Washington is likely to change, despite all the anti-lobbyist rhetoric tossed around in the campaign," lobby firms certainly fear what kind of access and what new reforms they could face under President Obama's administration. If we had the sense of smell of a lion, we could smell the fear emanating from the monitor when reading this Congressional Quarterly article from today. This article is ridden with quotes from lobbyists not only attempting to sell themselves and their business to a new administration, but also trying to prebut the coming reforms and changes.

I sincerely hope that the promises of reform do not end at the ballot box as so many on K Street seem to be projecting. Further transparency requirements are needed to reel in the influence industry. A good place to start would be to enact the reforms contained in the Transparency in Government Act, available at PublicMarkup.org.

Just like on Elm Street, Freddie killed bills in Congress. The Ted Stevens trial is set to wrap up today amidst cross examination of the Alaska senator. Lawmakers pressure AIG to stop lobbying. A look inside lawmaker insider trading. All of that in today's news:

In 2005, when Republicans still ruled Washington, Freddie Mac deployed a stealth lobbying effort targeting 17 Republican senators in an effort to beat back a reform effort pushed by Sen. Chuck Hagel. The lobbying firm employed, DCI, never filed a lobbying disclosure form as they avoided direct contacts with lawmakers and staff. Instead, the firm, whose lobbying effort Freddie Mac chief Hollis McLoughlin wanted to stay on the down-low, deployed high-profile constituents - businessmen, trade associations, etc... - to push back against the regulation effort to their senators. Freddie Mac was very happy with DCI's efforts as they kept 9 of the 17 targeted senators from signing a letter to then-Majority Leader Bill Frist asking that the bill be brought to the floor for a vote.

Sens. Dianne Feinstein and Mel Martinez responded to the appalling revelation that AIG is using taxpayer money to lobby against already enacted regulations by calling for the partially privatized insurer to stop its lobbying activities. AIG exists solely because of a $120 billion loan from the federal government, making the United States taxpayer the majority shareholder of the insurance giant.

Final fireworks are expected to fly as the fast moving ethics trial of Sen. Ted Stevens comes to a close today. Stevens is expected to face further cross examination today. The cross has already brought out the Incredible Hulk in Sen. Stevens as he showed his temper in court the other day. The defense attorneys are likely hoping that Stevens can better control himself. They don't want to see him when he's mad.

Open Secrets points to ProCon.org and their look into the issue of insider stock trading in Congress. Earlier this year, Rep. Brian Baird proposed the STOCK Act, which would make it illegal for lawmakers, staff, and executive branch officials to trade stocks with the benefit of nonpublic information obtained through the status of their official position. Another bill proposed by Rep. Baird would require "political intelligence" firms to publicly disclose their activities in the same way lobbyists do. In case you were wondering whether there is an actual insider trading positive effect on Congress' stock sheets, check out this graph:

Not everyone has that kind of appetite apparently. Businesses and lobbying firms are still complaining about the disclosure of contributions - both campaign and honorary - required in the new lobbying disclosure forms (LD-203). "This is insanity. It is grossly overreacting on the part of the Hill," says one senior vice president of government relations.

The new lobbying reports are available online (you can search them here) and CQ Politics went through and picked out some of the contributions:

Chevron gave $1.2 million to an education program in Africa and South America that has a congressman on its board.

Wal-Mart Stores gave $200,000 to the Cancer Research and Prevention Foundation for a dinner honoring three lawmakers.

Coca-Cola Co., AstraZeneca Pharmaceuticals and Anheuser-Busch Companies each chipped in six-figure contributions to the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation.

...

• The Leadership Conference on Civil Rights spent $240,000 on its annual dinner, which honored Rep. John Conyers Jr. , D-Mich., at the Hilton Washington and Towers.

• Wal-Mart contributed $200,000 to the cancer foundation’s spring fundraiser March 14 at the National Building Museum. Sen. Tom Harkin , D-Iowa, and Reps. Norm Dicks , D-Wash., and Edward Whitfield , R-Ky, were honored as co-chairmen.

• The American Medical Association gave Harkin and House Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer , D-Md., awards for outstanding government service at a dinner April 1 that cost $155,224.

• Pfizer Inc. gave Research! America $100,000 for a dinner March 18 at the Andrew W. Mellon Auditorium that honored Sen. Edward M. Kennedy , D-Mass., with an award for advocating medical research.

There's way more available at both the Senate Office of Public Records site and the Clerk of the House's Lobbying Disclosure site. So, good hunting.

I'm sure the I'll have some time to go through these soon, so check back here too.