Last week, the Delaware legislature sent an interesting bill to Governor Jack Merkell: SB 185, a short, targeted piece of legislation that, if signed into law, will bring Delaware’s lobbying disclosure into the 21st century.

With the passage of SB 185, online disclosure will be the default for all lobbying reports and lobbyist registration. (Paper filing will only be acceptable in the (hopefully) rare event that the electronic filing system is offline.) Further, SB 185 requires that lobbyists “disclose the bill, resolution, or regulation on which they are lobbying...within five business days of contact with a relevant public official” -- which, while not real time reporting, is pretty darn close and puts SB 185 on par with the disclosure deadlines proposed in a federal bill Sunlight supports: the Lobbying Disclosure Enhancement Act, introduced last June.

Of course, these electronic requirements would mean nothing if they remained out of the public’s reach. That’s why one of SB 185’s most important proposals is to charge the Public Integrity Commission -- the agency that administers many of Delaware's ethics and disclosure laws and receives these filings -- with making these reports available online “in a manner in which they can be easily reviewed by bill, resolution, regulation, lobbyist or employer, and that regular updates be distributed to members of the General Assembly.”

These are solid -- but not sweeping -- reforms. Although it’s critical that Delaware -- and all state governments -- require electronic filing and public-facing databases of influence data (updated in real time), when it comes to the transparency of lobbying records and practices, Delaware still has a ways to go. Earlier this year, the state received an “F” in Lobbying Disclosure from the State Integrity Investigation, which issued report cards to all 50 states, grading them based on a quantitative analysis of anti-corruption and pro-accountability laws and measures. Delaware’s “F” earned it the rank of fourth worst in the nation on lobbying disclosure and dragged down its overall score to a C-. Although lawmakers cited the bill (and Governor Markell endorsed it) as part of their effort to improve the state’s score, SB 185 really only improves on the part of lobbying disclosure that Delaware was already doing well: general public access to disclosed information. Prior to SB 185, Delaware was publishing its lobbying reports online for free, but it was not making these documents available in a searchable database (nor was it releasing this info in as timely a manner as possible). SB 185 will change that.

What the bill won’t vastly change is what information lobbyists need to disclose. SB 185 could be strengthened by requiring that the names of the specific officials or lawmakers lobbied are disclosed or if it created provisions for enforcement mechanisms, such as independent audits of disclosure records.¹ But just because 185 could be better doesn't mean that it isn’t worth the Governor’s signature: Policy, like technology, is iterative, and what SB 185 does to demonstrate Delaware’s willingness to use technology to support greater public monitoring can’t be underrated. Plus, SB 185 does require some new information be released: If made law, lobbyists will newly have to identify the specific bill, resolution or regulation they’re working on, a valuable addition to the lobbying information currently available to Delawareans.

SB 185 is an excellent example of a small but important step that all state legislatures should make to solidify public access to influence data, and it provides a great platform for Delaware to build on in its efforts to improve the quality and depth of its transparency laws. Let’s hope they do.

Full bill text available here.

¹ More info on Sunlight’s Lobbying Reform platform.

Lobbying may be lagging behind other industries in its use of Twitter, as lobbyists favor more confidential communications, but that is not the case for at least one influential, veteran K Street insider.

Gregg Hartley, the vice chairman and chief operating officer at Cassidy & Associates and a longtime GOP political fundraiser, tweeted directly at legislators, boasted of the fundraisers he threw for them, and even revealed when he was lobbying them on a particular issue—at least when he chose to share that information.

Hartley closed his Twitter account around Sept. 1, according to the lobby shop’s spokesman, but his tweets from early April until his most recent one in late July were saved in an RSS Reader*. During that time, many of the lawmakers he mentioned meeting with on Twitter received donations from him. In total, between March and August, Hartley contributed to 19 Republican campaigns or committees, totaling $29,500, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

Almost all of his tweets prior to April, which dated back to at least 2009, are no longer available because he deleted his account.

Hartley, who was the chief of staff to Senator Roy Blunt, R-Mo., when the latter, as the House Majority Whip, was viewed as the GOP’s K Street point man, lobbies for over two dozen companies and associations. He often tweeted when pressing lawmakers to favor a range of issues—from the proposed merger between AT&T and T-Mobile, to the legalization of online poker, to improving U.S.-Bangladesh relations.

“If you want to learn how Washington works, Gregg Hartley would be an expert,” said Missouri Democratic political consultant Richard Martin, who has known of Hartley for years, as both have been working on opposite sides of the aisle in Missouri. Hartley is a prolific GOP fundraiser, often hosting events for candidates in Washington. He is also unabashed about who he is targeting. In April, he sent out a blast email to PACs and insiders in Washington with a list of over a dozen lawmakers who he wanted to contribute to in June and “later this year,” according to an email obtained by PoliticalPartyTime.org.

Tweeting at a Tea Party freshman

From his Twitter account, Hartley often tweeted at members of Congress. Between April and June, Hartley mentioned one such congressman—Tea Party favorite Billy Long, R-Mo., seven times on Twitter.

“Billy Long would be a tough nut to crack. I’m sure he’s a pretty anti-Washington guy. It’s gonna take a few years before he learns the ways of Washington and becomes apart of that city. He may never, he may decide not to. But my guess is, he may follow in Roy Blunt’s footsteps and who better to learn from than Gregg Hartley on how to do that,” Martin said.

A spokesman for Cassidy & Associates, Tom Anderson, did not respond to a request for an interview with Hartley, and multiple direct calls to Hartley were not returned. Long’s office did not respond to a phone message or email requesting comment for this article.

During the threat of a government shutdown in April, Hartley directly lobbied Long on Twitter, recommending that he focus on long-term budget cuts.

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Hartley followed those tweets up with cash. First he tweeted about an event that appeared to be a fundraiser:

About a month later, Long’s campaign deposited a $1,000 check from Hartley, according to CRP. Then, on June 3, after Hartley took a break from Twitter for a few weeks, the lobbyist tweeted that Long noticed his absence. That same day, he tweeted about eating dinner with the congressman. On June 15, he complimented Long’s auctioneering skills; the congressman closed his auction business before joining Congress but was raising money for charity that evening.

Yet his access to lawmakers reaches far beyond the freshman class.

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That lunch with Cantor was soon followed by a $2,500 donation to Cantor’s leadership PAC, which reported receiving it days after the lunch.

That was also Hartley’s penultimate tweet. Anderson said that Hartley closed it to focus on his work.

Betting on Online Poker

In late June, just before a Texas congressman introduced legislation to legalize online poker, Hartley, one of the dozens of lobbyists pushing to legalize online poker or gambling on the Hill, started frequently tweeting about the subject. First he was in Las Vegas with his client MGM Resorts International, then he was in the “war room,” then he applauded the bill soon after it was introduced on June 24:

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Over the following weeks, he tweeted about meetings on Capitol Hill with other members of Congress. By early August, the bill had a total of 25 co-sponsors. A few days later, he had access to Barton:

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Over a week later, he tweeted about a July 8 meeting with Rep. Joe Heck, R-Nev., a key player in the debate, and the third biggest recipient of donations from the casino and gaming industry for the 2012 election cycle, according to CRP.

Heck hadn’t sponsored the bill yet. But he did on July 19.

Heck’s press secretary Darren Littell confirmed that a meeting took place in the week of July 4, but said that no one meeting was the “nail in the coffin” to gain Heck’s support and, if a sponsorship followed a meeting with Hartley, it was “purely coincidental.”

“I think there were some folks that were supportive of it and some that had reservations about it. We listened to them, we got their input and feedback. ...It’s kind of like with any issues, it’s never simple, especially with something as complicated as online gaming,” Littell said.

Hartley appeared to be courting other House freshman to support the bill too.

Hartley’s disclosure of meetings with congressmen is a rarity.

“As far as the lobbying community, it’s an extremely small percentage of people that are using that for that purpose and I think the reason why is a) they don’t want to talk about what they’re doing because they’re not proud of it or because they don’t want to release their clients’ business like any good practitioners,” said John Feehery, the president of communications for Quinn Gillespie.

Peter Dugas, a lobbyist at Clark Hill, said such revealing tweets might be misleading. If a lobbyist with multiple clients tweets about a meeting with a member of Congress, the wrong client may think his or her issue was being discussed. He also noted that, if accurate, opposing lobbyists can use the information to their advantage.

Misleading or not, Hartley’s twitter feed provided a revealing, 140-character view into the workings of one lobbyist, until his tweeting stopped.

 

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*The dates of Hartley's tweets correspond to the date and time they were stored in Google Reader, which might not be exactly the same as when they were tweeted. In particular, a slew of tweets were stored on April 11 (including the first two mentioned in this article) because the RSS Reader started capturing tweets that day.

I know this is a couple days old, but it hasn't been mentioned here yet. The District of Columbia's real-time online data disclosure project was one of six winners of the Innovations in American Government awards given out by the Harvard Kennedy School's Ash Institute for Democratic Governance and Innovation. The project was spearheaded by then-D.C. Chief Technology Officer (CTO) and current federal Chief Information Officer (CIO) Vivek Kundra. You can see the two sites singled out for praise below:

• Digital Public Square

• D.C. Data Catalog

According to the Ash Institute, "this is the first initiative in the country that makes virtually all current district government operational data available to the public in its raw form rather than in static, edited reports." Real-time data disclosure is becoming far more common in cities across the nation with San Francisco introducing DataSF.org and the New York City legislature examining open data legislation. (Vancouver, Canada has also endorsed the release of city data in raw form.)

Real-time, raw data disclosure is the cutting edge in transparency and government innovation. While the federal government has released Data.gov, a raw data site similar to D.C.'s, there are countless sets of public data compiled by the federal government that are in one or more of the following three categories: 1) Not online; 2) Not in a structured format; 3) Not compiled and disclosed in real-time. As many public data sets as possible should meet these three criteria. For some data it is unreasonable to ask for real-time disclosure. These sets should then, at least, meet the first two.

Side note: It's great to see my city defy our Rodney Dangerfield-like existence and finally get some respect.

Rob Miller, a Marine and congressional candidate in South Carolina's 2nd district, probably didn't expect to become an overnight star while he was watching the President give a speech to a joint session of Congress on health care reform. Then came Rep. Joe Wilson's rebel yell, "You lie!" Miller is Wilson's Democratic opponent in 2010 and lost a relatively close election to Wilson in 2008 (54%-46%). The money started pouring in almost immediately. Within a few hours, Miller raised over $100,000. Two days after Wilson's outburst, Miller has raked in over $750,000 (while writing he has crept to almost $800,000), likely making him one of the better funded Democrats running for a House seat in 2010.

Nearly all of this money is being raised through the site ActBlue, a fundraising portal set up to allow individuals to raise money for Democratic candidates themselves. One of the best features of the site is its transparency. The site updates as new contributions come in, showing the total on the candidate's page -- or on a fundraising group's page (like this group raising money for Miller). All of this has been written before, but I wanted to highlight one feature of this transparency: real time disclosure.

Current campaign finance laws require only quarterly disclosures of campaign contributions. The unforseen money bomb for Rob Miller exposes a problem with the limited system of quarterly disclosures for candidates trying to increase enthusiasm for and attract small donor money to their campaigns. The transparent nature of ActBlue allows for the snowballing effect we've seen over the past few days. It's a lot more rewarding for small donors to contribute when they can see the group results of their actions. Many campaigns have used transparent fundraising mechanisms at times, the Howard Dean bat and the Ron Paul money bomb are two obvious and innovative examples. By the 2008 campaign this was a pretty standard tactic of presidential candidates; both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton used this gimic many times in the Democratic primary.

But why shouldn't this just be the norm? Campaign contributions are viewed by the law as a form of speech. If we see real time disclosure of campaign funding help increase individual desire to contribute, isn't this a boon for speech and democratic participation? Donating to a campaign is a step above voting, in terms of participation, and can lead to further political actions like volunteering or even getting involved in local politics. Campaigns could simply forward their contributions on to the Federal Election Commission (FEC) in a timely, maybe not immediate, manner and the FEC could report the contributions in real time. This could increase transparency, campaign enthusiasm and small donor power across the board.

Right now, in the Miller/Wilson example we are seeing how the transparency of real time contributions has helped one candidate over another. Since Wilson's comment, the media has focused on his opponents rapid fundraising as they can see the numbers pour in over ActBlue. It took two days for Wilson to release a number on the amount he had raised, $200,000, in the wake of his outburst. A system where real time contributions could be viewed side-by-side may have helped increase contributions to Wilson. Who doesn't like a little healthy competition?

This is certainly a different argument for disclosure than is usually made, which is that money plays an influencing role in politics and disclosure of contributions is required to allow the public and an enforcement body to hold candidates accountable. This is an important argument and is certainly another reason for real time disclosure of contributions, but as I've stated above disclosure can also play a role in invigorating political activity. Unfortunately, it is the influence argument as the backbone of campaign disclosure that begins to complicate real time disclosure.

One requirement in campaign finance disclosure is the disclosure of names and employment, a key to gleaning the influence of interests and powerful people have with our elected representatives. In Buckley v. Valeo the Supreme Court upheld the disclosure of campaign contributions due to the need to avert possible problems of corruption and influence in elections and determined a minimum threshold for disclosure. It was determined by the court that contributions of a certain value were more likely to cause undue influence or potential corruption than smaller donations. These small donors would be spared disclosure to protect their anonymity as the size of their donation could not reasonably be seen to influence a candidate. Thus we have a system where small donations -- those who contributed less than $250 -- do not need to be disclosed to the FEC with the attendent name, employment and other categories for each individual donor.

How would this work out in a system of real time disclosure? Should we do away with minimum disclosure threshold? There were numerous problems with small donors during the 2008 elections, fraudulent donations and more, that could lead to a reasonable need for small donor disclosure. But would this work counter to the benefits of real time disclosure (increased participation, competition and speech) by scaring off individual donors afraid of identifying themselves? I'm not sure what the answer is to that question. If you care let me know what you think about it in the comments.

From the classic perspective of influence in politics, real time disclosure is imperative to shine the light on contributions as the pour into Congress during bill markups, committee hearings and votes. Similarly, real time disclosure would aid the need for increased competition and speech in our politics. Thanks to Rob Miller and Joe Wilson and ActBlue for showing us that.

There's a reason why lobbying has boomed so much over the last decade. The potential return on investment is just too lucrative to pass up. Some things are easy to quantify, a contract, an earmark, or a direct payment for services. But other things, like tax breaks, can take a little bit more time to figure out (at least for now). For example, a University of Kansas study, to be released today, will show that firms pushing for a "tax holiday" in 2004 received a 22,000% return on their lobbying investment. I'll write that number again: 22,000%. From the AP:

The report details efforts by hundreds of companies in 2003 and 2004 to push through a one-time tax "holiday" that lowered for a year the tax rate they paid on profits earned abroad. All told, U.S. companies saved about $100 billion in taxes, with pharmaceutical behemoths Pfizer and Merck & Co., technology giants IBM and Hewlett Packard, and health products maker Johnson & Johnson among the top beneficiaries.

The study zeros in on 93 firms that spent as much as $282.7 million lobbying on the issue during that period, and ultimately saved a total of $62.5 billion through the tax change. Researchers used publicly available lobbying disclosures filed with Congress and financial statements submitted to the Securities and Exchange Commission to compare the amount each company saved with its lobbying expenditures.

"It calls into question what Congress did in 2004," said Stephen Mazza, who conducted the study with Raquel Alexander and Susan Scholz. "It clearly is a very lucrative field for lobbyists. Congress wanted to create jobs, and what they probably did was create jobs for the lobbyists."

This is a pretty outrageous, although entirely predictable, result, pointing to a serious problem in governance. If investment in lobbying is the number one determinant in firm growth, how can we trust policy makers to do what is best for anyone other than those with money to spare on lobbyists? As we have been explaining all week, one way to expose influence and mitigate its excesses is to require the real time disclosure of lobbying contacts, providing more detail as to whom lobbyists meet with and what they discuss.

Another way more transparency could help us all in this area--and particularly acamedia--is the disclosure of key data in a structured format. The above mentioned study used lobbying disclosure data and SEC data to show how the lobbying of the examined firms expanded their worth. We already know that the SEC now requires top firms to submit their SEC disclosures in XBRL. If lobbying disclosures, particularly if they became real time, could be posted in a similar format, this kind of study could be created on a web site, providing near real time results of lobbying return on investment.

Just to drill the point home: 22,000% return on lobbying investment. Yet another case that lobbying needs to be made more transparent.