The idea of banning officials from becoming registered lobbyists for a five year period is one Trump position that is popular beyond just Trump voters. However, this isn’t so much “draining the swamp” has hiding it behind a billboard.
Instead of limiting the role of lobbyists, his efforts would push lobbying further into the shadows and out of public view. Meaningful change — not “fake reform” — requires a different set of solutions, including improvements to the lobbying disclosure system and building up the institutional capacity of Congress.
Similar rules were actually implemented just a decade ago, and the result of limiting registered lobbying was simply more unregistered lobbying. The revolving door keeps spinning, people who leave legislature or executive positions will take jobs, and the major reason for employing such people is often that they have connections back in DC. By banning people working as registered lobbyists, what you get is people having the same conversations as before, but without reporting it.
It’s the reason that the idea of registered lobbyists was created in the first place: legislators and officials will talk with people about issues. The registration system lets voters see who they are talking to and who is footing the bill.
Current law defines lobbying as earning more than $5,000 per quarter, contacting more than one government official, and spending at least 20 percent of one’s time working on behalf of a single client. ...
Borrowing from an American Bar Association report, Trump simply proposes to drop the 20 percent threshold from the definition, and nothing else.
Trump isn’t ending lobbying, he’s ending voters’ visibility into lobbying. This will allow some nice “lobbying down bigly!” claims, but the swamp? It’ll actually be bigger than ever.
To make a genuine difference in lobbying, the better approach is to track more of it. Require more record keeping, change the definition of lobbyist to catch those people doing the exact same work but falling through the cracks by dodging the current, rather narrow, characterization.
And make the reporting of lobbying activity actually mean something.
Right now, the disclosure act is administered partly by the secretary of the Senate and clerk of the House, whose other tasks include publishing the official congressional telephone directory, assigning numbers to bills and transcribing the proceedings of each chamber. It’s no police department.
The Department of Justice has civil and criminal jurisdiction over the act, but only for those who fail to file reports properly and only after receiving several warnings — not over those who choose not to file a report to begin with. There is little that law enforcement can do to go after those skirting the spirit of the law and lobbying from the shadows.
What Trump is proposing is that we stop tracking a good deal of lobbying activity at a time when Congress has less experience, less knowledge, and is more dependent on the people who walk through their door.
There is another way to make this worse: term limits.
