“Roadblocks to Transparency” was the focus of a Center for Responsive Politics conference on money-in-politics Thursday afternoon as part of Sunshine Week. Despite the distinct focus of each of the three panels — lobbying, traditional campaign finance and “dark money” — the upshot was that plenty of obstacles remain, and in many cases are likely to continue or worsen.

Kicking off the first panel, “Why So Down, K Street?”, CRP Research Director Sarah Bryner discussed our recent analysis of the apparent fall-off in federal lobbying: Disclosed lobbying expenditures have dropped from $3.55 billion in 2010 to $3.21 billion last year, and the number of active registered lobbyists shrank from 14,836 in 2007 to 12,278 last year.

Bryner noted that while the decline is real, “it’s not catastrophic,” and she and her fellow panelists suggested that the downward slope in lobbying activity is probably not as steep as the official numbers would indicate.

“K Street is not as down as the Lobbying Disclosure Act numbers show, but K Street is down,” said Kevin Bogardus, lobbying reporter for The Hill.





Bogardus, who has examined how the “Obama effect” has played out, said many lobbyists told him they used to register officially “out of an abundance of caution,” whether or not they met the threshhold that would require them to do so. Before President Obama took office, there was no real downside to registering.

But the Obama ban on current or recent lobbyists joining the administration or participating in other ways has flipped the equation, said panelist Tom Susman, director of government affairs for the American Bar Association (at whose Washington office the CRP event took place).

“All of these things put a real handicap on being a lobbyist,” Susman said.

Susman said he has heard anecdotal stories of former lobbyists being spotted on Capitol Hill carrying out lobbying activity. But, there is no obvious way to enforce the rules already in existence, he said, much less deal with the rise in new types of lobbying, like grassroots advocacy.

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During the afternoon’s second panel, on transparency issues in campaign finance, CRP Senior Fellow Bob Biersack expressed frustration that something as simple as requiring senators and Senate candidates to file their campaign finance reports electronically — which would make the information they contain accessible to the public more quickly and save taxpayer funds — has not come to pass. “Why didn’t it get added” to the bill taking away public funding for party presidential conventions, Biersack asked. That bill sailed through Congress last week. The Campaign Legal Center’s Meredith McGehee noted that the current landscape is one “where the value of and need for transparency [in campaign finance] is being directly challenged.” There is a “huge ideological battle over things that we though had been agreed upon,” she added. Longtime Democratic Federal Election Commissioner Ellen Weintraub (right), who was in the audience, nodded as McGehee talked about ideological warfare at the FEC and other agencies that have a hand in regulating campaign finance-related matters. Asked by moderator Dave Levinthal whether she thought there was anything that all six of the FEC’s polarized members — or even a majority of four — could vote for, Weintrob thought a moment and replied, “Improving our website.” That drew some laughs, but may have been only a slight exaggeration.

Members of the third panel, “Dark Money Rules: The IRS Effort to Rein in Secret Money,” all voiced the view that current regulation of politically active nonprofits is still a work in progress, but efforts to avoid transparency may already have moved on.

The IRS’ recent proposed rules changes that would affect these groups, which don’t have to disclose donors’ names, have garnered unprecedented attention — more than 143,000 public comments, with criticism coming from both the left and right. But the panelists agreed that the whole issue might be moot.

“There’s a lot of heat and light focused on the proposal, which will likely be a waste of time,” said panelist Robert Kelner, chair of the election and political law practice group at Covington & Burling LLP. “Money is already moving away from tax exempt organizations and into newfangled vehicles that are outside the purview of the IRS.”

Images: CRP Senior Fellow Bob Biersack; FEC Commissioner Ellen Weintraub (CRP photos/Sarah Flocken).



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