Plenty of Loopholes in New Lobbying Regulations

By Ken Silverstein

Last week the Democrat-controlled House passed an ethics bill that Speaker Nancy Pelosi said would fulfill her party's pledge to clean up Washington. As summarized by the Washington Post, the legislation “would prohibit House members or employees from knowingly accepting gifts or travel from a registered lobbyist, foreign agent or lobbyist's client” and would require advance approval from the House ethics committee for any congressional travel financed by outside groups. This week, Senate Democrats announced that they would seek to push through a similar bill, which would also create a new Office of Public Integrity to independently investigate ethics abuses.

Does this legislation have any teeth? The last time a Democrat-led Congress promised such a sweeping campaign against special interests was in 1974, in the aftermath of the Watergate scandal. The big innovation back then was creation of Political Action Committees, which were initially seen as a boon to unions. However, corporate PACs soon outnumbered labor PACs by a wide margin, and the Federal Election Commission opened a huge loophole in 1978 by allowing “soft money” contributions to underwrite “party-building” activities. In 2004, total political donations from corporations and business officials reached an astounding $1.5 billion, versus a relatively paltry $61 million from unions.

The newly passed House bill has several loopholes. For starters, the House ethics committee is, very simply, a fox in charge of the henhouse, so seeking its advance approval for junkets is a joke. Meanwhile, congressional travel funded by nonprofit foundations—like those run by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce—will still be legal.

Big money will still have plenty of ways to befriend members of Congress and otherwise influence policy. Consider the case of the lobbyist Gerald Carmen, a former U.S. representative to the United Nations in Geneva under the Reagan Administration. In 1999, Carmen signed a deal with the government of Kazakhstan to improve that country's image in the United States. Over the next two years, his Carmen Group was paid more than $1.1 million to turn President Nursultan Nazerbayev, a crooked hack, into “one of the foremost emerging leaders of the New World.”

Carmen's office sent at least four journalists on all-expense-paid trips to Kazakhstan. Upon their return, these reporters filed upbeat, sometimes glowing, reports. The most lavish praise for Nazerbayev came, predictably, from R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr. of the American Spectator. In March of 2000, he published an op-ed in the Washington Times, recalling an interview in which Nazarbayev had told him of “his faith in free markets, democracy and a “‘strategic partnership’” with the United States. “This developing country,” wrote Tyrell, “now has at least four highly competitive political parties, nearly 1,000 media organs mostly privately owned, the freedoms of our Bill of Rights, and commendable tolerance.” (In the previous year, democracy-defender Nazerbayev had won 82 percent of the vote after he barred his primary opponent from running and rigged various other electoral rules.)

Carmen's office circulated Tyrrell's op-ed on Capitol Hill and had it published in Kazakhstan. In late March, Marshall Sanford, a South Carolina Republican, praised Kazakhstan on the House floor and inserted Tyrrell's op-ed into the Congressional record. A few weeks later, Carmen paid for Sanford to travel to Kazakhstan on a “fact-finding mission.”

Carmen also arranged for Republican Congressmen James Sensenbrenner and Jack Metcalf to travel to Kazakhstan, on a trip that was paid for, the pair reported on disclosure forms, by an ostensibly independent group called the “Youth Movement for the Future of Kazakhstan.” In reality, that organization had been created to support Nazarbayev's presidential campaign and was run by one of his close allies. Having found their facts and returned to Washington, both Sensenbrenner and Metcalf gave glowing speeches about Kazakhstan on the House floor.

Under the new House rules, as I understand them, Carmen couldn't have paid for Sanford's travel directly—but he still could have set up the trip for Sensenbrenner and Metcalf (and had Sanford join them). And, of course, he still could have flown hired pens like Tyrrell to Kazakhstan and arranged for friendly congressmen to circulate their dubious reporting. The new rules might slow things down (for a while), but don't expect congressional junketeering to come to a halt any time soon.

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