Political Booknotes
Political Booknotes The Hollow Core: Private Interests in National Policy Making. John P. Heinz, Edward O. Laumann, Robert L. Nelson, and Robert H. Salisbury. Harvard University Press, $39.95 By...
...And his sentiment—if not his specific proposal—contains a lot to be commended...
...While exaggerated, such assaults do have a ring of truth...
...To help the lobbyists, the legislation would ease the paperwork burden and create a single federal office to enforce the new law...
...It doesn't work for anybody else...
...The registration would also disclose any governmental job the lobbyist had held in the previous two years...
...As this story illustrates, lobbying knows no bounds in the nation's capital...
...Interest groups are hiring every lobbyist they can find to protect themselves against the Clinton onslaught...
...But one enterprising lobbyist was able to break their isolation...
...Their purpose was to negotiate in complete secrecy the sensitive details of what would later become the 1990 deficit reduction act...
...From a sample of 316 lobbying organizations, the authors detail precisely how often the groups prepare testimony and draft legislation and regulations...
...In effect, the book concludes that lobbyists these days are much different than their caricature...
...Almost no one believes that lobbyists shouldn't be regulated better, including the lobbyists themselves...
...It would have been useful to know, for example, that the author of the tax bill that passed the House in 1989 was not only Democratic Rep...
...Now comes another book that tries to pull back the veil on lobbying...
...But a reader cannot help concluding that the line between those inside and those outside of government isn't clearly drawn...
...One chart helps tell the tale...
...Sam Gibbons of Florida, the second ranking Democrat on Ways and Means, on their behalf...
...Even the likes of Thomas Hale (Tommy) Boggs Jr., one of Washington's premier corporate lobbyists, has testified on Capitol Hill that lobbying regulations are in desperate need of updating and has praised the modest proposal of Senators Levin and Cohen as a good start...
...Indeed, Clinton's anti-lobbyist rhetoric has led to a boom in Washington lobbying...
...People have a right to know who is trying to influence what in the policy-making process and how much they are being paid...
...To help the public, the legislation would require anyone who is paid to lobby the government—either directly or indirectly—to register...
...But the laws don't work...
...It also operates almost completely without regulation...
...They are economists, advertising executives, telemarketing specialists, and even accountants...
...The only reason many lobbyists register at all is to prove to potential clients that they are "legitimate...
...It also shows lobbyists doing more typical things, such as contacting congressional committees and executive branch agencies...
...Many Americans should want to keep a better count of what lobbyists do as well, and The Hollow Core is in an odd way a lengthy argument for changing the nation's laws to help make that possible...
...In recent years, lobbying registrations have ranged from silly—one lobbying firm disclosed quarterly payments of $1.31 to one of its employees—to outrageous—in 1989, 10 big lobbying firms with authoritatively estimated revenues of more than $60 million disclosed less than $2 million of lobbying receipts...
...Just in case he was caught, Graefe always kept his golf clubs with him...
...Lobbyists know they can flout the current system of disclosure because enforcement of the diffuse lobbying laws is all but nonexistent...
...Even if they don't always win, lobbyists are obviously a permanent and influential force that has to be reckoned with in Washington...
...influence of lobbyists...
...He routinely bashes lobbyists as a way of promoting his hard-hitting economic package...
...No one can be sure what effect such extra information about lobbying might have on policy making...
...He is pressing this year to enact the first truly thorough lobbying disclosure law so that others can learn quickly and with relative ease how lobbying works...
...Congress carries some panache and is tantamount to hanging out a shingle to do business in Washington...
...But even with this allure, only a fraction of lobbyists ever register...
...And if the law is finally fixed, more than the few intellectuals who wrote The Hollow Core will be able to keep an accurate count of Washington's burgeoning influence industry...
...Disdain for lobbyists and their special power in Washington is key to President Clinton's critique of government...
...American University's James Thurber estimates that at least 80,000 people are directly involved in lobbying in Washington...
...It shouldn't take that long...
...Of course, it is also true that some of Clinton's closest advisers have been lobbyists—including three members of his own cabinet...
...A tougher lobbying law might also have dis58 The Washington Monthly/April 1993 closed that a group of former congressional staffers-turned-professional-lobbyists have for years bankrolled an annual skiing trip to Vail, Colorado, to woo their successors on Capitol Hill...
...Consumer advocate Ralph Nader and his minions can—and do—camouflage their sources of financing with the same impunity as any of the most insidious business or labor lobbying groups...
...It isn't the kind of book that anyone other than a graduate student in political science would ever want to cuddle up with in front of a fireplace...
...Frederick Graefe, a partner in the law firm of Baker & Hostetler, was a former marine who still had friends in the military...
...Harvard University Press, $39.95 By Jeffrey H. Birnbaum Just over two years ago, a large group of top government officials sequestered themselves in a converted bar at the Officers Club of Andrews Air Force Base...
...An effective lobbying law might have revealed, for example, that lobbyists representing such corporate giants as IBM and Hewlett-Packard, including former Carter administration adviser Stuart Eizenstat, sat together with senior congressional aides and essentially wrote the version of the tax credit for research-and-development expenditures that passed the House of Representatives in 1989...
...In addition, nothing that Clinton or anyone else will do is likely to diminish the...
...One of them was an officer at Andrews, who, at Graefe's request, told the guards at the main gate to allow Graefe onto the base whenever he wanted—ostensibly to play golf...
...And that is the only way it can be: The right to petition government for redress of grievances is guaranteed by the First Amendment to the Constitution...
...The authors see lobbyists more as circling around policy choices rather than being central to their development...
...The circle that lobbyists form around this hollow core is extremely adaptive and useful to the people who make and implement the nation's laws...
...But thanks to official inattention, the four separate lobbying registration laws on the books are toothless and ineffective...
...What the lobbyist did instead was wait in the Officers Club parking lot for his friends on lawmakers' staffs to come out and brief him on the talks...
...But, perhaps inadvertently, the book also helps shed some light on the important and, until recently, almost completely furtive business of influence peddling...
...As you can see," the authors admit, "we are inclined to want to count things...
...Finding out the many things about lobbyists that now go undisclosed would enormously enhance our understanding of government...
...Current lobbying laws are supposed to compel lobbyists to report these sorts of activities...
...This seemingly simple conclusion took the four top-flight academics who authored this book many years to document and convey...
...Lobbyists like Graefe ply their trade free of serious scrutiny by either government or the public at large...
...They aren't fat, cigar-smoking men who shove $100 bills into the pockets of compliant legislators...
...And President Clinton, for one, wants to foreshorten that process...
...The Levin-Cohen proposal in general has been embraced not just by lobbying foes but also by lobbyists, giving it a strong chance of passing this year...
...Hence the title...
...And obviously," Marlowe adds, "the current law is woefully inadequate in accomplishing that objective...
...In addition, many thousands of others around the nation routinely participate in the grassroots kind of lobbying that involves telephone calls and letter-writing to government officials...
...The Hollow Core: Private Interests in National Policy Making, is a serious, academic examination of how lobbyists operate in Washington...
...But that leaves lots of room for reform...
...The real problem," Clinton has said, "is the government only works for the very wealthy and the special interests...
...Ed Jenkins of Georgia—as was widely reported at the time—but that he was assisted almost daily by his former tax aide and then real-estate lobbyist, James Rock...
...Instead, they serve to conceal more about lobbying than they reveal, and at the same time bury lobbyists under a blizzard of paperwork...
...But surely there would be some...
...April 1993/The Washington Monthly 59 After years of talk and no action about these shortcomings, 1993 might finally be the time when a new lobbying law is written...
...There are also plenty of things to learn beyond mere dollars and cents...
...Jeffrey H. Birnbaum covers the White House for The Wall Street Journal and is the author of The Lobbyists: How Influence Peddlers Get Their Way in Washington...
...With revenues in the billions of dollars and participants numbering in the hundreds of thousands, lobbying is a big business getting bigger all the time...
...This is true for all sorts of lobbyists, not just the corporate kind who are most often fingered as the "bad guys...
...When they register, lobbyists would have to disclose the names of their clients, the specific issues they lobbied, the overall amount they spent on lobbying, and the federal agencies and congressional committees they contacted...
...No matter what the details, few would disagree with Howard Marlowe, a former president of the American League of Lobbyists, the industry's major professional organization: "Lobbying ought to be regulated—it ought to be regulated more effectively—if for no other reason than to help to increase public confidence in and understanding of our representative form of government...
...Buried in over 400 pages of thick analysis, The Hollow Core contains data compiled over several years that quantifies how pervasive and sophisticated modern-day lobbying has become...
...For instance, the forces that wanted to cut the tax on capital gains a few years ago, led by lobbyists Chads Walker and Mark Bloomfield, probably would have been damaged had it been known than that they spent $50 to arrange each of 708 telephone calls from big campaign contributors to key members of the House Ways and Means Committee...
...For a professional lobbyist, being able to say that he or she is registered with the U.S...
...The authors downplay the notion that lobbyists are decisive in policy battles...
...Failure to make complete disclosure would leave them subject to stiff civil penalties...
...Indeed, professional lobbying is one of the last rogue industries in America...
...There is a remarkable consensus among people both inside and outside of government that lobbyists should be required to disclose precisely what they are lobbying for, the source and amount of their lobbying fees, and the names of the government officials they contact, either directly or indirectly...
...As a result, nearly 10,000 of the 13,500 individuals and organizations who list themselves as lobbyists in a book called Washington Representatives don't even bother to register under the Federal Lobbying Registration Act...
...And its main message isn't very sexy: Lobbyists struggle to get their way in a highly uncertain and ever-changing policy environment...
...And efforts by mutual life insurance companies to block a tax increase would have been set back were it public earlier that one of their lobbyists, Clifford Gibbons, had lobbied his own father, Rep...
...But an overhaul of lobbying regulation is a big part of the administration's drive to make government more accessible to the American people, and a proposal developed in recent years by Senators Carl Levin of Michigan and William Cohen of Maine is gaining prominence as part of that effort...
...Regulations such as these wouldn't reduce or limit lobbying...
...And of those who did in 1989, 62 percent of their filings were late and 90 percent were incomplete, according to a survey by the nonpartisan General Accounting Office...
Vol. 25 • April 1993 • No. 4
