Congress was in no rush to reform itself in the early 2000s, even as more and more of its members decamped for the lobbying world and started collecting fat paychecks. But the 2005 arrest of “super lobbyist” Jack Abramoff shamed Congress into action. Abramoff bared the worst excesses of the capital’s influence industry, brazenly feting lawmakers with golf trips to Scotland, sushi dinners and campaign contributions, opening the door for lobbyists to write legislation themselves. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Texas) resigned, and Ohio Rep. Bob Ney went to prison. Democrats seized on the chaos to retake both chambers, promising voters they’d change what they called a “culture of corruption.”
Their attempt to make good on that promise, the Honest Leadership and Open Government Act of 2007, was embraced by both parties as a historic breakthrough. “This legislation will slow the revolving door that shuffles lawmakers and top staff between federal jobs and the private sector,” Harry Reid, newly the Senate majority leader, said of the lobbying reform law. Sen. Susan Collins, the Maine Republican, added, “This bill, then, is a critical part of restoring the people’s trust by reforming ethics and lobbying rules.”
Instead, it made things worse.
Nine years later, the result of the law is very nearly the opposite of what the American public was told it was getting at the time. Not only did the lobbying reform bill fail to slow the revolving door, it created an entire class of professional influencers who operate in the shadows, out of the public eye and unaccountable. Of the 352 people who left Congress alive since the law took effect in January 2008, POLITICO found that almost half (47 percent) have joined the influence industry: 84 as registered lobbyists and 80 others as policy advisers, strategic consultants, trade association chiefs, corporate government relations executives, affiliates of agenda-driven research institutes and leaders of political action committees or pressure groups. Taken as a whole, more former lawmakers are influencing policy and public opinion now than before the reform was enacted: in a six-year period before the law, watchdog group Public Citizen found 43 percent of former lawmakers became lobbyists.
