Stealth Lobbyist Disclosure Act, H.R. 1302

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I received this in my email today from the Honorable Lloyd Doggett.:loveya::loveya::loveya:


March 31, 2006

Dear xxxxx:

Knowing of your shared interest in a clean and open government, I
want to make you aware of my efforts in Washington, D.C. to
ensure that Congress and those who lobby its members are
accountable to the public. Yesterday, in a hearing before the
House Rules Committee, I gave the testimony below on my Stealth
Lobbyist Disclosure Act, H.R. 1302. (You can also click here to
hear and see my speech:
http://www.house.gov/doggett/speeches/lobbyrules033006.wmv .)
I first introduced this bill in 2002 to close a serious loophole that
allows corporate lobbyists to spend millions trying to influence
legislation while hiding behind empty "coalitions" to conceal their
real clients' identities.

In 1995, we successfully passed landmark lobbyist disclosure
legislation that required most lobbying activities to be reported and
made available for public scrutiny. It was hoped that effective
public disclosure of the identity and activities of lobbyists would
increase public confidence in the integrity of government.

However, while current law requires a lobbyist to disclose certain
information about the clients represented, in the case of a group
who calls itself a "coalition," the client is the coalition and not its
individual members. Unfortunately, some companies and wealthy
individuals began taking advantage of this well-intentioned
provision and began organizing themselves into informal
"coalitions" in order to avoid reporting their true identity on
lobbyist disclosure forms. By using this lobbying loophole, they
can lobby on controversial issues and keep their identity secret
from the public, press, shareholders, employees, and lawmakers.

My legislation has been included in Democratic Leader Nancy
Pelosi's Honest Leadership and Open Government Act, H.R. 4682,
as well as in similar legislation to establish more rigorous ethics
and lobbying requirements. My bill has been endorsed by Public
Citizen, U.S. PIRG, and Taxpayers for Common Sense.

As always, I will continue my efforts to earn your support. For
this reason, I appreciate that you have signed up for "Lloyd's List."
However, if you no longer wish to receive periodic updates from
me and want to be removed from "Lloyd's List," please let me
know by reply e-mail or by simply calling me at [phone] or
[phone].

Please let me know your thoughts on lobbying reform and other
federal issues.

Representative Lloyd Doggett
"Stealth Lobbyist Disclosure Act"
March 30, 2006

Majority Leader Boehner has described the disclosure of
relationships as a key ingredient for lobby reform. Rules
Committee Chairman Drier has entitled his legislation on this
subject the Lobby Accountability and Transparency Act. I'm here
today to testify about one narrow issue of disclosure that has not
been the subject of previous testimony in this committee. It is
much-needed reform. Without addressing this narrow issue there
is a gaping hole that will continue in our lobby laws that will
subvert the kind of disclosure, the kind of transparency, and the
public's right to know, that leaders on both sides of the aisle have
quite correctly said is essential to reform.

Subverting the existing lobby disclosure requirements is really
quite simple. All that a lobbyist, who wants to hide who the true
party in interest is, who is paying the high lobbying bill and who
he or she represents, needs to do is to form something called a
"coalition." A coalition can be two or more entities or two or more
people. You select some nice sounding name for it, a vague name
of course, and then you report that the coalition is your sole client,
without identifying who is really paying the bill.

Now it's true that when lobbyists come to see Members of
Congress, they normally want us to know who is paying the bill,
particularly if it is someone from our district. Now with coalitions,
the lobbyist can have it both ways. If he comes to see a
Congressperson and there's someone from our district that has a
big stake in what's under consideration, they can tell us who that
is. However, all the public knows is that the "Coalition for Good
Deeds" is out there supporting this cause and paying for the tab
and they never find out who really is behind the scenes.

This is not an esoteric subject. During the last five years, there
have been over 700 such coalitions legally formed under our
lobbying laws. For over half of those, there is absolutely no
membership information on the lobby disclosure form they are
required to file. If you do a little detective work - search the
internet or comb through newspaper articles - as I have done and
asked the Congressional Research Service to do, you can uncover
about 1 in 6 of these coalitions and find out who their members
are. I think we came up with a little more than a 1/4 additionally
where we got partial memberships.

But for the majority of these coalitions, who is involved is a total
mystery, except to those who are paying the bill and those who are
gaining influence here in the Congress. By using this existing
loophole in our laws, stealth coalitions can lobby on a
controversial issue and protect the identity of the person who really
stands to gain on the lobbying from us as lawmakers, from the
public, and from their shareholders, if they are a publicly-held
corporation.

Let me give you an example. The "Section 877 Coalition," which
eventually drew the attention of an investigative reporter and a
front page story in the New York Times, is a great example of this
egregious loophole and what happens under it. That Coalition
spent about a million dollars seeking to prevent Congress from
tightening tax laws on wealthy individuals who renounce their
United States citizenship in order to dodge taxes. After
considerable outside investigation, we determined that this
"coalition" was really a wealthy family that had officially moved
offshore in order to dodge U.S. taxes.

Another example is the so-called "Council for Energy
Independence," which has never lobbied for energy independence;
they've just got a good sounding name. That Coalition spent about
$2.4 million lobbying this Congress to preserve $9 billion in tax
credits. Even the supporters of these credits have never claimed
that they've generated any energy independence, any new source
of energy or any cleaner energy, but they sure have benefited at tax
paying time. Earlier this month, one commentator in Tax Notes
described this as the "worst tax credit," one of the worst tax
loopholes on the books, but you cannot determine from disclosure
documents who the Council on Energy Independence is because
only the coalition name is listed.

I have introduced H.R. 1302, the Stealth Lobbyist Disclosure Act
again in the 109th Congress and I urge the members of the Rules
Committee and the House at large to incorporate my provision into
any broader lobby reform legislation. It simply amends the
definition of "client," so you can no longer get by with listing the
coalition as the client. It exempts those that contribute less than
$1,000 per six-month reporting period and it exempts 501(c) tax-
exempt organizations. I'm not trying to get the membership lists
of the National Rifle Association, the Christian Coalition, the
Sierra Club or any other such group.

This particular measure, H.R. 1302, is cosponsored by a number of
members on the House Rules Committee, including Ranking
Member Slaughter and Mr. McGovern, and it has been
incorporated by Mr. Meehan in H.R. 2412, the legislation that he
just described. It has also been incorporated by the Democratic
Leader Nancy Pelosi in her Honest Leadership and Open
Government Act. And I believe, as has been indicated, by the
Republican Leadership, that there is a desire for a bipartisan
process here to improve our lobbying laws. This admittedly modest
proposal to close an egregious loophole is one that I ask you to
incorporate and lift the veil of secrecy.

I believe that it will help restore public trust in the Congress. We
must be able to follow the money trail and see where it leads. This
is a proposal that will ensure that the public knows the link
between lobbyists and who is really paying their bill. Thank you.

Sincerely,
Lloyd

---------------
U.S. Representative Lloyd Doggett
201 Cannon House Office Building
Washington, D.C. 20515
[phone], [phone], [phone]
http://www.house.gov/doggett

[Horse with no Name]

1. kick

This is too good to be ignored