TennesseeTicket.com

I’m no full-time reporter, so I hurried to the hotel as soon as I could break away from other duties. TLA President Mark Greene, who kindly filled me in on what had transpired, met me at the door. The assembled professionals had heard from their chief regulator (Drew Rawlins, Executive Director of Tennessee’s Registry of Election Finance). According to Greene, Rawlins’ presentation was largely about upcoming changes to lobbyist registration rules: photo IDs, online registration, and “other technical stuff.” I then grabbed a chair to hear the next speaker’s presentation.

Peggy Kerns is Director of the Center for Ethics in Government, which is a body of the National Conference of State Legislatures. She is a former state legislator herself (1989-97, in Colorado), so she presumably knows a thing or two about lobbyists. She easily took on a sympathetic mien as she attempted to lead Tennessee’s lobbyists toward an understanding of their more scrutinized future. “The trend is definitely toward more regulation,” she advised. She bemoaned the perception of “dirty business” that the media transmit. She recalled reading one midwestern paper’s editorial page where lobbyists were described as emitting “a stench [as] from a hog wallow.” (“That could have been a quote from Tennessee,” she quipped, though she meant to geographically position the reference, not to alienate her audience.) At the same time, she echoed an observation made by many: more laws are not the key to ethics reform. The activities (in short, bribery) that produced indictments in “Operation Tennessee Waltz” were already prohibited by law. What, then, is the problem? Why is there a trend toward more regulation? I gathered a few answers to this question.

1. Kerns repeatedly referred to the public perception that money influences legislative outcomes. Several lobbyists took issue with the concept, with one stating that “if group X spends $25,000 to promote an issue and group Y spends $125,000 to oppose it,” there is no guarantee that group Y will prevail. That got a chorus of agreement. After all, the lobbyists’ contention is that they assist legislators with vital information on the issues to which they are to apply an up-or-down vote, and the amount of money spent to research and present that information is irrelevant. Interesting thought, but let no one forget that the “lobbyists are presenting this information and influencing policy not from a general public interest perspective, but only based on the narrow interests of the organizations they represent,” according to newsbatch.com. Someone with a LexisNexis account could see if reliable studies have been done to determine whether the amount spent positively influences the outcome. I don’t have a LexisNexis account, but my hunch is that the extra $100K in the example above just might help a bit. An increase in the breadth and scope of required disclosures just may help the average citizen “connect the dots” between spending and votes.

2. States are flailing. I say this because the amount of variation from state to state in which lobbyist activities are regulated is staggering. Well, except for Pennsylvania. Their Supreme Court recently struck down all lobbyist regulation laws as unconstitutional (hee hee, it’s good to see that my Operation Justice Enrichment is going as planned – after I get done here, I’m heading to the Keystone State to be a lobbyist). Tennessee, if you didn’t know, currently has two commissions studying reforms – one named by Governor Bredesen (Citizens Advisory Group on Ethics) and one put together jointly by the 104th General Assembly (Rep. Kim McMillan and Sen. Mike Williams, co-chairs). Part of the challenge facing both groups is in merely assembling and analyzing the laws that are on the books in other states, and making a determination on which have shown results. According to Kerns, Tennessee is “on the restrictive end” when it comes to gifts, meals, and beverages that can be provided to legislators by lobbyists; but as she was informed at the pre-convention party on Monday night, there are plenty of loopholes around even those restrictions. And, unlike in other states, Tennessee’s lobbyists are only required to disclose campaign contributions, not their compensation – and neither are lobbyists’ clients (aka “principals”) required to disclose spending. Some states regulate gifts to the extreme (Wisconsin has a “not even a cup of coffee” law), while others are focusing more and more on public relations spending (Tennessee does not). Which ones work? For that matter, do any laws effectively increase ethics?

3. The mainstream media, for the most part, haven’t been doing their jobs. A paltry few among the public are suddenly aware that lobbyists are integral to some very serious problems in how our government really works, and so an outcry is raised for more regulation. Some might say that, in lieu of more (and more confusing) laws, the public just needs a better understanding of how the process works, who’s executing what parts of it, and how much their daily lives are being affected by it – and that, armed with such knowledge, the voters can make more informed decisions on Election Day. There’s a dirty little secret buried in this idea, though: the public might not care enough. Such was the murmur when Kerns raised the point, anyway. I’m all about raising public awareness of, and interest in, how government works – and so reporting on lobbying is definitely on my agenda, since I don’t see much evidence of “citizen lobbyists” going to schmooze our elected representatives on behalf of the general public. Every lobbyist has at least one special interest to which she is beholden and responsible. (The idealist in me says that the legislators themselves should negate the need for “general public lobbyists,” but I don’t hold out much hope that they actually have time, or incentive, to act as such.)

The questions aren’t all answered, though. Why do more than half the states require lobbyist and/or principal spending disclosures? Is it better for citizens to know how much is spent per bill, a total by industry, or specific fees that are awarded? Why should lobbyists have to disclose, but the notorious “527” groups get to keep their numbers secret? These and more will furrow many brows during the coming months, and the Civic Forum is one distillation of information related to them that will, hopefully, quench the public’s thirst for knowledge.