At least 19 senior aides for the House Democratic leadership and committee staffs left lucrative K Street jobs to work for the new House majority this year, and some of them now have direct jurisdiction over the industry or interest group they represented, according to an analysis of lobbying and financial disclosure records.
Two senior aides for the Energy and Commerce panel, staff director Dennis Fitzgibbons and general counsel Gregg Rothschild, said they jumped at the chance to leave K Street and return to Capitol Hill and help steer the Democratic agenda.
{mosads}When Rep. John Dingell (D-Mich.), the elder statesmen and chairman of the panel, approached them, Fitzgibbons and Rothschild readily agreed, citing a desire to rebuild the majority and effect real change.
“It says more about John Dingell than it says about me,” Fitzgibbons said, explaining his move from a $464,270-a-year lobbying job for DaimlerChrysler back to the committee. “It’s intellectually challenging. There’s never a day that I don’t learn something new.”
Rothschild said he left his annual $240,000 salary at Verizon Communications to return to Capitol Hill simply because Dingell asked.
“It pretty much comes down to that,” he said. “This is why I went to law school. I love public service, the chance to work on food- and drug-safety and energy issues. It’s really a historic opportunity.”
The two differ on whether their time in the private sector as paid corporate advocates will affect their work on the committee. Rothschild said he can keep an open mind on telecom issues despite his time at Verizon. Fitzgibbons, who last year worked to block bills aimed at increasing fuel efficiency for cars, said it doesn’t really matter, because DaimlerChrysler is a major economic presence in Dingell’s district.
“I can [divorce myself from the issues], but I’m not really supposed to,” Fitzgibbons said. “There are 400,000 of John Dingell’s constituents who have the same issues.”
Famously protective of his committee’s turf and a champion of the auto industry so crucial to his state, Dingell has sparred with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) over climate-change and energy legislation.
Ultimately, both aides said, the final views of the committee are Dingell’s, not theirs, so their former employment shouldn’t matter.
It is impossible to determine the exact number of staffers who left lobbying for Capitol Hill this year, because no records are kept on the trend. Most returns to the public sector are anecdotal, gleaned from word-of-mouth and office staff announcements.
In recent years, staffers routinely have moved from Capitol Hill to K Street, a practice known as the revolving door. But this is a case of the reverse revolving door, through which lobbyists leave the private sector to rejoin their party’s ranks on Capitol Hill.
Many Democrats decried the widespread revolving-door practice when Republicans were in charge. Last year, as part of their “culture of corruption” campaign against Republicans, Democrats vowed to slow down the spinning turnstile if they regained the majority.
When Republicans were considering a lobbying reform bill last year, Pelosi advocated extending the so-called revolving-door ban, which currently prevents members and aides from lobbying for one year after they leave the Hill.
But early this year, House Democrats dropped a provision from their lobbying reform bill that would have extended the revolving-door ban for members to two years after veteran Democratic members balked at the language. The Senate version includes such an extension, and that difference will be a sticking point when the two bills go to conference.
Former Rep. Marty Meehan (D-Mass.) inserted a reverse-revolving door provision as part of the compromise with House leaders during the House Judiciary Committee markup of the ethics reform bill. In exchange for dropping the two-year revolving-door prohibition, Meehan won a concession: New congressional staffers who had previously served as lobbyists could not make official contacts with their former employers for one year. But with Meehan no longer in Congress to defend this provision, it’s unclear whether it will survive the House-Senate conference.
“You can’t legislate morality,” Rep. Neil Abercrombie (D-Hawaii) explained when asked why he opposed an extension on the one-year revolving-door ban. “There are all kinds of ways to get around these lobbying rules.”
But watchdog organizations are equally adamant that the revolving-door practice has been picking up steam in recent years.
While some members have praised staffers who left lucrative positions for a major pay cut on the Hill, Public Citizen’s Craig Holman takes a more jaundiced view, arguing that a lean paycheck for a short period can lead to millions of dollars down the road.
“Every swing through the revolving door leads to a fatter future paycheck in the private sector,” he said.
Meredith McGehee, a policy director for the Campaign Legal Center, said the migration of staffers to K Street and back again is a disturbing trend that didn’t exist 20 years ago, when she first came to Washington.
“The reasons for coming to Washington to work have changed,” she said. “It’s not just about public service anymore.
Washington has become a place to come to make a lot of money.”
Once people have worked for an organization or company, loyalty and relationships exist that can’t be erased — and that experience alters a staffer’s ability to operate in a neutral way, she said.
The majority staff on the House Financial Services Committee includes two former lobbyists: Michael Beresik, a former lobbyist for H&R Block who serves as a senior policy director for the Committee on Financial Services; and Peter Roberson, a professional staff member of the same panel who represented the Bond Market Association last year.
The Transportation and Infrastructure Committee has hired five former lobbyists as Democratic staff, four of whom represented an industry directly affected by the panel last year: staff director Jim Kolb and senior professional staffers Helena Zyblikewycz, H. Clay Foushee and Jana Denning. Kolb lobbied for the American Concrete Pavement Association and worked for the American Road & Transportation Builders Association; Zyblikewycz lobbied for the AFL-CIO’s Transportation Trade Department; Foushee represented the City of Houston’s Department of Aviation; and Denning lobbied for the Aerospace Industries Association of America.
A handful of newly hired Democratic staffers have lobbied for nonprofit groups such as the Global Health Council, an international membership alliance dedicated to fighting HIV/AIDS and improving world health, and more liberal-leaning organizations such as the Open Society Policy Center, which advocates for international criminal justice reform, human rights and civil liberties. At least one of these former nonprofit lobbyists, Laurel Angell, now serves on a committee that affects the group’s agenda. Angell, who lobbied for Defenders of Wildlife, now serves as a policy adviser for the Committee on Natural Resources.
| OFFICE OF THE SPEAKER Name: Joe Onek Title: Counsel Clients for 2006 included: Open Society Policy Center (lobbying) Constitution Project (consulting) Constitution Project (consulting) Georgetown University (consulting) Shepherd University (honorarium) 2006 Compensation: $174,798 OFFICE OF THE MAJORITY WHIP Name: Mike Hacker Title: Senior Advisor/ Coalitions Dir. Employer: Quinn, Gillespie & Associates Clients for 2006 included: AT&T National Air Traffic Controllers Association National Association of Home Builders National Association of Realtors NBC Universal Price Waterhouse Cooper, LLP Qualcomm Inc.. Safeway Stand Up for Steel Tysons Foods Inc. U. S. Telecommunication Association Verizon Alliance for Quality Nursing Home Care Bank of America Barclays Global Investors Bristol Myers Squibb Company British Columbia Lumber Trade Council EADS North America Microsoft Corporation 2006 Compensation: *Financial disclosure form not found / not required. COMMITTEE ON APPROPIRATIONS COMMITTEE ON ENERGY & COMMERCE Name: Gregg Rothschild COMMITTEE ON FINANCIAL SERVICES Name: Peter Roberson COMMITTEE ON HOMELAND SECURITY Name: Angela Rye COMMITTEE ON NATURAL RESOURCES COMMITTEE ON OVERSIGT AND GOVERNMENT COMMITTEE ON RULES COMMITTEE ON SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY COMMITTEE ON SMALL BUSINESSES COMMITTEE ON TRANSPORATION AND INFRASTRUCTURE Name: H Clay Foushee Name: Fred Illston |