Word: lobbyists
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...worse. It was that these decisions became known at a moment of rising public disgust with the bankers who looted the economy - and then continued to loot it, granting themselves bonuses even after the rest of us chose to bail them out. (Read "Daschle's Problems: When Is a Lobbyist Not a Lobbyist...
According to the White House, the important thing is that Tom Daschle is not technically a lobbyist. "If you're not registered to lobby, you can't be a lobbyist," explains White House spokesman Robert Gibbs. And Daschle, the former Senate Democratic leader who is up for the top health post in the Obama Cabinet, never filled out the paperwork to register...
...date, a handful of these waivers have been proposed, including, most controversially, one for William Lynn, a former lobbyist for defense contractor Raytheon who has been tapped to serve in the No. 2 job at the Pentagon. But the controversy over the waivers, which have been criticized by both Democratic and Republican Senators, is just one of the perception problems dogging Obama's new ethics policy. Another issue stems from the people nominated to the Administration who have worked in the lobbying business but are not technically lobbyists - people, in other words, like Daschle or former Senator George Mitchell...
...lobbying disclosure law applies to organizations and individuals who make lobbying contacts," explains Fred Wertheimer, a good-government lobbyist for Democracy 21. "It does not apply to sitting down and strategizing about how to win a battle in Congress." Furthermore, the lobbying law applies only to those who spend more than 20% of their professional time making contacts...
...Ironically, Wertheimer and a group of other public-interest lobbyists made a push in 2007 to bar former members of Congress, like Daschle, from participating in the non-lobbying coordination of lobbying efforts for a preset "cooling-off period" of two years. The chief sponsor of that effort happened to be Senator Obama. "Obama was the one who really became excited about the whole idea," says Craig Holman, a lobbyist for Public Citizen, a group that helped write the bill. "We lost that on the House side, initially. It was largely the committee chairmen who didn't want that...