Different Realms of Disclosure
Organizations required to register and report under New York’s new lobbying disclosure laws have begun to seek exemptions to protect their donors from anticipated reprisal or harassment. This concern...
View ArticlePolitical Contributions, Conflicts of Interest, and the Role of Ethical...
In the fight over contribution limits, litigants argue over how much money, given by whom and in which ways, can push normal politics into corruption or the certainty of its appearance. McCutcheon...
View ArticleThe Opacity of “Transparency”
Arguments about transparency have become hard to follow. Government can demand an accounting of money spent to influence politics or public policy; it can certainly compel disclosure of the paid,...
View ArticleAssessing Lobbying Reform in the Obama Administration
Assessing Lobbying Reform in the Obama Administration Presentation to the American University Conference on Lobbying Reform in the U.S. and the E.U. March 17, 2014 I appreciate very much your...
View ArticleFiascos and Matters of Degree
The most recent issue of Election Law Journal offers interesting writing on lobbying. One of the articles, Money, Priorities and Stalemate: How Lobbying Affects Public Policy, is a study by Professor...
View ArticleClarifying the Problems in the Political Reform Debate: Lee Drutman on Lobbying
This is a good time for carefully researched and balanced discussions of political reform and Lee Drutman has now stepped in and done his part with an excellent book about lobbying, The Business of...
View ArticleLobbyists and Campaign Finance: The “Bundling” Question
A strength of any reform discussion is careful attention to the role of campaign finance in lobbying activity. Critics of standard reform proposals complain that “insiders” are attempting to regulate...
View ArticleStill More on the Disclosure Wars: Issues Speech, Both The “Real” and the...
The 10th Circuit decided another disclosure case, Coalition for Secular Government v. Williams, on the mandatory reporting of “issue speech”. It held that an individual collecting small sums to wage a...
View ArticleForeign National Influence, Foreign National Interference
In 1968, the Nixon presidential campaign successfully persuaded the South Vietnamese government to scuttle peace talks with the North. The goal was to end any possibility of an election-eve accord that...
View ArticleThe Quandaries of Ethics Reform in the Trump Era
There is now bipartisan interest in a change in the lobbying rules to reach the “back room” or “shadow” lobbyist. Most immediately, the proposal has been to have the new Administration expand the ban...
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