Senate joins House in putting reform for lobbying first on the 2007 agenda

WASHINGTON (Map, News) - The Senate’s new Democratic leadership will put lobbying reform at the top of its agenda when it convenes in January.

In fact, Sen. Harry Reid, D.-Nev., has decided to make ethics reform the “first item of business in this new Senate,” according to incoming Majority Whip Sen. Richard Durbin.

“Senator Reid is committed to lobbying and ethics reform and looks forward to making it one of the Senate’s top priorities when we convene in January,” a Reid spokesman told The Examiner.

The move mirrors the plan of incoming House Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi, who has pledged to begin revamping lobbying rules on her first day as leader. Pelosi said in a statement she would kick off her first 100 hours by “breaking the link between lobbyists and legislation.”

Implementing that pledge on the House side, congressional sources and lobbyists agreed, will include a combination of new legislation and easily implemented changes to House rules. The changes are likely to follow the road map laid out in the Honest Leadership and Open Government Act, a bill proposed by Pelosi earlier this year. That bill, which never got out of committee, included a ban on trips and gifts from lobbyists and doubled to two years the amount of time congressional members and senior government employees had to wait before becoming lobbyists. The bill would also have canceled floor access of former members who have become lobbyists and revised lobbying disclosure requirements.

The Senate has a more difficult problem. It takes agreement from two-thirds of the Senators to change Senate rules (the same requirement at the core the filibuster debate last year). Unlike in the House, the Democrats do not have enough of a majority to simply step in and shift the standards of conduct — they have to get the agreement of at least some of their GOP colleagues to proceed.

There is, however, already an agreement of sorts — on the language in the Senate version of the Lobbying Transparency and Accountability Act of 2006. Though the House and Senate have not been able to rectify their differences, the senators already hammered out their internal compromises and passed the bill in March.

Though nothing is final, congressional sources confirm that this bill is a guide to what will be proposed by the Democrats next year in the Senate. Among the provisions are a ban on floor access for lobbyists who were once members, a gift ban and a requirement for written certification before taking a trip paid for by someone outside of the government.

Dee Ann Divis is the business editor of The Washington Examiner. Contact her at ddivis@dcexaminer.com