Lobbying Disclosure Enhancement Act
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Ms. KILROY. Mr. Speaker, I rise in support of legislation I introduced, H.R. 5751, the Lobbying Disclosure Enhancement Act, to help bring accountability to the way lobbyists do business in Washington.
Back home, many people tell us that Washington is broken, that we need to end politics as usual. Well, one of the ways we tried to do this is to rein in lobbyists through the disclosure filings that they are required to file, and it is amazing how difficult it is to even make that happen.
H.R. 5751 would create a task force to help investigate and prosecute violations of the Lobbying Disclosure Act. If there is not some kind of push to enforce, then frequently people fall into noncompliance and they don't take us seriously. Well, it's time for us to be taken seriously on this question.
Mandated by the Honest Leadership and Open Government Act of 2007, a recent GAO study found the need for more transparency and accountability for special interest influence in government. Specifically, the GAO found that since 1996, the Secretary of the Senate has referred 8,281 potential violations of lobbying disclosure rules to the DOJ. About 4,400 of those referrals occurred in 2009 alone. The Office of the Clerk has referred an aggregate of 760 potential noncompliant registrants to the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia. And for 9 years, at least one organization reported lobbying the same 16 outdated--and mostly dead--pieces of legislation it initially reported in 1999 and 2000.
These statistics show a growing trend of mistakes and noncompliance that can't be ignored by this body. We have promised the American people more transparency and accountability, and my bill will help deliver on that promise.
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Ms. KILROY. I thank the gentleman for his question.
I fully would have supported a fee such as was included in the original bill, but we were informed by the Clerk of the House that they could not administer such a fee. So I would be more than happy if you and others in Judiciary would take up that question and return that question when we come back in September.
But reclaiming my time, I came here to change the ``politics as usual'' approach and to help bring reform.
The Attorney General is given the responsibility to report back to Congress with policy recommendations about how best to improve the Lobbying Disclosure Act going forward and about how to make the processing and enforcement seem self-funded. I believe that the taxpayers should not have to shoulder the heavy burden of playing watchdog to this industry and that the creation of a self-sustaining system could be possible.
My legislation changes the current disclosure rule that previously prevented the Department of Justice from publishing the name and firm of anyone in violation of the Lobbying Disclosure Act. We will now know the names of the lobbyists who continue to file late or to file incorrect information. This change reminded me of a phrase I heard recently: ``What you can't get through altruism, you must get through shame.''
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