ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1995, Roanoke Times
DATE: Wednesday, December 20, 1995 TAG: 9512200050
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-5 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Associated Press WASHINGTON
PRESIDENT CLINTON has signed legislation that requires greater scrutiny of Washington's influence industry.
The capital's influence industry will be forced more into the open under a law President Clinton signed Tuesday requiring lobbyists to register and disclose their activities for the first time.
``At last!'' said Rep. Charles Canady, R-Fla., at a White House ceremony. ``We've waited 40 years to see genuine lobbying reform in Congress, and now it's done.''
``Lobbyists in the back room, secretly rewriting laws and looking for loopholes, do not have a place in our democracy,'' said Clinton, flanked by lawmakers who had pushed the bill to passage after decades of gridlock.
The law, which takes effect Jan. 1, broadens the definition of a lobbyist to include far more people than under the current statute. Just 6,500 lobbyists are now registered, while estimates of those involved in influencing federal policy run as high as 10 times that number.
Lobbying would be redefined to include contacts with executive branch officials and congressional aides. And the law would require that lobbyists report how much they are paid, and the specific issues on which they are working.
Together with new rules banning or limiting most gifts to members of Congress, advocates said the law would help lessen the influence of money on government policy. But they pointed ahead to a larger, more difficult hurdle: rewriting the laws governing the financing of political campaigns.
Clinton offered his support for a bipartisan campaign finance bill that has been gathering steam this year. That bill would curb campaign spending and further limit the amounts that can be given by political action committees, the political arms of special-interest groups. It also would end the giving of ``soft money,'' the unlimited amounts corporations and labor unions give to support political parties.
As for the new law, Clinton said, ``It will pull back the curtains from the world of Washington lobbying. It will help to restore the trust of the American people in their government.''
Ann McBride, president of the citizen lobby Common Cause, said the law represented ``an important breakthrough.''
Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., who had pushed the bill for five years, said it would bring immediate changes.
``Some of the lobbyists who have been excessive in terms of the amounts of money spent are going to have to think twice'' about whether disclosure will make their campaigns backfire, Levin said. ``If the public finds out special interests spent a fortune to defeat a bill, it could have a negative impact.''
The law represents the first major change in regulation of lobbying since a 1946 law first sought to require lobbyists to register. That law was rendered virtually worthless by a later Supreme Court decision.
Since then, at least ten attempts to revamp the law have ended in failure, the most recent one last year when a bill similar to this year's died in an end-of-session Senate Republican filibuster.
This time, the Senate approved the bill 98-0 in July and the House voted 421-0 for the same measure on Nov. 29. But the lopsided votes belied the difficulty of overcoming unseen forces that wanted to torpedo the measure.
Advocates pointed to one shortcoming in the new law: failure to regulate grass-roots lobbying, the fastest-growing area of the industry. Grass-roots practitioners use databases and advertising to find citizens sympathetic to their clients' causes, then generate large volumes of telephone calls and letters to Congress in hopes of influencing legislation.
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