A Capitolwire Column

By Peter L. DeCoursey
Bureau Chief | Capitolwire

HARRISBURG (Feb. 27) – The reform movement in Pennsylvania owes a debt to the Pennsylvania Bar Association: If the state bar hadn’t royally infuriated Attorney General Tom Corbett, we might still be without a functioning lobbyist expenditure disclosure law.

Here is what happened: more than two years ago, the state passed a lobbyist expenditure disclosure act to track who was spending an estimated up to $80 million a year to influence legislation and policy in state government. It took until late 2006 to get that done because the Supreme Court nuked the previous law on the grounds that it unconstitutionally treated lawyer-lobbyists like other lobbyists.

Fortunately former Supreme Court Chief Justice Ralph Cappy, who did a lot of fine things before he got pay-raise-obsessed, fixed that problem, so that any future law could cover lawyers who lobbied. So they passed the new law in 2006.

Since then, a group of lawmakers and other state officials and staff have struggled to set up regulations for that law. In November of last year, the Independent Regulatory Review Commission, IRRC, voted 3-1-1 to reject those regulations, basically because they would make lobbyists reveal their lobbying once they were paid, even if that were before they lobbied anyone. That exceeded what the law allowed the regulations to do, said IRRC staff and Commissioner John Mizner.

Then the group devising the regulations did some revising two months ago. They proposed that lobbyists had to register and start disclosing their expenditures and clients once they had a contract to lobby. At first that was said to be a written contract, then revised more than six weeks ago and unanimously approved by the drafting group, to be a written or verbal contract.

At first the bar association’s representatives praised the idea. Then they said that once they realized it wasn’t just a written contract that triggered registration, they released a letter yesterday saying they still thought the regulations exceeded the law.

Since up until yesterday Corbett and the regulation-drafting group thought the bar association had agreed to support the regulations, the change by the bar association “got my Irish up” Corbett told aides while waiting to testify.

Corbett said the bar association letter was “disheartening to me, designed in my opinion to sidetrack this legislation. … If their efforts are successful, we will retain our distinction as the only state without lobbying reform.”

More importantly, it was Corbett, not some aide, who told Mizner that the regulations did not exceed the law, and that he was comfortable going to court in the future to defend them.

Mizner himself cited Corbett’s confidence in the regulations as a reason to change his vote. And why did Corbett show up personally and sound so energized? Because he felt the bar association had spat in his oatmeal.

Of course, the fact that Mizner is the appointee of Senate President Pro Tem Joe Scarnati, R-Jefferson, probably didn’t hurt either. Scarnati is the employer of Drew Crompton, the Senate counsel who drafted much of the original bill, and was a key player, as was the attorney general’s staff, in the regulations.

Did that play a factor? Maybe not, but Mizner paid a lot of attention when IRRC staff recommended a “no” vote in November, and not so much to their identical recommendation yesterday.

It is also worth noting that former Reading Mayor Karen Miller, Gov. Ed Rendell’s appointee to the commission, switched her November vote. While Rendell’s commitment to lobbyist expenditure reform has been erratic – he did ignore a case where a buddy lobbied him in violation of Rendell’s own self-imposed 2006 rule on behalf of a TV production company – his appointee timed her change of vote perfectly.

With the switched votes of Mizner and Miller, the 3-1-1 November vote should have been reversed, right? Nope, because IRRC Chairman Arthur Coccodrilli, the Senate Democratic appointee, who voted for the regulations in November, had second thoughts since, he said, and voted no. House GOP appointee Nancy Sabol Frantz again abstained.

So it all came down to one vote, by new IRRC appointee George Bedwick, appointed by House Speaker Keith McCall, D-Carbon. Bedwick, despite some clearly-expressed and cogent concerns, voted to approve the regulations.

So far, at least, McCall has been a pleasant surprise on reform measures, such as this matter and even on the House rules, given his pre-leadership anti-reform record.

So, at least from here, we finally have a lobbying registration disclosure law, with more teeth and much more disclosure than the associations for lawyers and lobbyists wanted it to have.

Tom Corbett deserves credit for putting his name and credibility on the line to get this done. So do the IRRC folks who voted for it, since none of them or their predecessor appointees did so in November. So their appointers get some credit, too.