-By Warner Todd Huston
Roll Call is reporting that during the typical Friday afternoon document dump — a practice used to hide actions that might prove somewhat embarrassing to the White House — the administration quietly announced that some of the former restrictions on lobbying ballyhooed about during the late campaign have been lifted.
Let special interests ring!
Roll Call (see here, but subscription is required) says that the administration lifted bans on lobbyists that have some part of spending “stimulus” funds. So now getting hooks into bloated federal spending is open season for the very lobbyists that Obama pretended to disdain only months ago.
So much for hopinchange.
The ban on oral communication now applies only to competitively bid applications on the stimulus package and it applies equally to lobbyists as well as non-lobbyists, according to a White House blog post written by ethics official Norm Eisen.
Additionally, the administration is still also pretending at “transparency” because one of the new rules is that there be “immediate internet disclosure” of this renewed contact that lobbyists are to have with federal agencies. Not that such a thing is anywhere near de rigueur at this point… but, um, you know how hard The One is working, right?
So why the reverse? According to Roll Call:
The decision to change the policy follows the 60-day review period that the Obama administration set for the Office of Management and Budget to review the new lobbying rules. Several watchdog groups and lobbying entities, including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the American League of Lobbyists and the AFL-CIO, raised concern over the recently imposed rules.
So, I guess the hopinchangieness wasn’t as hopey and changie as it was once imagined?
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Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer, has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and is featured on many websites such as newsbusters.org, RedState.com, Human Events Magazine, AmericanDailyReview.com, townhall.com, New Media Journal, Men’s News Daily and the New Media Alliance among many, many others. Additionally, he has been a frequent guest on talk-radio programs to discuss his opinion editorials and current events and is currently the co-host of “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Conservatism” heard on BlogTalkRadio. He has also written for several history magazines and appears in the new book “Americans on Politics, Policy and Pop Culture” which can be purchased on amazon.com. He is also the owner and operator of publiusforum.com. Feel free to contact him with any comments or questions : EMAIL Warner Todd Huston
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