Parties Skirt Rules on Gifts, Plan Lavish Conventions - WSJ.com

Parties Skirt Rules on Gifts, Plan Lavish Conventions - WSJ.com: "Parties Skirt Rules on Gifts,
Plan Lavish Conventions
By BRODY MULLINS and ELIZABETH WILLIAMSON
August 16, 2008

Parties Skirt Rules on Gifts,
Plan Lavish Conventions
By BRODY MULLINS and ELIZABETH WILLIAMSON
August 16, 2008

WASHINGTON -- When the Democratic Party holds its convention the week after next, members of Congress will be able to hear singer Kanye West at an all-expenses paid party sponsored by the recording industry.

They can play in a poker tournament with Ben Affleck, courtesy of the poker industry. They can try to hit a home run at Coors Field, home of the Colorado Rockies, thanks to AT&T Corp. Free drinks and cigars will be on offer at a bash thrown by the liquor industry.
[Kanye West]

The corporate largesse is on tap despite new ethics laws and rules that both chambers of Congress adopted in 2007, aimed at weakening the links between lawmakers and lobbyists. Spearheaded by the Democratic Party, the ethics effort included an attempt to ban corporations and lobbyists from throwing lavish parties for members at the national political conventions.

But in the months since the new rules took effect, lawmakers have watered down the guidelines, and Capitol Hill and K Street have teamed up to find ways around the guidelines as written. Politicians and lobbyists are now preparing about 400 of the biggest parties -- both at the Democratic gathering in Colorado and when Republicans convene the following week in St. Paul -- that conventioneers have ever seen.

"Despite a slight chilling effect, the types of events you can hold really hasn't changed very much," says Elliot Berke, a Washington campaign-finance and ethics lawyer. "It's just a question of adhering to the new guidance."

The ethics rules that legislators drafted for themselves in response to the law sought in principle to ban lawmakers and their staff from accepting gifts, meals, trips or tickets from lobbyists and from corporations that employ lobbyists. But they also included dozens of exceptions.
PARTY PLANS

• Schedule of Events: Democrats | Republicans

The rules don't apply to charitable fundraisers. So lawmakers and aides are free to play in a poker tournament sponsored by the Poker Players Alliance. Funding for the event and charitable contributions come from the a lliance and various other sponsors. Because proceeds will go to the Paralyzed Veterans of America, the poker lobby can pick up the tab for the event and attend along with about 200 poker celebrities, lawmakers, aides and delegates. Guests will be given $5,000 worth of chips for the four-hour tournament, with the winnings going to the veterans group. A spokeswoman for the alliance says the event complies with the law.

Another popular party exemption is the so-called "widely-attended" event clause. Under that rule, corporations can pick up the tab for parties if they meet two conditions. One is that at least 25 people invited are not members of Congress or staff. The second condition, which applies only to House members: The party must have some element that relates to official congressional business.

So when the Recording Industry Association of America decided to throw the Kanye West party, it teamed up with the One Campaign in order to promote solutions to global AIDS and poverty. Literature on the topic will be available at the event and several speakers will address poverty relief before the concert.

"The truth is the ethics changes haven't affected our parties very much," said Jonathan Lamy, a spokesman for the trade association.

Likewise, when the Distilled Spirits Council throws the "Spirits of Denver," party goers will hear a brief presentation on how to prevent underage drinking.

The council also is adapting to another new rule that forbids gifts for anything more than "nominal" value -- a phrase interpreted as under $10. (Under the old rules, anything worth up to $50 was acceptable.) People who attend the spirits party will get the traditional gift bag with cigars from Rocky Patel Premium Cigar Company. But the cigars will be lower-grade than in previous years.

"We want to showcase our fine products and be 100% within the rules and the law," says Frank Coleman, the spokesman for the distilled spirits industry.

Lawmakers and aides who attend the Republican convention will be treated to their own set of concerts and bashes. A conservative organization run by former Rep. Tom DeLay is throwing a concert at the Aqua Nightclub in Minneapolis with Smash Mouth. Mr. DeLay has made the event a fundraiser for his organization, the Coalition for a Conservative Majority, and thus aides say it complies with the law.

Parties like this weren't supposed to happen at this year's conventions. On the first day Democrats took control of Congress in 2007, they introduced legislation and new rules banning or forcing broader disclosure of a range of campaign contributions, travel, gifts and meals given to lawmakers by corporations and the lobbyists they employ.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California called it the Democrats' signal effort to "drain the swamp." Breaking the ties between lobbyists and lawmakers was necessitated, Democratic lawmakers said, by a host of scandals under the Republican-run Congress.

Brendan Daly, a spokesman for Rep. Pelosi, said Congress made progress by banning parties at conventions in honor of specific members, but acknowledged that people have found ways around that rule. "If those parties prove to be a problem, then we can revisit it when we do the ethics rules next year."

Tommy Vietor, a spokesman for Democratic Sen. Barack Obama, said Sen. Obama wants to change the way the conventions are funded, but wasn't able to do so this year "due to the very late end to the primary season." The McCain campaign declined to comment.

The convention parties are the latest examples of how lawmakers and lobbyists have been finding ways to skirt such rules since they were passed. Faced with a ban on giving tickets to pricey charity events directly to lawmakers, corporations have in recent months been buying tickets at hundreds of dollars apiece, then donating them back to the sponsoring charity to give away -- along with a list of lawmakers the companies wish to attend.

Corporations and trade groups say that they are paying strict attention to the letter of the new law. In preparation for the conventions, their lobbyists and lawyers have been presenting convention party plans to the House and Senate ethics committees, seeking an official nod on their legality. Lawmakers too have been seeking published guidance from their colleagues on those committees for acceptable convention-time behavior.

That guidance has so weakened Congress's own curbs on convention parties that some ethics experts say the parties are potentially more lavish now than they were in 2004.

The new thicket of rules has "had the effect of making people more thoughtful and more careful," says Robert L. Walker, a former chief counsel to both the House and Senate ethics committees and now an attorney with Wiley Rein LLP. "But at the end of the day, the application and interpretation of those rules...may allow a fairly significant amount of entertainment at most of these events."

Take the new rules banning parties that honor a specific lawmaker. Ethics committees for the House and Senate have helped lobbyists and corporate sponsors by issuing loose interpretations of that rule for the conventions. Neither committee commented for this story.

The House is allowing corporations to fete a group of individuals -- even if the group consists entirely of lawmakers. That will allow dozens of companies to throw a late-night "Blue Night in Denver" party for the 47 fiscally conservative House Democrats who belong to the Blue Dog Coalition.

"That is flatly absurd," said Craig Holman, government-affairs lobbyist at Public Citizen, a nonpartisan government watchdog group. The Blue Dog Coalition could not immediately be reached for comment.

Public Citizen has recruited a couple of delegates at each convention to monitor the bashes and check for fudging on the rules. It said it intends to seek complaints against any infractions.

At both conventions, lawmakers and aides will be able to take advantage of a number of loopholes to see some great shows.

One of the top events at the democratic convention will be a Black Eyed Peas concert sponsored by The Creative Coalition, a group of stars that describes itself on its Web site as the "social and political advocacy organization for the entertainment industry." The Creative Coalition regularly sends Hollywood actors such as Alec Baldwin and Susan Sarandon to Washington to lobby for increased funding for the arts and to defend against legislative attempts to impose broadcast limits on violence and obscenity. It is throwing parties at the Republican convention as well, including one headlined by the Charlie Daniels Band.

Even so, the organization doesn't fall under the ban on bashes sponsored by lobbyists. None of the people who advocate for it spend more than 20% of their time doing so, the threshold that would require them to formally register as "lobbyists." Therefore, the Creative Coalition is free to party at the conventions.

Write to Brody Mullins at brody.mullins@wsj.com and Elizabeth Williamson at elizabeth.williamson@wsj.com