New Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi intends to take a vote on anti-corruption legislation immediately after being sworn in. The only problem we have with her “lobbying reform” proposal is that it will lead to more corruption on Capitol Hill and she knows it!

December 27, 2006 – If you are like many voters, in the November elections you walked into a voting booth and held your nose before punching the ballot. Whether you voted for change or to stick with the enemy you know, the chances are that you didn’t like any of the people running. You just picked the least-bad choice and hoped for “the best”. Unfortunately, what we appear to have gotten is a long way from “the best”.

As the new Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi has set an ambitious agenda. The first thing on her list of “things to do” is call for an immediate vote on a lobbying reform package. She wants the new Congress to take the vote within minutes of being sworn in.

But because her bill can’t be presented to Congress prior to the swearing in ceremony, those who vote on it will not have had any chance to read it. If it is the same proposal Pelosi was pushing last year, it contains 84 pages of drivel that are designed to exempt large corporate lobbing interests from regulation and at the same time will impose strict reporting requirements on small non-profit organizations that attempt to lobby.

The only purpose that we can see for a law such as this is so that members of Congress can protect large campaign contributions and silence many of their critics in one fell swoop. Simply by introducing such a bill, Pelosi is showing that she has already been bought and paid for by special interests.

At ACCESS we are urging our readers to contact the new Speaker’s office to voice their opposition to this bill. Her phone number in Washington is 202-225-4965. Her California phone number is 415-556-4862. When calling, make sure that you mention that you will also be contacting your own representative to urge that they vote against this lobbying reform package until all reporting requirements for charitable organizations are removed.

You can get the phone numbers for your own Congressional Representative by filling in the form below.