The people paid to influence Congress write the bills Congress passes.

The honest situation

The revolving door is a turnstile.

Under current federal law, a former U.S. Representative has to wait one year before lobbying Congress. A former Senator has to wait two. Senior staff have to wait one. Those are the rules. Watchdogs and reporters have documented the pattern for decades. One widely cited review found that between 1998 and 2004, 42 percent of former House members and half of former senators who left office went on to lobby, with many more taking adjacent positions at lobbying firms or trade associations that don’t require formal registration.

The activity itself runs on darkness. Lobbyists hand members ready-to-introduce bill text. There’s no requirement to disclose who actually wrote the legislation a member files under their own name. Meetings between members and lobbyists are not publicly logged. The Lobbying Disclosure Act covers paid lobbyists who spend more than a defined threshold of their time on lobbying contacts, which means a sizable population of people influencing Congress for a paycheck never has to register at all.

I can’t outlaw lobbyists. The First Amendment protects the right to petition government. I can make every single thing they do visible.

My pledge

Five commitments that work whether the law changes or not.

This is one of six planks in the pledge. Every federal candidate in the country gets asked, on the record, whether they’ll sign the full document.

What I’ll do federally

Close the door. Light the room.

There is real legislation in the House right now that would close the worst of these loopholes. The work is making sure it reaches a floor vote, and naming the leadership figures in both parties who would rather it didn’t.

• Cosponsor the Close the Revolving Door Act (H.R. 3554 in the 119th Congress, Ocasio-Cortez and Neguse). Imposes a lifetime ban on former members becoming registered lobbyists, extends the staff cooling-off period from one year to six, increases penalties under the Lobbying Disclosure Act, and creates a public lobbyist database.
• Close the “shadow lobbying” loophole. Anyone with direct congressional contact on behalf of a paying client should have to register, regardless of what percentage of their time they spend on it. The current threshold under the Lobbying Disclosure Act lets a large category of paid influence operate off the registration rolls entirely.
• Spousal and immediate-family disclosure. If a member’s spouse or adult child becomes a lobbyist, the member discloses it. If they lobby on issues touching the member’s committee, the member recuses.
• Mandatory bill-authorship disclosure on every introduced bill. If a lobbyist supplied language, the bill says so on the face of it.
• Real-time public meeting logs for all members. The standard I’m holding myself to should be the floor for the institution.

What I’ll do at the state and local level

The standard isn’t whether the law requires it. The standard is whether voters can see it.

Even if federal lobbying reform stalls again - and it has, repeatedly, for thirty years - the pledge itself is the lever. Other Tennessee candidates can be asked whether they’ll meet the same standard. The disclosure is built campaign by campaign.

• A public meeting log for the campaign, starting now. Not waiting for the seat. Every meeting with a registered federal lobbyist during the campaign goes on this site.
• A candidate sign-on pledge. Every Tennessee federal candidate gets asked, on the record, whether they will commit to the five-point lobbying standard. The answers go on this site.
• State-level lobbying disclosure. Tennessee has lobbying disclosure rules, but they don’t require the kind of real-time meeting logs, bill-authorship disclosure, or post-service standards this pledge would impose. A federal candidate can’t change state law alone, but can absolutely make a public argument for it while running.
• Office-level standard. The pledge applies to my senior staff. Chiefs of staff, legislative directors, and committee staff are routinely in the room with lobbyists. The cooling-off and disclosure standards have to apply to them too.

What I’ll push at the party level

Endorsement standards don’t need a floor vote.

The Tennessee Democratic Party could make signing the lobbying plank a condition of endorsement for federal candidates. That is a single decision by a state committee, not a constitutional amendment. The endorsement gets pulled if the pledge gets broken. The decision is fully within party authority.

The same logic applies to state legislative endorsements. Tennessee state legislators currently operate under disclosure rules that are loose enough to be a running joke. TNDP can hold its own candidates to a higher standard without waiting for the state to act.

The pushback I’m ready for

“A lifetime ban hurts legitimate advocacy - nonprofits, unions, environmental groups, veterans groups.”

This is the argument lobbyists use whenever any version of this reform moves. It deserves a real answer because some of those organizations do real work.

The pledge doesn’t ban advocacy. It bans me from cashing in on access I acquired in office, and it requires everyone I meet with on behalf of a paying client to operate in the open. A union lobbyist, a nonprofit lobbyist, and a corporate lobbyist all show up in the same weekly log. The bill-authorship disclosure applies whether the language came from the Sierra Club or from a pharmaceutical company.

Right now, corporate lobbyists operate in the dark and everyone else operates in the light, because corporate lobbyists are paid to know how to use the darkness. Putting everyone on the same disclosure footing is not an attack on advocacy. It is a level playing field. The groups whose advocacy is actually transparent end up better off, not worse.

As for the lifetime ban on me personally: nobody is owed a post-Congress lobbying career. If the option to cash in on the connections I built in office is what makes the job worth taking, I shouldn’t take the job.