WASHINGTON — Donald Trump began his quest for the Republican presidential nomination talking about the influence of campaign donations. He's ending it discussing the influence of lobbyists.
Trump has spent the last week proposing ways to reduce the influence of lobbyists in the nation's capital.
"It is time to drain the swamp in Washington," Trump said at an Oct. 17 rally in Green Bay, Wis.
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He called for banning executive branch officials, members of Congress and congressional staffs from lobbying the government for five years; expanding the definition of lobbyist to require consultants and advisers to register; banning senior executive branch officials for life from lobbying for foreign governments; stopping registered foreign lobbyists from raising money in elections; and limiting congressional tenure.
Several campaign finance and ethics experts, however, said Trump's proposals fell far short of what was needed. Here's why.
1. Trump has shown no interest in these issues before.
Craig Holman, who lobbies on campaign finance and ethics issues for Public Citizen, said he asked both Trump and Hillary Clinton to back legislation preventing companies from paying bonuses to employees going into public service.
Clinton agreed, he said. Trump never responded.
"He's never ever given me a reason that he would support lobbyist and ethics restrictions," Holman said.
Trump is the first presidential candidate in decades refusing to release his income tax returns. Nor has he agreed to a blind trust to avoid financial conflicts.
"Until Mr. Trump addresses his own issues, his proposed executive order or legislation on ethics will be as good as the Enron Code of Ethics, which can be had for a song on Ebay," said Richard Painter, chief ethics officer for President George W. Bush.
2. It's at odds with the lobbying history of Trump's allies.
Former top campaign aide Paul Manafort was a major player in the Department of Housing and Urban Development scandal that engulfed President Ronald Reagan's administration. Manafort helped obtain $42 million to renovate an Upper Deerfield Township housing project he was a part-owner of. Local officials didn't know about the money and didn't want it.
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Republican political operative Ralph Reed, founder of the Faith and Freedom Coalition and co-chair of Trump's Pro-Life Coalition, helped a Mississippi Indian tribe represented by former GOP lobbyist Jack Abramoff, later convicted of fraud and conspiracy, block a competing casino in Alabama.
To hide the fact that Reed's anti-gambling efforts were funded by a casino-owning tribe, the money was laundered through Grover Norquist's Americans for Tax Reform, according to the U.S. Senate Indian Affairs Committee.
3. It may not be constitutional.
The First Amendment guarantees the right "to petition the government for a redress of grievances," a textbook definition of lobbying. Trump wants to ban certain officials from exercising that right.
"One of the reasons its so difficult to regulate lobbying is lobbying has a particular part of the U.S. Constitution that protects it," said Ciara Torres-Spelliscy, a law professor at Stetson University in Gulfport, Fla., and an expert in election and constitutional law. "It's not clear that what they're proposing would actually survive judicial scrutiny."
4. His Republican allies have refused to pass such legislation.
"Congress is not going to do these things," said Norman Eisen, former special counsel to President Barack Obama for ethics and government reform. "When I was working on these issues for President Obama, we asked them to take more modest steps and they wouldn't do it."
In 1995, the first House Republican majority in four decades passed plank after plank of its "Contract with America," except for a constitutional amendment on congressional term limits.
5. It's silent on the billions spent on behalf of special interests.
"Any U.S. company or labor union could still donate $50 million or more to a nonprofit aligned with the Clinton or Trump campaign and not even have to disclose their donation," said lobbying expert Rogan Kersh, provost and political science professor at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, N.C. "That's more ethically troubling than a former White House official or Congress member attempting to persuade their ex-colleagues of the merits of a policy proposal.''
Trump's deputy campaign manager, David Bossie, formerly led Citizens United, the advocacy group that successfully convinced five U.S. Supreme Court justices to overturn almost a century of precedent and law and relax limits on corporate and union political spending.
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That decision led to an explosion of spending by groups that don't disclose their donors to $1.1 billion in 2016 from $309 million in 2012, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, a Washington-based research group.
"Dark money could be hiding all sort of things, including foreign money," Torres-Spelliscy said. "You could have quid pro quos that we just can't see."
Clinton has promised to nominate Supreme Court justices who would overturn the decision, and to push the Securities and Exchange Commission to require publicly traded companies to disclose corporate donations.
"There's no question that we need to make Washington work much better than it does today," Clinton said in June. "And that means, in particular, getting unaccountable money out of our politics."
Jonathan D. Salant may be reached at jsalant@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @JDSalant. Find NJ.com Politics on Facebook