Riffing off of the estimable Nisha Thompson’s Local Sunlight feature, there are a couple of Sunlight related stories happening across our northern border and across the pond in Europe. First, our friends in Europe are taking after our Congress and considering passing sweeping lobbying disclosure for the EU for the very first time:

The European Commission has proposed new rules that could require European Union lobbyists to register for the first time, as part of a new transparency effort spawned after news reports of Abramoff’s activities broke.

Andreas Geiger, a founder and managing partner at Alber & Geiger, a public policy firm with offices in Berlin and Brussels, told The Hill that all lobbyists now need to lobby the EU is to have an access badge. To get one, lobbyists must state who they are working for and undergo a background check. But there are no records of what issues lobbyists are working on, or how much they are getting paid for their work.

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There are an estimated 15,000 people who lobby the EU, about half the number who lobby Washington. As in the United States, Geiger says, the lobbying industry is booming in Brussels.

Next up, in Canada, a major scandal is brewing. Imagine if back in 2001 the Democratic leadership bribed Jim Jeffords with $1 million to switch from Republican to Independent and thus tip the Senate majority into Democratic hands. That would certainly be a major national scandal. Well, that’s what’s going on in the maple leaf country. According to TPM:

Back in 2005, while the former Liberal government was tottering on the brink of collapse after many years in power, representatives of the opposition Conservatives went to an independent MP whose vote could topple the government and offered him a bribe for his vote.

The nature and context of the alleged bribe are particularly ghastly. The late Chuck Cadman was then in the final stages of terminal cancer. And in exchange for his vote, Conservative Party reps offered to purchase a $1 million life insurance policy for Cadman "and a few other things" in order to provide for his wife.

Cadman refused, voted to keep the government in power rather than cause a new election, and died a short time later.

And it turns out that the current Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who was opposition leader at the time of the alleged bribe attempt, knew about it:

Stephen Harper knew Conservative party officials were making a financial offer to independent MP Chuck Cadman in exchange for his vote to topple the minority Liberal government in May 2005, a new book charges.

Harper was Opposition leader when two party operatives offered Cadman, who had terminal cancer, a million-dollar life insurance policy, according to the book.

In an audio tape released to the Star by the publisher of Like A Rock: The Chuck Cadman Story, it is clear that Harper knew of the offer when he was interviewed by author Tom Zytaruk in September 2005.

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Here’s a pleasant surprise in the just passed Honest Leadership and Open Government Act (HLOGA). One of the law’s new filing requirements is that individual lobbyists have to report all "covered official positions" held for 20 years prior to their current filing period. This could provide an amazing amount of new information about where people have lobbied in the past — information that we’ve never seen before.

The new provision will be quite significant for lobbying firms. For them, the 20-year lookback applies to all lobbyists listed on any new registration filed for any client with an effective date of Jan. 1, 2008 or later. For most lobbying firms, this means that eventually all lobbyist employees will need to disclose their prior employment under the 20-year lookback.

The new requirement will have little impact on non-lobbying firm organizations with in-house lobbyists who were already registered as of December 31, 2007. For those organizations, only new lobbyists disclosed as of Jan. 1, 2008 or later will have to report their previous employment in accordance with the 20-year lookback.

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Yesterday, the Senate moved one step closer to passing S. 1639, the Comprehensive Immigration Reform Bill, which has been less than popular with the public, and with those on the left, the center left, the center right and the right. Of course, some are supporting the bill, but sadly, lobbying records are no help in determing who might be supporting it.

While the bill’s opponents have been reporting on calls to lawmakers and posting videos on YouTube, the Senate Office of Public Records has posted only 17 lobbyist disclosure forms that list immigration as an issue of interest for 2007. In 2006, by contrast, 611 disclosures were filed, by everyone from the AARP and AFL-CIO to Wal-Mart and the Wine Institute, listing immigration as an issue on which they lobbied. But now, with a bill that would affect agriculture and construction, high tech and universities, food processing and small businesses, we know only that Duke University, Microsoft, and a handful of others are lobbying on the issue of immigration.

Are Gucci-loafered lobbyists whispering in senators’ ears about cloture votes while offering to host posh fundraisers at which employees of their Fortune 500 clients will pony up tens of thousands of dollars in contributions? Are former chiefs of staffs and legislative aides and even senators gladhanding their old colleagues? Don’t look to lobbyist disclosure to find out — under the rules, lobbyists have up to 45 days after they start work to disclose a minimal amount of information–the name of their client and the issues they’ll be addressing. Even then, it can take the Senate Office of Public Records, which at least posts the disclosures online, as much as 44 days to make the form public.

None of this necessary, of course — meaningful lobbyist disclosure would bring their actions out from what Mark Steyn called the “metaphorically smoke-filled room” into the light of day. Wouldn’t that make for a better process, not just on this bill, but on all of them.

Incidentally, here is the list of the immigration lobby as of June 27, 2007; again, I’m guessing this mildly understates K Street’s interest.

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