Boehner's plan to 'open things up' in the new House affects lobbying strategies

The House of Representatives may soon be a much more chaotic place to lobby.

Lobbyists say a recent pledge by the presumed House speaker-in-waiting, John A. Boehner (R-Ohio), to "open things up" by returning power from party leadership to the committees, allowing any member to offer amendments on the floor and doing away with comprehensive spending bills in favor or a piecemeal approach, will force the influence industry to change tactics.

Advocates "will have to reach out to more of the rank-and-file members, subcommittee chairmen and committee chairmen to do some of the grass-roots and block-and-tackle lobbying we did in the old days," said Venable's Gregory M. Gill.

Indeed, Boehner's plan is described by many Hill veterans as a back-to-the-future approach that would return the House to the way it functioned when he arrived on the scene in the early 1990s as a member of the Gang of Seven, the twilight of an era when bills were hashed out in committees, went through a grueling open-amendment process and often required the support of bipartisan coalitions -- a time when many current lobbyists came of age as Hill staffers.

"What you had was a very diverse, open airing of ideas and the ability to offer amendments from both sides of the aisle was pretty much unconstrained," said Michael J. McAdams, a lobbyist with Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck.

The process of making and influencing law began to change when Republicans regained control of the House in 1994 and Newt Gingrich took over as speaker, K Street insiders say. The collaborative approach, which required advocates to educate dozens or more lawmakers on any given subject, was supplanted by a top-down, leadership-driven form of lawmaking. Over the next decade, that strategy was adopted by both Republican and Democratic leadership, the result being that recent advocacy efforts were typically directed at party leadership and in rarer instances those representatives who chaired committees.

In a speech at the American Enterprise Institute in the weeks leading up to the election, Boehner said the power within the House had been "co-opted by the leadership" and pledged to return it to chairmen and ranking members so they can craft bills that can withstand an open amendment process. He warned that they "shouldn't be content to churn out flawed bills and then rely on their leadership to bail them out."

Boehner's remarks have since been republished as part of the "Pillars of a New Majority" manifesto released in the days after his party regained control of the House. If his vision is realized, lobbyists say they will have to approach the House as an open playing field where advocacy campaigns should be conceived in the broadest possible sense to encompass dozens of rank-and-file members.

Some may find the shift easier than others. Even during the leadership-driven area, the telecommunications industry has used this approach effectively, and its efforts could be a template for similar campaigns. The government relations staff at AT&T, for example, recently built bipartisan coalitions around issues like net neutrality, which spurred separate letters from House Democrats and Republicans to FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski.

"There will need to be a lot more ground-level work to educate individual members on the issues because you're not going to be having major legislation written primarily in a leadership office," said Kathryn Hazeem Lehman, a lobbyist at Holland & Knight.