Craig Holmanis the government affairs lobbyist for Public Citizen, a national consumer advocacy organization whose mission is to “serve as the people’s voice in the nation’s capital.” He holds a PhD in political science from the University of Southern California and has conducted extensive research related to campaign finance and lobbying reforms. In addition to his work in Washington, Holman is working with European governmental and nongovernmental organizations to develop a lobbyist registration system for the European Union.

Working for a nonprofit watchdog organization puts Holman in a very different position in terms of resources compared with lobbyists at the for-profit lobbying firms that line Washington’s K Street. Nonprofits are far less likely to have affiliated political action committees (PACs) and their lobbying expenditures are on average less than one-fifth of what corporations in Washington spend. Public Citizen reported spending about $200,000 in 2011 on lobbying.

Before coming to Public Citizen ten years ago, Holman was a senior policy analyst at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University’s School of Law and he worked as a senior researcher for the Center for Governmental Studies in Los Angeles. In addition to his PhD, he has a BA in political science and philosophy from the University of Wisconsin.

Beth Leech: How did you become a lobbyist?

Craig Holman: Well, I come from academia, actually. I was working at New York University at the Brennan Center for Justice, and had just completed a study that served as the primary evidentiary record for the McCain-Feingold law that fundamentally reformed campaign finance in 2002. Once we got that law passed, Public Citizen contacted me and asked if I wanted to come to DC to serve as a lobbyist on campaign finance matters. It was a transition I found intriguing.

In academia you never quite see the results of your work—not very often anyway. As a lobbyist, I still get to use my academic expertise, but I apply it in concrete, specific, results-oriented situations of trying to get specific legislation through. Serving as a lobbyist affords me a different and interesting dynamic for applying my skills.

Leech: What was the study that you worked on related to the McCain-Feingold reform?

Holman: The study is known as Buying Time 2000. Through the Campaign Media Analysis Group [CMAG], a conglomeration of academic institutions literally rented an old Navy satellite that used to spy on submarines during the Cold War, but is now just flying around in space not doing much, and we used it to monitor television commercials around the country during the 2000 presidential election.

Leech: Before that, there wasn’t any record of politically related commercials?

Holman: No, there was no record of most of these commercials. Not unless they were directly connected to a formal candidate or party campaign. Commercials that were financed by groups that claimed they’re only sponsoring “issue” ads rather than campaign ads were not recorded anywhere, and there was no disclosure of how much was being spent on these issue ads, or who’s behind them or the content of the ads.

In the Buckley v. Valeodecision back in 1976, the Supreme Court tried to figure out the difference between issue ads and campaign ads. Issue ads are not subject to regulation and disclosure, but campaign ads are subject to the contribution limits and the disclosure requirements of the Federal Election Campaign Act. The Supreme Court just made up the legal difference in a footnote. Footnote 52 in the Buckley decision says that the difference is whether the ad uses one of eight magic words: “Vote for,” “vote against,” “elect,” “support,” “cast your ballot for,” “Smith for Congress,” “defeat,” “reject.” If it had one of those eight words or phrases, then it was a campaign ad, subject to disclosure requirements. If it didn’t use one of those magic words, then it was not subject to any kind of regulation or disclosure. That’s how the campaign finance system operated from 1976 up until the McCain-Feingold law, so groups that avoided the magic words did not register with the Federal Election Commission and did not disclose what they were doing.

To test whether the magic words test had any basis in reality, we tapped into the CMAG satellite to monitor all these television commercials and take a look at what was happening in the real world of campaign advertising. The satellite sucked in almost a million television commercials in that 2000 campaign, and we had students at the University of Wisconsin and Brigham Young University watch the ads and answer a survey about the content. Most of the survey questions were straightforward and objective, like, “Does the ad use any of the magic words?” The one subjective question we had in the survey was, “In your opinion, is this ad designed to influence how you would vote for or against a candidate?” The results would then be sent to me at NYU’s Brennan Center for analysis.

We found that just two percent of the political ads sponsored by outside groups that our students viewed as intending to influence their vote actually used the magic words. Just two percent!

Leech: Wow.

Holman: That means that ninety-eight percent of the campaign ads sponsored by outside groups that were saturating the airwaves were outside the realm of disclosure. Even when we took a look at candidate ads—all candidate ads are regulated, no matter what they say—only ten percent of candidates ever said, “Vote for me,” or “Don’t vote for my opponent,” because that’s just a tacky way of doing electioneering. So the campaign ads themselves never said to vote for or vote against anyone.

That study was used to get the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law through Congress. During the Senate debates, I’d be getting the study results in as the law was being debated on the Senate floor. I would do a quick analysis at New York University, design an electronic SPSS chart showing the results, and then e-mail the chart to one of our colleagues on the Senate floor, like Senator Olympia Snow or Senator Susan Collins. I’d be watching on C-SPAN and see, literally an hour later, my chart being brought out in a blown-up format onto the Senate floor.

Leech: You already were very much an advocate.

Holman: Yes. I was serving in that role because the numbers just simply were in support of passing this type of campaign finance law. The numbers showed that Footnote 52 in the Buckley decision was pure myth and we needed something else, and that was the McCain-Feingold law.

Leech: That’s fascinating. And you continue that work today at Public Citizen. Public Citizen has a broader mandate than just campaign finance, but you focus primarily on campaign finance?

Holman: I focus on money in politics, generally. Lobby reform became a very big interest of mine once I came to DC and began lobby work. Remember this was in 2002, and I fairly quickly realized that what I viewed as the role of lobbying was not the reality on Capitol Hill.

Leech: How did it differ?

Holman: Well, for me, lobbying was bringing expertise and information to lawmakers so that they could make better-informed decisions and pass better legislation. What I realized was that most lawmakers weren’t very interested in information or expertise, but rather were primarily influenced by lobbyists who could provide money, campaign money as well as personal enrichment. This was the era of Jack Abramoff. I soon realized that I wasn’t able to get that much done because, as a lobbyist for Public Citizen, I was not a source of money for lawmakers.

Leech: Abramoff was the lobbyist who went to prison as the result of a bribery and fraud scandal.

Holman: Right. Abramoff and most of the lobbying firms along K Street were very involved in influence peddling through monied means. The hired-gun lobbyists rarely had any particular expertise or information to provide. What they did have was money to make direct campaign contributions: networks of business associates whose individual contributions could be bundled together so the lobbyists could provide very large campaign contributions, and connections to campaign contributors who could host major fundraising events. Money for wining and dining. Jack Abramoff even had Table 40 set aside in his Signatures Restaurant to fete lawmakers at will. They could afford paying the large salaries necessary to attract lawmakers and their staff to leave public service and spin through the revolving door as well-connected and well-paid lobbyists themselves. But neither Public Citizen nor any of the citizens’ groups had that kind of money or those revolving-door lawmakers on salary.

I began working on lobbying reform, thinking, “This is not how things should be done on Capitol Hill.” I proposed some lobby reform legislation that was introduced by friends in Congress, like Senator Russ Feingold and Representative Marty Meehan, but it didn’t draw much interest in Congress. As a matter of fact, we couldn’t even get hearings for it. I’d be knocking on the doors of members of Congress, making phone calls, trying to get co-sponsors for the legislation. This was in 2004 and 2005, and there was very little interest on Capitol Hill. Most members wouldn’t even meet with me to discuss the lobby reform proposal.

Leech: But eventually a reform measure did pass.

Holman: Yes, indeed. All that changed in January 2006, when news suddenly broke that Jack Abramoff had worked out a plea bargain with the Department of Justice in which he agreed to point the finger at all those members of Congress whom he bribed.

As soon as that news broke, my telephone started ringing off the hook. Congressional offices were calling and saying, “You know, that lobby reform legislation sounds pretty interesting—maybe we can sign onto this. And here are some other ideas for other reform legislation.” It just spiraled onto the national agenda, onto Capitol Hill’s agenda. Groups from the right, from the left, from the mainstream, all got involved in trying to come up with some sort of meaningful lobby reform legislation. We eventually got it passed into law as the Honest Leadership and Open Government Act of 2007.

Leech: How did that act change things?

Holman: It fundamentally changed the practice of lobbying on Capitol Hill. To give a little background, the House and Senate were under Republican control in 2006, and because of the Jack Abramoff scandal, even the Republicans were joining in on the lobby reform movement. They were the ones that originally started crafting some serious lobby reform legislation, but as it continued through the committee process and then the amendment process, the legislation continued to get watered down.

The Senate approved one version of the bill that was so weak that Public Citizen could no longer even endorse it. Nor could the rest of the reform community. I recall the opening sentence of a coalition statement condemning the Senate-approved legislation: “The United States Senate failed the American people today.” The House passed similarly weak legislation, and the entire reform community came out opposing both measures at that point because they were so weak. In the end, both bills went to conference committee, and Tom DeLay and the Republican leadership in the House declined to even appoint conferees. So, the legislation perished in 2006 simply by being ignored by Congress once again.

Public Citizen and others in the reform community decided that we couldn’t just let this happen. We organized a huge grassroots effort to try to keep lobby reform on the nation’s political agenda as we entered the 2006 elections. One of the campaigns we did was a candidate pledge drive, and it was the most successful candidate pledge drive I’ve ever participated in. A third of all candidates running for Congress pledged to support serious lobby reform if they were elected.

The candidate pledges helped boost this issue on the nation’s political agenda. There were exit polls following the election showing that lobby reform and corruption was the number-one issue that affected voting decisions. The result was that Democrats swept both the Senate and the House, largely on this anticorruption campaign.

Leech: That’s impressive.

Holman: With that, Harry Reid, now the Majority Leader in the Senate, and Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker of the House, took this lobby reform legislation, the Honest Leadership and Open Government Act, and introduced it as the very first bill of the new Congress. And it quickly became law.

Now, getting back to your question as to what sort of impact it had: it had a major impact. Prior to the Honest Leadership and Open Government Act, most legislation and lobbying activity was done through influence-peddling tools that involved campaign money—promises of lucrative, high-paying jobs once members of Congress left office through the revolving door, or trips to Scotland to play golf, or gifts of prime seats at sporting events. That was the influence-peddling game on Capitol Hill.

With the Honest Leadership and Open Government Act, we shut down gifts that lobbyists and lobbying organizations could provide to members of Congress or their staffs. Lobbyists, and even organizations and businesses that hire lobbyists, are now banned from providing any gifts to members and staff. This includes a ban on wining and dining. Lobbyists and their employers can no longer take a member of Congress out and buy him or her dinner. Or, for that matter, lobbyists cannot even pay for snacks, or provide free tickets to sporting events or give any other gift.

We restricted travel that could be paid for by lobbying organizations, so if you’re an organization that employs a lobbyist, you can only pay for a one-day trip for a member of Congress, just long enough to fly them out to give a speech at your conference, and then fly them back the next day. These trips have to be pre-approved by the Ethics Committee, and the itineraries are posted on the Internet for all to see. Lobbyists cannot even travel with a member of Congress to those types of events.

Accommodations provided to members have to be the same as those provided to everyone else at the function. And members and staff cannot fly to the event in a corporate jet, only via commercial airfare—and that must be business class or less. The days of the Jack Abramoff wining and dining, and trips to Scotland to play golf all came to an end in 2007.

Leech: That’s a lot of change.

Holman: A lot of change, but much of the gains came undone later, and I’ll get to that.

Leech: Not everything is fixed yet.

Holman: I was also advocating to prohibit lobbyists from being involved in any campaign fundraising, but even the reform-minded 110th Congress wasn’t willing to go that far. Congress was willing to have full disclosure of these fundraising events, however, and so we ended up with disclosure of direct as well as bundled campaign contributions by lobbyists, and fundraising events hosted by lobbyists.

Leech: That means that if a lobbyist raises a lot of money from other people for the member of Congress, the lobbyist has to disclose that.

Holman: Yes, the bundling has to be disclosed, and disclosed online, and that’s still in effect. We also made it much easier to access information that lobbyists must disclose about their activities because of a phrase that I put into the legislation. Instead of filing paper documents that were not easily searchable, lobbyists now have to file electronically, and those electronic reports are available online in a “searchable, sortable, and downloadable” format. That means these records can now be searched online by any number of criteria, such as lobbyist, organization or client. The records can be sorted by such criteria as amount of expenditure, issues lobbied or date. And if you want to download the data into your own database program, such as SPSS, that can be done, too.

Leech: Researchers everywhere thank you.

Holman: That made a huge difference. Now we have an excellent disclosure system. We also now require lobbyist activity reports to be filed every three months as opposed to twice a year.

Leech: So now the files are more up-to-date. You mentioned that you were the one who inserted that language into that bill. Can you talk a little bit about how a lobbyist would go about doing that?

Holman: Certainly. To get effective legislative reforms, I don’t just offer ideas and bullet points that say, “Point: You need to have electronic disclosure. Point: You need to ban wining and dining.” I won’t offer something that simple, because I’ve learned that when I am not specific, it will tend to be drafted by staffers in Congress into something that is not at all what I’m working toward.

I will almost always provide a draft version of a bill or sections of the bill. I provide not only the ideas, but also my suggestions on how it should be written in statutory language. Then it goes to staffers and eventually the Office of the Legislative Counsel, and they always rewrite it, of course—but, by providing the initial drafts, at least I’m setting the stage for where this type of legislation is going. I’m a firm believer in providing actual statutory language for a legislative proposal, as well as summary bullet points that outline the objectives.

Leech: You would first give that language to staff of the members of Congress who were interested in proposing such a bill?

Holman: That’s right. Then the staff goes over it and they rewrite it, and then it goes to Leg[islative] Counsel in the House and the Senate, and the Leg Counsel will rewrite it. It comes out as a very different bill, but at least I’ve set the parameters of how the legislation is going to look. I did the same with the Honest Leadership and Open Government Act. It helps keep the focus.

Even in this particular case, there were things that happened in the drafting that caught me by surprise. I was working on revolving-door provisions with then-Senator Barack Obama and Senator Russ Feingold, and we were going to have much stricter revolving-door restrictions on entering lobbying after leaving government service. However, many members of Congress rebelled against that idea, especially the elder chairmen of committees who were planning on retiring soon and taking lucrative lobbying jobs themselves. They didn’t want to see any further restrictions on the revolving door, so that was the one thing that we ended up not getting in this bill that should have been in there.

We had a substitute measure that was offered by Representative Marty Meehan. That was to at least require members of Congress to disclose any job negotiations they were having for future employment, so the public can determine whether there’s a conflict of interest going on. Unbeknownst to me—I didn’t catch this—the Leg Counsel on the House side wrote that the disclosure reports had to be filed with the House Ethics Committee rather than with the Clerk of the House. Well, the House Ethics Committee does not disclose any of their reports, as opposed to the Clerk of the House, which is a disclosure entity. So now all these disclosure reports get filed through a secret agency and rarely get disclosed to the public. That’s what we’re stuck with right now. I missed that, so we still have that today.

Leech: You mentioned that some aspects of the Honest Leadership and Open Government Act [HLOGA] have come undone. What happened?

Holman: When we passed that sweeping lobby reform in 2007, we achieved a great deal to help level the playing field between lobbyists who don’t have a lot of money, like me, versus K Street lobbyists. We ended the kinds of gifts and travel that moneyed interests could pay for, but citizens’ groups could not afford.

It forced all lobbyists, whether you’re K Street or a Public Citizen lobbyist, to do your business on Capitol Hill—going into the lawmaker’s office instead of taking him out to a golf course. You actually show up in their offices, present your case, provide your information and expertise, and do what lobbying really is supposed to be all about.

Leech: Then decisions are based on the quality of your argument and your evidence rather than on what gifts you have to give.

Holman: That’s right. HLOGA elevated merits of the arguments and reduced the role of money. But the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United in 2010 once again elevated the status of money in lobbying.

Leech: That case ruled that it was unconstitutional to limit independent campaign expenditures by corporations and other organizations. What was the effect of all that money?

Holman: It had a direct impact on the integrity of the legislative processes. Suddenly I was up against K Street lobbyists on Capitol Hill who could direct the spending of hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars in campaign funds to support or oppose a lawmaker. Right after the Citizens United decision, I was providing a congressional briefing to staffers on the impact of the ruling itself. One staffer asked, “How can I say no to a lobbyist who now has deep pockets to unseat my boss if they don’t like us?”

That fear is valid. Lobbyists for corporate clients have always been in the role of directing the corporate PAC campaign contributions based on the company’s legislative and political priorities. But campaign contributions from PACs are limited to $5,000 under federal law and fully disclosed to the public. With Citizens United, the same corporations can now make unlimited and undisclosed expenditures for or against candidates—all of which will be directed by the corporate lobbyists. K Street lobbyists are once again elevated to the status of kingmakers in Congress.

Leech: Because they could make a difference in elections.

Holman: Yes. We had two big steps forward with HLOGA, and with Citizens United, we had another big step backward.

Leech: At this point, what are you and Public Citizen doing to address the effects of the Citizens United ruling?

Holman: We’re trying to make sure that the rules of HLOGA don’t get entirely thrown to the wayside. More directly, we have to deal with the Citizens United decision. As long as we allow the five justices on the Supreme Court to decree that a corporation shall be treated as a person under the First Amendment, the democratic system—both in terms of elections and the quality of representative government—is going to suffer. We have to do what we can to rein in that damage, if not reverse it altogether.

Leech: What sorts of things is Public Citizen doing?

Holman: We are working around the clock trying to get full disclosure of where all this corporate money is flowing. About half of it does not need to be disclosed under the law. We are supporting the Disclose Act, which was just reintroduced in Congress. We are also encouraging the Securities and Exchange Commission to pass regulations that would require full disclosure of corporate political expenditures, including lobbying expenditures, by publicly owned corporations. The SEC has just announced that it will pick up that topic for rulemaking in April 2013.

At the same time, we’re monitoring the compliance to the ethics rules themselves and trying to close some of the loopholes. There’s one big loophole that has been poked into the travel rule. Under the pressure of K Street lobbyists, the House and Senate ethics committees have now issued rules saying that if a lobby entity sets up a separate 501(c)3 charitable organization on paper, then that charitable organization can pay for the travel junkets.

Leech: What effect has that change had?

Holman: After 2007, we had reduced the amount of travel junkets by two-thirds. At the end of last year, we reached the same level of travel junkets that we had prior to 2007. We’ve returned full circle, back to the Abramoff era.

Leech: What sorts of actions can one do to try to address something like that?

Holman: First, we produced numbers to show what’s happening, and then I’ve met with a task force of the House Ethics Committee that is studying the travel rules. I’ve been pleading with the Ethics Committees to close this loophole, and at the same time, I am going to the public and the press and highlighting the abuses to try to apply pressure on the Ethics Committees to close the loopholes. It would require either an ethics rule change at this point, or a reinterpretation of the rules by the Ethics Committees.

Leech: Public Citizen has suggested in one of its publications that there is an ironic silver lining to the problems created by Citizens United. Could you explain that a little bit?

Holman: Most of the reforms that we achieve come out of scandal. What Citizens United has created is the environment for scandal. We’re seeing huge increases in the amount of money flowing into politics and much of it is secret slush-fund money. That is the pre-Watergate situation, and ideal opportunity for wheeling and dealing, for buying government favors, for corruption and scandal. It’s on the heels of scandal that we achieve our greatest reforms. It’s like how we achieved HLOGA. We achieved that on the heels of the Jack Abramoff scandal. We now have a situation that is ripe for scandal again. We’re ready to move forward with some more sweeping reforms.

Leech: What are you working on at the moment?

Holman: The revolving door is big on my agenda. Jack Abramoff readily admits the revolving door was one of his favorite tools for influence peddling. Once a member of Congress or a congressional staffer thought that they could in a year or so leave Congress and get a very lucrative job in Jack Abramoff’s lobbying firm, he said he had them in his pocket. Staffers on their own initiative would call Abramoff to notify him of issues that he might be interested in, just because they thought they were going to get a $300,000 job with him next year. It was one of the very most effective influence-peddling tools employed, back then as well as today.

Public Citizen did a study on the revolving door and found that forty-three percent of all former members of Congress who served in Congress sometime between 1998 and 2006 became registered lobbyists when they left public service. Almost half of Congress is spinning through the revolving door. We wanted to strengthen the revolving-door policy and extend the cooling-off period from one year to two years, and then also prohibit anyone who left Congress from doing any lobbying activity at all during that two-year period.

Under the old law, a retiring member could not make a lobbying contact for one year after leaving Congress. All that meant was the retiring member could not actually pick up the telephone to call his or her old buddies. The former lawmaker could become a registered lobbyist, could manage the entire lobbying team of a lobby shop, organize the entire lobbying campaign, prepare all the lobbying messages, and then have someone else make the phone call. That’s all it meant.

During the HLOGA debate, we pressed for extending the cooling-off period from one year to two years, and including “lobbying activity,” including strategizing on a lobbying campaign, as part of the prohibited activity during the cooling-off period. We lost nearly all of the strengthening revolving-door provisions in the Honest Leadership and Open Government Act, with the exception that Senators Feingold and Obama prodded the Senate to extend its cooling-off period to two years. Everything else in the ineffective old law was kept intact.

Barack Obama, however, carried the movement for strong revolving-door restrictions with him to the presidency. The very first day he stepped into the White House, he issued an executive order that contained those types of stronger revolving-door restrictions and even went further. That order—Executive Order 13490—can only apply to the executive branch, so it did not apply to Congress. What Obama did get is a mandate for all presidential appointees to agree that they would never lobby the Obama administration, so that ends up being an eight-year ban on lobbying the Obama administration.

Even more importantly, Obama imposed the first-ever reverse revolving-door restriction on the executive branch. Not only is there a problem with members of the government leaving government and becoming lobbyists, but there’s just as big a problem with special interests and lobbyists moving into government and capturing the agencies that regulate their companies and clients. It’s called regulatory capture. No one had ever tried to address this problem. Obama, in his executive order, set up a policy where all presidential appointees now must sign an ethics pledge declaring that they will not take any official actions that directly affects their former employers or clients, or issues that they had lobbied on, in the past two years.

I would like to see this codified into law, because I know when the Obama administration comes to an end, that reverse revolving-door restriction is going to come to an end. I’d like to see it applied to all subsequent White House administrations. That’s one of the big projects I have been working on.

Leech: Are you getting very much good feedback on that?

Holman: I’m getting some feedback on that. There are some members of the Senate who have expressed interest in introducing this type of legislation. About a year ago or so, when I approached the White House about codifying the revolving-door restrictions, they were saying, “Well, let’s just see how it works first as an executive order before going to the legislation.” Without a green light from the President back then, it’s something I have not been pursuing legislatively in the 112th Congress, but I am fully planning on moving ahead with it in this new Congress.

Leech: What do you think about criticisms of Obama’s executive order that argue that, as a result, people who are lobbying are simply using loopholes to avoid registering?

Holman: Yeah, I love hearing those arguments from the lobbyists. The argument, by the way, is twofold. The first part of the argument is that all those restrictions do nothing at all—they’re meaningless restrictions. Then in the second breath, the argument is: “We’ve got to get rid of these onerous restrictions.” They’re either meaningless or they’re onerous—one or the other, but they can’t be both.

One very popular myth that lobbyists have been spreading around claims that since the White House now records lobbyist visits and puts them on the Internet, now everyone is just meeting in a coffee shop outside the White House to avoid being disclosed. That is a complete myth. There have always been visits to the coffee shops outside the White House. There always were beforehand, there always will be afterward, and that’s just because you have to get all this clearance to get into the White House. If I want to meet with someone in the White House this afternoon, I can’t get clearance in time. Lobbyists and White House staff will meet in the coffee shops, but that’s not in an effort to try to get around lobbying restrictions.

An appropriate solution that Obama should consider is to modify the disclosure of White House “visits” to include any lobbying contacts with executive branch officials, inside or outside the White House.

In a similar vein, the decline in lobbying registrations has been exaggerated. There appears to have been some decline in lobbyist registrations, but not by phenomenal amounts. And that decline began not just because of Obama’s revolving-door policies, but because of all the different ethics requirements that we passed in the Honest Leadership and Open Government Act.

Most lobbyists can and have adapted. A few have chosen to risk violating the law and evading the registration requirement. In order to address this problem, a full lobbying contact disclosure system—in which public officials would note and disclose all of their official meetings—would provide the public with the type of record so we could identify those who should be registered as lobbyists. This is another project on my agenda.

Leech: Is there anything else you’ve been working on recently?

Holman: One of the results of my work with lobby reform on Capitol Hill is that I’ve become a reform advocate for the European Community as well. After helping get the Honest Leadership and Open Government Act through, I’ve been invited to Brussels about half a dozen times to testify before the European Commission, the European Parliament, or advocacy groups on lobby reform, and consulted with them on what to do.

It’s been interesting. And because I’m writing for academic publications as well, I’ve been publishing some studies on lobby reform globally, especially focused on Western and Eastern Europe. It is a small club of people who study and advocate for lobby reform on the international stage.

By the way, one member of that club is Jack Abramoff. Since being released from prison in 2010, after serving nearly four years for various corruption charges, Abramoff has become a strong advocate for lobbying reform, lecturing on what is wrong with the system both at home and abroad, when his parole officer permits. Abramoff knows from personal experience the potential for corruption caused by money in politics. While we disagree on most everything else in politics, he and I both understand the need to break the potentially corrupting nexus of lobbyists, money, and lawmakers—and we are working together toward that end. No one can make the case better than Jack Abramoff. Though I never thought I would say this a few years ago, I consider Jack a friend.

Leech: Let’s shift gears for a little bit and talk about you and your workday. What is it like to be you? How would you spend an average day?

Holman: To tell the truth, there really isn’t an average day. The days and my paths change radically from day to day, depending on what happens. I develop long-term plans for legislation and reforms I want to see put in place, such as codifying the revolving-door restrictions and increasing enforcement of the Lobbying Disclosure Act, but I also spend a lot of time playing defense. There will suddenly be a new development on Capitol Hill attacking some of the reforms that already are in place or trying to prevent some of the other reforms that I have in mind.

The average day really bounces all over the place. Some days I’m playing defense. Other days I’m drafting legislation in my office. Other days I’m out trying to get sponsors and co-sponsors of those legislative proposals. Other days I’m organizing a coalition of groups to try to defend existing laws that we have on the books. Most days, I am appealing to the public through the press to try to keep the public very involved in what’s happening on Capitol Hill. It changes. Every single day is different.

Yesterday, for instance, all the new members of Congress arrived on Capitol Hill, so I spent most of the day going to all the new members’ offices, trying to meet them and their staff, getting to know who they are and letting them know who I am. Today, I’m trying to find a lawmaker who will sign on to a complaint that I will be filing with the Federal Election Commission for what I consider illegal fundraising during the election. Next week, I will probably still be looking for a lawmaker to sign on to my complaint, but I will also be trying to make sure the Office of Congressional Ethics gets set up and functioning.

Throughout the course of all of these days, I continue doing media work to try to keep the press and the public informed as to what’s happening. The press is very important for my objectives. For K Street lobbyists, money is probably the most significant tool when it comes to influence peddling. As a lobbyist for Public Citizen, that’s not an option for me. To counter the effects of money, I have to get the public involved, and I do that largely through the press, as well as through grassroots activities. I try to keep a very high profile in the press in order to carry some weight on Capitol Hill.

Leech: Do you have a usual set of reporters who you tend to work with?

Holman: Well, there is a large number of reporters who I frequently work with, and it’s a fairly diverse pool. It ranges from what I consider sort of the campus newspapers, like Roll Call and The Hill—they tend to be very effective when it comes to insider work on Capitol Hill—to national news outlets like NPR or 60 Minutes.

A 60 Minutes story led to one of the things that I was able to achieve in the 112th Congress. Insider stock trading laws had never applied to Congress. Representatives Louise Slaughter and Tim Walz had introduced a bill to apply insider-trading laws to members of Congress and congressional staff, and I was trying to promote that bill. The most I could get was nine co-sponsors on the legislation last year, and clearly it wasn’t moving anywhere.

Quite some time before I had gotten a call from Ira Rosen, who is a producer for 60 Minutes, and he was fishing for ideas, news stories, and I clued him in to this whole congressional insider-trading story. About a half a year later, 60 Minutes came out with a great television exposé on the topic, and we went from nine co-sponsors to one hundred eighty the next week. That shows the critical power of the press in getting the public involved and trying to shame Congress into doing what’s right. That’s one of the main tools that I have for trying to be able to influence legislation on Capitol Hill.

Leech: Do you have any advice for young people who are interested in jobs in policy advocacy? What would you suggest they do, if it’s something that they think sounds like an interesting career?

Holman: There are some easier ways to go about it than to get a PhD. When I was an undergrad, I debated whether to pursue my doctorate or take the easier route and go to law school, which is three years of schooling and a multiple-choice exam, and you’re out. I love academia so I chose the political science route, which was a very long and difficult path. You’re probably familiar with it.

Leech: Indeed.

Holman: I find that the PhD doesn’t make a whole lot of difference when it comes to credentials in this line of work. Much to my surprise, people on Capitol Hill tend to have higher respect for law degrees than they do for doctorates or PhDs.

Leech: Why do you think that is?

Holman: Probably because law degrees bring in more money than PhDs. Being a lawyer is a high-paying profession. A doctorate, even though far more academic and with far more expertise, brings in much less money than lawyers do, and I suspect that may be the reason. By the way, I don’t mean to suggest that I regret getting my PhD. I would have done it anyway.

Leech: What do you think makes someone a good lobbyist? What characteristics make someone good at being a policy advocate or being a lobbyist?

Holman: There are different traits for different types of lobbyists. If you’re going to be more like a hired-gun lobbyist, representing whoever employs you, the principal trait for effectiveness is networking—having that outgoing personality where you establish all these connections and you’re constantly working with coalitions and groups of people and insiders. If you’re a lobbyist who’s pursuing a particular agenda, such as I am at Public Citizen, expertise is the principal component, though the ability to network runs a close second.

Leech: You seem to do a lot of networking as well. Obviously, you have to know a lot of people to be able to approach them and suggest things to them and get them to help you.

Holman: Yes, networking is always essential for all types of lobbyists. But for a hired-gun lobbyist, it is the one trait that is most important. For my style of lobbying, it’s really the expertise that is the most important trait. But in order to get my ideas and my legislative proposals out there, I have to do the networking as well. I do a lot of it through the press. Quite a few people on Capitol Hill know who I am, even if they haven’t met me, and that’s because they frequently read about me, or see me on television, or hear me on the radio. Much of the networking can be done through that sort of media work.

Leech: What do you like the best about your job?

Holman: Quite a bit. I believe in what I’m doing. I’m not a hired-gun lobbyist who will pursue an agenda for anyone who pays me. Instead, I’m actually doing what I really want to do, and for some reason unbeknownst to me, a group named Public Citizen pays me to do what I want to do.

One thing that I really do appreciate—serving as a professional lobbyist as opposed to just an academic career—is that I get to see my ideas put in practice. I put them down on paper, try to get them passed as legislation and public policy, and actually see the final outcome of my ideas materialize in the form of legislation, regulations, and public policy.That’s something quite exciting.

Leech: Is there anything you don’t like about your job?

Holman: There’s much that angers me. Serving as a lobbyist for the past two years has been very frustrating. The Republican caucus in both the House and the Senate decided that as an electoral strategy, they would defeat any legislative proposal that the Obama administration supported, to try to make Obama look like a do-nothing president, in the hope that that would help them win the White House in 2012.

For the last two years, it’s been like hitting my head against a wall, trying to find Republicans to sign on to some of this important reform legislation. It was one of the main reasons why I couldn’t pursue the revolving-door proposal in the 112th Congress. You had to get Republicans on board or nothing would happen. They controlled the House and had a filibuster-proof minority in the Senate.

It’s been a very fruitless two years, with the sole exception of the congressional insider-trading bill. I’m hoping, as we move into the 113th Congress, now that the White House is off the table, that Republicans and Democrats will realize that their role is not just to try to get elected and to win the White House, but actually to govern, and we’ll see some more bipartisan support happening on the Hill in the next year.

Leech: How does being a lobbyist, especially a lobbyist for an organization like Public Citizen, work in terms of personal life and balance between personal and professional? Are you working all the time, or do you find time for outside things?

Holman: I mostly work. It’s an uphill struggle here on many of the battles that I’m pursuing. There aren’t that many people who have the means to be able to dedicate their activities toward these battles, so it’s a small group of reformers that are pushing many of these lobbying and campaign finance reforms. As a small group, we’ve got to put in a whole lot of work on this. I really do spend most of my time in the office or on Capitol Hill. To tell the truth, I enjoy it. I believe in what I’m doing. And because I spend most of my time pursuing what I believe in, I don’t even see it as work.