Joshua Rosenstein was quoted in an article on The Hill this week regarding the policies placed upon lobbying under the Obama Administration:
“I think that the spirit of the executive order is good, and the idea behind it was certainly sound. The problems are unintended consequences that the executive order had and a reality of the way Washington works,” said Joshua Ian Rosenstein, a partner at Sandler Reiff Lamb Rosenstein & Birkenstock who handles lobbying compliance issues.
“An administration can try as hard as it wants, but as long as a statute itself is flawed,” Rosenstein said, “everything the administration does to fix it is just patchwork.”
USA Today quoted Joe Birkenstock in an article concerning potentially improper campaign contributions to several congressional and presidential candidates:
While campaigns cannot investigate every donation they receive, “getting multiple maxed-out contributions on the same day from an identifiable group of first-time political donors that the campaign doesn’t already know well is definitely a yellow light,” said election lawyer Joe Birkenstock. “It doesn’t necessarily mean there’s anything wrong, but that’s generally the kind of fact pattern a compliance team should follow up on.”
Joshua Rosenstein was quoted in a Mother Jones article regarding Jeb Bush’s lobbying reform plan that would impose a six-year ban on lawmakers becoming lobbyists:
“You have countless cases of very high-profile former members who may well be in contact with their former colleagues, but don’t meet the threshold and therefore aren’t subject to the restrictions,” says Joshua Rosenstein, an attorney with Sandler Reiff who advises clients on compliance with lobbying regulations. “You can already sit on the sidelines and advise clients on congressional policy or the reality of moving a bill through either chamber without ever running afoul of anything.”
Rosenstein said that without tightening up the definition of “lobbying,” prohibiting members from doing it doesn’t mean a whole lot.
“The law defines lobbying and if the definition is too permissive having restrictions on lobbyists doesn’t really matter because there are so many holes you can drive a truck through,” he says.
Joshua Rosenstein was quoted in an Open Secrets article about Jeb Bush’s call for a six-year ban on lobbying for former lawmakers:
When it comes to a revolving door ban, the key is what it restricts, according to Joshua Rosenstein, a Washington, D.C. lawyer and expert on lobbying. If they want to, for instance, former members can structure their new careers so that they don’t have to register as lobbyists by spending less than 20 percent of their time per quarter working on lobbying-related activity.
Often, when former lawmakers do that, they’re “selling their Rolodex,” Rosenstein said. Per quarter, “they can make several very important contacts to former colleagues…for which the client would be very grateful,” he said. Then the former lawmakers simply wait for the day they’re eligible to lobby.
It’s unclear from Bush’s speech how he himself defines lobbyist or lobbying activity, but to have a no-contact rule for 6 years–so that all advocacy contact by former members of Congress would be banned–would be substantive, Rosenstein said.
“What’s unclear is whether Jeb’s proposal means to extend the current precise ban to six years, or instead ban Members from becoming lobbyists for six years. And that makes a difference,” he said. “If it’s a ban on advocacy contacts, that’s a stronger prohibition than merely a prohibition on becoming a registered lobbyist.”
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“Congress will normally revamp a lobbyist regulation scheme in the wake of a scandal involving lobbyists,” Rosenstein said of the likelihood of passing a lobbying regulation bill. “Absent that, it’s probably hard to do, as a practical matter.”
Dara Lindenbaum will join former Sen. Nina Turner (D-OH), Sen. Roger Katz (R-ME) and Del. Alfonso Lopez (D-VA) on a panel moderated by Michele Jawando to discuss the challenges and opportunities to removing structural barriers so that voters have a voice in the democratic process.
The panel is on July 7, 2015 at 10 a.m. at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.
Joshua Rosenstein was quoted in article on Open Secrets about lobbying donations for presidential candidates in the Senate:
“Both [Paul and Sanders] have publicly decried the influence of corporations in American public life,” Joshua Rosenstein, a Washington, D.C.-based lawyer and expert on lobbying, said. “If you are a corporation, is it possible that you view each of them as relative lost cause? Sure.”
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Despite that fact that making contributions may be good for business, Rosenstein noted, many lobbyists also donate for ideological reasons.
“While they certainly have to be pragmatists about what they’re doing…and that certainly drives some of the giving,” he said, “there might very well be an equal or greater ideological segment of the lobbying community that aren’t driven by pragmatic reasons,” Rosenstein said.
On Tuesday June 16th, Joe Birkenstock was a guest on The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell on MSNBC, where he discussed campaign finance deadlines and filings for the presidential election.
Neil Reiff discussedcampaign/Super-PAC coordination this week with Campaigns & Elections:
Get the firewalls up before working on expanding the clients, advised Neil Reiff, a campaign finance attorney at Sandler, Reiff, Lamb, Rosenstein & Birkenstock, P.C. “The big thing is having enough personnel to properly service both sides of the firewall. There’s no mobility between the independent and coordinated sides.”
Before going through the effort and time consuming expense of structuring a firewall, though, firms should take stock of their client list and what business they’re pitching, said Reiff. “Just because you create a firewall doesn’t mean the business is necessarily there.”
This week, Neil Reiff discussed donor-operated Super PACs with Bloomberg Politics:
“On some level, it’s showing the system works,” says Neil Reiff, the former deputy general counsel at the Democratic National Committee, now a partner at Sandler Reiff Lamb Rosenstein & Birkenstock in Washington. “Someone can just go out and do this on their own.”
The entire Bloomberg Politics article can be found here.
Sandler Reiff and several of our attorneys were recently recognized for outstanding client service and cutting-edge legal work by two prominent legal ranking services.
Chambers USA 2015 ranked firm co-founder Joe Sandler and recent recruit Joe Birkenstock in the Nationwide Government: Political Law category, explaining that the firm “offers a breadth of expertise across a spectrum of issues including election law, lobbying and campaign finance.” They noted that Sandler is regarded by the market as “one of the most respected election lawyers in the country,” and offers clients a breadth of expertise in the political law field, including strengths in campaign finance, lobbying regulations, government ethics and tax issues.
Chambers described Birkenstock as “an established political law practitioner with a fine reputation,” adding that his peers describe him as “very smart and analytical.” They explain that Birkenstock is well versed in handling federal compliance and regulatory issues as they pertain to political parties and candidates, as well as corporations and nonprofit organizations.
SuperLawyers listed firm co-founders Joe Sandler and Neil Reiff, along with Joe Birkenstock, in the Legislative and Government Affairs category. Sandler Reiff is the only firm outside the AmLaw 200 megafirms with three attorneys listed as DC SuperLawyers, reflecting our firm’s prominence among boutique political law practices and our ability to deliver sophisticated, first-rate legal services in a timely and cost-effective manner.