Welcome to Capitol Hill, Where the Revolving Door Never Stops

Lobbyists are greeting the new House majority. Theodoric Meyer and Marianne Levine at Politico:

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi has yet to officially secure the speaker’s gavel, and it’s still unclear which newly elected members of Congress will land key committee slots or other positions of power in next year’s Democratic House. But after a midterm campaign in which prominent progressives refused to take corporate donations — and with Democrats weighing new ethics and lobbying rules in 2019 — lobbyists are trying to get a jump-start on buddying up to members of the new majority.

Amazon announced Wednesday that it had hired two former chiefs of staff to members of the Congressional Black Caucus, Reps. G.K. Butterfield (D-N.C.) and Yvette Clarke (D-N.Y.).

Samsung, Lyft, Spotify and Diageo, the liquor company that makes Captain Morgan rum and Smirnoff vodka, hosted a mixer the week after Election Day that drew half a dozen newly elected Democrats, according to a person who attended. Pelosi and Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-Md.), who was elected House majority leader on Wednesday, and congressional staffers showed up, too. 

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Oscar Ramirez, a Democratic lobbyist who started his own firm with two partners earlier this year, said he and his partners had helped at least half a dozen House candidates who were elected this month. He’s now offering advice to them on which staffers to hire and which committees to try to join.

“We’ve had relationships with some of these new members now for over a year,” Ramirez said. “We were helping them get elected.”

 Lobbyists are closely tracking who Democrats are hiring to staff their offices and committees: “Who’s going to be the staff director? Who’s going to be the deputy staff director?” as one lobbyist put it.

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There were 19 former Pelosi staffers who were active registered lobbyists in 2018, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, representing corporate clients including American Airlines, Facebook, General Electric, Nike and Wells Fargo.

While the number of Pelosi alumni who lobby remains relatively small, considering her decades in Washington, it has grown since she relinquished the speaker’s gavel in 2011. They include Nadeam Elshami, a former Pelosi chief of staff who’s a lobbyist at Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck; Dean Aguillen, a former director of member services for Pelosi who’s now a lobbyist at Ogilvy Government Relations; Arshi Siddiqui, a former senior policy adviser to Pelosi now at Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld; Catlin O’Neill, who now works in Facebook’s Washington office; Anne MacMillan at Invariant; Alexandra Veitch, who’s a lobbyist for Tesla; Mike Sheehy, a lobbyist at Signal Group; and Tom Manatos, who lobbies for Spotify.