Regulatory capture or government at work?

 The changeover in majority party is always exciting.  But will we get better government?



GOP staffers and lobbyists have already been working behind the
scenes to game out how they’ll approach putting together a budget and
how the budget reconciliation process would work. Those efforts will be
complicated by funding cliffs in the spring that the Congress will also
have to deal with at the same time.  Senate Republican leadership’s promise to return the chamber to
“regular order” would also create a lot of activity with bills going
through committees and more amendments being considered.


“From my perspective, everybody both on the Hill and off the Hill are
going to be working a whole lot harder with Leader McConnell and the
Senate returning to regular order,” said Hazen Marshall, a lobbyist at
the Republican firm the Nickles Group. “People are going to be working
late. It’s going to be a brand-new world for staff on the Hill who
haven’t gone through that in a long time.”





Those shifts are likely to boost the lobbying industry’s revenues, which have been fairly flat over the past several years.  BGR Group’s Loren Monroe predicted that big-ticket legislation like a
transportation bill will increase the importance of coalition building,
especially as committees become more relevant.


“Assuming the GOP is in the Senate majority next year, there will be a
huge increase in traditional legislative activities — such as hearings,
markups, oversight and floor amendments,” Monroe said. “Coalitions will
be necessary to be able to cover all the moving parts and to support
passage of the backlog of major legislative items. Those coalitions are
much more likely to be led by Republicans or Republican-leaning firms.”





K Street’s Republicans hope for uptick in business - Anna Palmer - POLITICO.com