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ATR, AWF demand probe of SEIU’s Stern for illegal lobbying

By: Erick Erickson (Diary)  |  November 16th, 2009 at 09:18 AM  | 

RESIZE: AAA

Ed Morrisey emailed to let me know about this story. This is huge and well done.

At 9 am ET today, Americans for Tax Reform and the Alliance for Worker Freedom will deliver a letter to both chambers of Congress and to US Attorney Channing Phillips in Washington DC, demanding a federal investigation of Andrew Stern, president of the SEIU. They will claim that Stern, who stopped registering as a federal lobbyist in 2007, has continued his lobbying efforts. They claim to have compiled evidence of Stern’s lobbying from the recently released White House visitor logs, media reports — and Stern’s own Twitter feed, in what has to be a first for the social networking service.

The organizations make out a strong case that Andy Stern is still lobbying and is in violation of federal law.

In seven months, Stern visited the White House 22 times, or more than once every two weeks.

With a pretty loose definition of what a lobbyist is, Stern most likely would be considered one. The problem, of course, is that we’re asking the Obama Justice Department to do the investigating.

Nonetheless, this is well done.

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  • seandparnell

    I haven’t seen the WH logs, but unless Stern spent all 8 hours of each of those 22 days at the White House, I don’t think that the numbers show what is being claimed. That’s because people don’t record their “lobbying” time by day, but instead by hour (or even by minute). So if he spent 3 hours at the White House each time he went up, that’s a total of 66 hours spread over 30 weeks (give or take), which at 40 hours/week (and I’m pretty certain Stern’s putting in more than 40 hours/week) is 1,200 hours. 66 divided by 1,200 is just over 5%.

    Put Stern down for 50 hours a week, and that percentage shrinks even further. And “preparation” is pretty minimal for a guy like Stern – he knows his issues, he doesn’t exactly need to spend a lot of time brushing up on the details of card check.

    To me, this complaint by ATR and AWF just illustrates even further the utter nonsense of the anti-lobbyist fervor that the Obama administration is in the grips of (not to mention a certain Senator from Arizona and other grandstanding politicians who don’t appreciate the First Amendment role of lobbyists).

    It is amusing at first to see the Obama administration caught up in their own silly anti-lobbyist rhetoric. But I fear lasting damage to the First Amendment if we just add to the frenzy.

    Sean Parnell
    President
    Center for Competitive Politics
    http://www.campaignfreedom.org

  • http://hillbillypolitics.com Steph C

    Even if nothing comes of it at the federal level, because of beings like Holder and the progressive stranglehold on Congress, in the eyes of the people outside the beltway, it will become something.

    ATR, especially, has an extensive network.

    Either Congress cleans itself up and we’ll do the job in a way Congress will not like.

  • http://hillbillypolitics.com Steph C

    the White House, too.

  • texas214

    Stern declassified himself as”lobbyist” so Obama wouldn’t have to meet with mean, nasty, un-American lobbyist.

  • Scope

    and the more people know about Andy Stern, and SEIU, the better. To remain silent would make it appear that what he and his thugs are doing is OK. Unfortunately, you can’t ask the wolf to patrol the henhouse.

    It is similar to Obama asking the Congress to not investigate or do anything about the Ft. Hood shooting until the military completes it’s investigation. Some in the military knew quite well that Hassan was getting more and more radical with his powerpoint presentations, his statements to other military officers, and his apparent agitation because of being deployed to Afghanistan, yet did nothing. Wether it was because of PC or the fear of losing their own jobs for being called racists, they owed much more to the military members at Ft. Hood, even if it meant losing their jobs. Now those same people, along with the FBI who claimed that it was not a terrorist incident will be in charge of investigating themselves. Neither the Ft. Hood or the Stern investigation will meet with much success.

  • Scope

    and the more people know about Andy Stern, and SEIU, the better. To remain silent would make it appear that what he and his thugs are doing is OK. Unfortunately, you can’t ask the wolf to patrol the henhouse.

    It is similar to Obama asking the Congress to not investigate or do anything about the Ft. Hood shooting until the military completes it’s investigation. Some in the military knew quite well that Hassan was getting more and more radical with his powerpoint presentations, his statements to other military officers, and his apparent agitation because of being deployed to Afghanistan, yet did nothing. Wether it was because of PC or the fear of losing their own jobs for being called racists, they owed much more to the military members at Ft. Hood, even if it meant losing their jobs. Now those same people, along with the FBI who claimed that it was not a terrorist incident will be in charge of investigating themselves. Neither the Ft. Hood or the Stern investigation will meet with much success.

  • Spartan4Life

    This is something I don’t get. Weren’t public employee unions illegal at some point?

    The fact that these people get paid with tax dollars and have zero interest in promoting fiscal sanity while throwing their political support to one party over the other is a prescription for a downward spiral of our country.

    If public employee unions aren’t illegal, they should be.

  • Achance

    rights in ’68 by executive order. The rights were considerably expanded under Clinton. At the state level, bargaining is a creature of state law, some have it, some don’t. Other than Alaska and, sorta, California, pretty much all of the ones that have fully unionized public employees are completely controlled by Democrats and their union friends.