The Republican rout on Election Day didn’t only shake up Capitol Hill, it has caused a realignment on K Street. Republicans — current staffers, former members, and especially anyone with ties to the incoming majority leader and chairmen of powerful committees — are now in high demand.
Republican firms are hiring new staff and picking up new clients while liberal and bipartisan firms beef up their Republican bench. All in all, it’s a “robust, effervescent job market for Republicans,” in the words of Sam Geduldig, partner in the GOP firm Clark, Geduldig, Cranford & Nielsen.
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The luckiest group may be the crowd surrounding the presumptive new Senate majority leader. “Mitch McConnell and the other leadership have a large following” on K Street already, points out Ivan Adler, a lobbyist headhunter at the McCormick Group, “and those folks will certainly be the biggest winners.”
If you’re a Republican lobbyist with a close tie to McConnell or to the incoming chairmen of the “money committees” — Finance, Banking, Commerce, and Appropriations — your value has just gone up.
Forty former and current McConnell staffers are in the Revolving Door database maintained by the Center for Responsive Politics, the largest number for any sitting U.S. senator. McConnell’s most prominent alumni on K Street might be former chiefs of staff Hunter Bates and Billy Piper.
Piper works at K Street firm Fierce Isakowitz & Blalock, where his clients include manufacturers, airlines, banks, technology firms and energy companies. Bates lobbies at Republic Consulting, where his clients include the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers, the Biotechnology Industry Organization, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Expect these impressive client lists to grow.
Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Ala., will likely be the next Banking Committee chairman, Sen. Thad Cochran, R-Miss., will take the Appropriations gavel, and Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, will take over the tax-writing Finance Committee. These three men also have plenty of former aides on K Street — aides who will now be in higher demand.
To some extent, the GOP takeover increases the value of all Republican lobbyists. Former GOP Senate aide Steven Irizarry was promoted Wednesday to managing partner at the bipartisan firm Roberti & White.
For firms already employing GOP staffers, the power change means more clients. This pop in clients won’t show up in public records immediately—firms have six weeks to file new registrations. But Geduldig said on the Thursday after the election, “I got two new opportunities [for clients] today. It feels good.”
K Street is also snapping Republicans up off Capitol Hill. For instance, Cesar Conda, chief of staff for Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla. (before moving on to the senator’s political action committee), announced Thursday he was returning to his old K Street lobbying firm, Navigators Global. Lobbyists at other firms said they plan to make their Republican hires in the coming weeks.
Not all Republican offices are getting visits from headhunters, though. Staffers for the famously combative Sen. Ted Cruz swear to me that K Street isn’t looking to poach from Cruz’s office. Cruz’s biggest fights have pitted him against the business lobby, and he is not seen as a terribly persuadable lawmaker.
Improving the labor market even more for Republicans, many GOP lobbyists will return to Capitol Hill to fill the offices of newly elected members (there will be nine more GOP senators, after all) as well as committee staff — and majority staffs are larger than minority staffs.
Democrats have the opposite job market dynamic: fewer Senate jobs and less demand on K Street. But the nature of the Senate means industry still needs some Democratic votes to overcome filibusters. “I don’t think it’s all that grim for the Democrats in the Senate,” Adler says, because companies will be looking for Democratic lobbyists who can help persuade the handful of minority-party senators needed to overcome a filibuster.
This all assumes that Congress will, in fact, pass legislation — which is not a given. The appropriations process has become moribund, riding on continuing resolutions since the GOP earmark ban in 2010. Given a lame duck president and divided government, it’s hard to imagine what will get passed — and thus what work lobbyists will have to do.
Republican lobbyists are clearly pining for an active two years — the last two years of gridlock have dragged down lobbying revenue across K Street. But this puts K Street at odds with the Republican base on many issues. Immigration reform, a more lively appropriations process, and renewal of the Export-Import Bank are among the business lobby’s top hopes from a GOP Congress. All three ideas find stiff resistance in Tea Party circles, to which the GOP majorities are sensitive.
Tax reform might be a rare opportunity for Republicans to push legislation that pleases both their business base and their grassroots. “I think a lot of people are hopeful that Paul Ryan and Orrin Hatch will come up with a comprehensive tax proposal,” Geduldig says. “Taxes are something that involves everyone,” Adler notes, “so if they take that on, it’s great for K Street.”
Timothy P. Carney, the Washington Examiner’s senior political columnist, can be contacted at [email protected]. His column appears Sunday and Wednesday on washingtonexaminer.com.
