Corporate Political Activities Deskbook provides a thorough grounding in the current state of the law on federal and state campaign finance, pay-to-play, lobbying, gift compliance, and more. It serves as a practical manual for in-house attorneys and others who advise corporations about involvement in the political process, suggesting ways that corporations can utilize the available avenues of interacting with the government while avoiding negative press and legal and regulatory attention.
Among the developments discussed in the new 2018 edition are:
- Trump ethics pledge: Non-career political appointees to the executive branch of the Trump administration must sign an ethics pledge. The “Trump Pledge” replaces a similar ethics pledge that President Obama required for appointees, but with some key differences: The pledge covers prohibition on the acceptance of gifts from registered lobbyists and restricts appointees from working on matters involving a former client or employer for which the appointee worked, or on which the appointee lobbied, in the previous two years. The pledge also imposes certain restrictions on lobbying activity on appointees upon leaving government service.
- Ban on contributions by federal contractors: In Wagner v. FEC, a federal contractor was fined a $34,000 civil penalty for a $200,000 contribution to a “super PAC,” which the Federal Election Commission (FEC) found to have violated the ban on federal contractor contributions under Federal Election Campaign Act. The penalty is significant because while the FEC previously suggested that the federal contractor ban applied to super PAC contributions, it had not previously found actual violations to have occurred, leaving open some question regarding the FEC’s appetite for imposing penalties for such contributions.
- Surveys of state and federal laws. The at-a-glance charts of state and federal lobbying laws and state contribution laws have been updated.
This essential and timely treatise is available on PLI PLUS, our research database. If you’d like to order a print copy, please email libraryrelations@pli.edu or call 877.900.5291.