Coziness between lobbyists and lawmakers a longstanding practice

If they are thirsty, a lobbyist will buy drinks.

If they’re bored, a lobbyist will score tickets to a concert, a football game, or maybe a NASCAR race.

And if they need a friend — or a friend with benefits — a lobbyist might take care of that, too.

Liaisons between those in power and those seeking to influence them have become ingrained in the Capitol’s culture, interviews with dozens of lawmakers, lobbyists and others suggest; to say that at least some lawmakers are in bed with lobbyists expresses a truth both literal and metaphorical. As Karen Handel, a Republican candidate for governor, put it last week, the Legislature is defined by “sex, lies and lobbyists.”

And money. Lobbyists spent $1.5 million last year trying to influence Georgia lawmakers, according to reports filed with the State Ethics Commission. A decade ago, they spent one-third as much.

Legislators and lobbyists socialize in bars and restaurants, on golf courses and beaches. Sometimes, away from home during the long legislative session, they become involved on a more intimate level.

“They are at camp,” said former state Rep. Tom Bordeaux of Savannah. “Unless you repeal the laws of nature, you’re going to have things happen that shouldn’t happen.”

That coziness was long accepted in the Capitol with little more than a whisper or a roll of the eyes. But it exploded into public consciousness last month when the former wife of House Speaker Glenn Richardson accused him of having an affair with a lobbyist while pushing a bill to benefit her employer. Richardson’s support from fellow Republicans already had waned because of his erratic behavior, including a suicide attempt. On Dec. 3, he stepped down as speaker and gave up his House seat.

Richardson’s resignation highlighted the degree to which lawmakers can be seduced into a lifestyle that few of their constituents would recognize: Thousand-dollar dinners, junkets to resorts, seats in the luxury boxes at sporting events and performances. All of it is paid for by corporate lobbyists, some of them young and pretty, in high heels and short skirts.

“Once you get people telling you how smart you are,” said Neill Herring, a veteran lobbyist for environmental groups, “all judgment evaporates.”

Only when they cross interests with a solicitous lobbyist do many legislators learn how fragile those relationships can be.

In 1989, the first of his eight years in the Legislature, former Rep. McCracken Poston of Ringgold was the guest of a petroleum industry lobbyist at an automobile race. Then he filed a bill the lobbyist opposed.

“How can you do that?” he said the lobbyist asked. “I thought we were friends.”

The next year, Poston alienated another lobbyist, who made it clear the lawmaker would be excluded from a popular junket.

“We’re going to miss you,” the lobbyist said, “at the Master’s.”

While the sex lives of Georgia legislators can be salacious, their less sensational connections to corporate lobbyists may be just as great a threat to the public interest, said Bill Bozarth, executive director of Common Cause of Georgia.

“We need to broaden our sense of dissatisfaction to behavior that goes beyond sexual relationships,” Bozarth said. “There are other relationships between those who would influence policy and those who make policy that are equally disturbing.”

With the Richardson scandal a fresh memory as 2010’s legislative session opens Monday, lawmakers say they will consider tougher ethics rules to bring Georgia in line with most other states. All but Georgia and 10 others restrict the value of gifts from lobbyists to legislators.

“I think clearly there’s been an excess,” Rep. David Ralston (R-Blue Ridge), the expected new speaker, said last week on Atlanta radio station WABE, “and I think we need some sensibility brought to this issue — to say, ‘We’re going to draw some lines.’ ’’

Lawmakers concerned about the coziness between their colleagues and lobbyists have tried to impose restrictions in past years: in 2005 and even a year ago, when Rep. Wendell Willard (R-Sandy Springs) introduced a bill limiting gifts to $100. The bill was “dead on arrival,” Willard said recently, blocked by House leaders.

“They didn’t want anything that applied stronger ethics rules to them.”

Bad behavior

One day long before cellphones and e-mail, state troopers were dispatched on a delicate mission: to discreetly inform every state legislator about an outbreak of a venereal disease.

This was of more than passing interest. During that year’s session, many lawmakers had lived in the same Atlanta hotel. Many had kept company with the same women.

The outbreak turned out to be a false alarm. Nevertheless, the episode retains a prominent place in the annals of bad behavior at the Capitol.

For decades, lawmakers infamously consorted with secretaries and prostitutes, some hired by lobbyists. In the 1950s, Gov. Marvin Griffin learned the political perils of upsetting social conventions when he sent his chief of staff — his brother, Cheney — to disband a state secretarial pool made up of 50 young women with dubious typing skills.

“The next morning when I came in,” Cheney Griffin later told an interviewer, “legislators were hiding behind the pillars and coming up to me and saying, ‘You fired my girlfriend.’ ’’

To keep peace in the Capitol, the governor rehired the typists.

Assignations with secretaries and other state workers remained common well into the modern era, especially while Democrats ran the Legislature, said Herring, the environmental lobbyist, who does not spend money entertaining lawmakers.

“They went for steady girlfriends,” he said. “It was one woman who was not their wife, and they would be together for years.”

By the time Republicans ascended to power in the 2000s, the Capitol had changed. More women were in office. More were in the ever-expanding lobbying corps.

But state government veterans say the atmosphere became even more promiscuous, with lawmakers and lobbyists talking openly about who was sleeping with whom.

Many legislators began making late-night excursions to bars in East Atlanta: the Standard, Six Feet Under, Milltown Arms in Cabbagetown.

In that neighborhood late one night in 2007, Rep. Ben Harbin (R-Evans) smashed his car into a utility pole; police officers reported that he smelled of alcohol, spoke with a slur and was unsteady on his feet. Harbin, the House budget chairman, pleaded guilty to reckless driving after prosecutors dropped a drunken driving charge.

“It’s a lot more like a fraternity house,” Herring said of the Capitol in recent years. “It seems like it’s a lot looser.”

A $1,256 tab

Before the Legislature convened in 2005, Rep. David Graves had separated from his wife in Macon. He kept a residence in his hometown but, in fact, lived in a Cobb County house belonging to his girlfriend of the previous two years — hospital lobbyist Julie Windom.

When they began dating, Graves was in his mid-40s, Windom in her late 20s. Their arrangement remained something of an open secret until late the night of Feb. 15, 2005.

Graves and Windom, driving separate cars, left a Buckhead restaurant where 13 legislators and lobbyists had run up a bill for $1,256. The tab included three bottles of wine, 12-year-old Scotch, bourbon, and at least one Bloody Mary. Graves chaired the House committee that oversees the liquor industry.

On the way to Windom’s house, Graves came across a police checkpoint. Minutes later, he was under arrest for driving under the influence.

The arrest might not have attracted much attention if not for Graves’ novel defense: that a provision of the state Constitution exempted him from arrest while the Legislature was in session.

At trial, testimony shed an unusual amount of light on the intimacy between legislators and lobbyists.

“Early in the session,” Graves testified, “there can be as many as five or six different receptions with different groups in the same evening. You’ll have the bankers association at the Hilton, the homeowners association at the Marriott, someplace else will have another – you know, the mayors association will be at 755 Club – all in one night.”

Alcohol flowed freely, Graves said, “very much so.”

“Oh, it’s always available,” Windom testified. “You go to a reception and there is an open bar. There are usually at least one or two receptions every evening, and then generally there is a dinner after that where wine is ordered. If you want a liquor drink, you can get liquor or whatever.”

Graves dropped the immunity defense, and a judge convicted him of drunken driving. Sentenced to jail time and probation, Graves did not run for re-election in 2006. Along the way, he and his wife divorced. He and Windom broke up.

During the trial, Graves and Windom said they didn’t know who paid for the dinner that preceded his arrest. Both were certain it wasn’t a legislator.

“I’m sure,” Windom said, “some lobbyist paid for it.”

Insatiable appetites

Lobbyists aren’t always happy to pay.

Some complain privately that lawmakers have honed insatiable appetites for fine food, wine and liquor. They tell of receiving calls from legislative offices “inviting” them to play host to dinner gatherings likely to cost $100 or more a person.

Some lobbyists have even told Willard, the ethics proposal’s sponsor, that they support a limit on gifts as a way to curb incessant requests for dinners, tickets and other gifts.

Lobbyists often end up paying the bill at the city’s most expensive restaurants, such as Kevin Rathbun’s Steak, where a 12-ounce filet mignon goes for $48, or the Oceanaire Seafood Room, which offers a $90 shellfish platter.

For lobbyists wooing lawmakers, an open bar in a hotel hospitality suite or a steak and a Scotch at the end of a legislative day will no longer suffice. Nor does entertaining only during the session.

As majority leader, Rep. Jerry Keen (R-St. Simons Island), held enormous sway over which bills passed or failed in the House. So on 16 days last June and 13 more days in July, lobbyists reported spending $3,950 to entertain Keen — even though no legislative business was conducted either month.

Keen, the third-ranking House official, received almost $50,000 in meals, trips and other gifts from lobbyists from 2005 through 2009, eclipsed only by Richardson and former Speaker Pro Tem Mark Burkhalter. Keen did not return telephone calls seeking comment.

The week of June 7, records show, Keen was treated every day of the week: a $73 meal that Sunday in Nashville, compliments of Blue Cross/Blue Shield; lunch on Monday and dinner on Tuesday; convention expenses of $295 a day the rest of the week, paid by the Georgia Automobile Dealers Association.

In July, lobbyists kept Keen busy on three successive Fridays. On July 17, it was golf and lunch ($129) and dinner ($204), paid by Daiichi-Sankyo, a Japanese pharmaceutical company. On July 24, it was golf ($125) and travel expenses ($50), compliments of Georgia Crown Distributing and Coca-Cola. On July 31, it was golf again ($60), paid for by the Entertainment Software Association, followed by dinner ($43) and concert tickets ($152), both courtesy of Georgia Power.

All, however, paled in comparison to the dinner that Oglethorpe Power Corp. bought for Keen on Oct. 28.

The price of his meal: $412.

‘Easy seduction’

Perhaps the most amazing thing about Richardson’s downfall wasn’t an affair with a lobbyist. It’s that so many lawmakers now say the relationship had been common knowledge since at least 2007 but still drew no condemnation.

Lawmakers rarely challenge their colleagues’ behavior. During a debate over same-sex marriage in 2004, Rep. Alisha Morgan (D-Austell) broke protocol when she called out philandering lawmakers.

“I don’t go in anybody’s bedroom when you have a wife at home and you have somebody else up here,” Morgan, who opposed a ban on gay unions, told other lawmakers.

They were appalled — by her candor.

Morgan recalled the reaction: “Oh my God, how could you say that when this person’s wife is in the chamber?”

Adultery is “accepted behavior” at the Capitol, she said. “It’s just common knowledge. It is hypocrisy when you talk about family values when this is what you’re doing in your own lives to your families.”

Richardson’s resignation stirred rumors about other affairs. Political blogs picked up unsubstantiated stories about lobbyists who supposedly bore children out of wedlock with legislators, about sex in Capitol offices, even about lobbyists who slept with multiple lawmakers as their bills advanced through the Legislature.

Women lobbyists, who make up one-third of Georgia’s 1,700 registered lobbyists, say they are getting too much of the blame for legislators’ behavior.

One lobbyist, herself rumored to have had affairs with legislators, said male competitors have stoked gossip to steal business. The lobbyist spoke on condition of anonymity to protect her clients, but said she and other women in the Capitol have been maligned.

“It’s going to be hard to be attractive at the Capitol now,” she said. “We are not all strippers and whores.”

Some in the Capitol, including Ralston and Willard, say misbehavior is not as widespread as it has been depicted.

But other current and former legislators say their colleagues have faltered by thinking the schmoozing and flirting by lobbyists are anything more than calculated business moves.

“You’ve got a lot of people telling you how great you are, how interesting you are, how powerful you are,” said Bordeaux, the former lawmaker from Savannah. “It’s an easy seduction.”

Even legislative interns seem to grasp the allure.

A yearbook published by the 2009 House interns includes a section of “superlatives.” It’s a typical list: Best dressed, class clown, best overall.

And then this: Most likely to have lunch with a lobbyist.

Staff writer Cameron McWhirter and former AJC reporter Ann Hardie contributed to this article.

How we got the story

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution began investigating the culture of Georgia’s state Capitol in 2007, after a Democratic operative filed an ethics complaint claiming House Speaker Glenn Richardson had an affair with a lobbyist while advocating for a bill that benefited her employer.

In 2007, and again over the past month after Richardson’s resignation, reporters interviewed dozens of current and former state legislators, lobbyists, historians and political activists. Many declined to speak for attribution, citing the sensitive nature of the topic. Much of this article is based on those interviews.

Other material in the article comes from lobbyists’ disclosure reports filed with the State Ethics Commission, court records associated with a drunken driving case against a former legislator, and old newspaper articles.

Reporters also confirmed historical details in two books: “Georgia Governors in an Age of Change,” edited by Harold P. Henderson and Gary L. Roberts, and “Who Runs Georgia?” by Calvin Kytle and James A. Mackay. Both were published in 1998 by the University Press of Georgia.