The people paid to influence Congress write the bills Congress passes.

The honest situation

They sell the access you gave them.

When you send someone to Congress, you hand them something valuable: inside knowledge of how government works and a contact list of everyone who runs it. The revolving door is when they cash that in - leaving office to work for corporations and lobbying firms, paid to use everything they learned on your dime against you.

The law barely slows it. A former House member waits one year before lobbying Congress; a former senator waits two. Then the door is wide open. One study found that 43 percent of members who left office and could lobby went on to register as lobbyists¹ - and plenty more took lobbying-firm jobs that don’t even require registering.

And the work happens in the dark. Lobbyists write whole bills and hand them over with no rule that says who wrote them. Meetings between members and lobbyists aren’t logged. And the disclosure law only covers people who lobby above a set share of their time, so a whole crowd of paid influencers never registers at all.

I can’t outlaw lobbying - the Constitution protects the right to petition the government, and it should. But I can make every piece of it visible, and I can refuse to walk through that door myself.

My pledge

The point isn’t just my pledge. It’s getting everyone else to sign one.

The reason to take this to Congress is to put every other member on the record - ask each one to sign the same pledge, and publish who signs and who won’t. Here’s the exact language every candidate gets asked to sign. It’s one of six planks in mine.

What I’ll do in Washington

Close the door. Light the room.

There’s a real bill in the House right now that would close the worst loopholes. The job is getting it to a floor vote and naming the leaders in both parties who’d rather it stayed buried.

• Cosponsor the Close the Revolving Door Act (H.R. 3554).² It puts a lifetime lobbying ban on former members, makes staff wait six years instead of one, raises the penalties, and builds a public lobbyist database.
• Close the “shadow lobbying” loophole. Anyone paid to lobby a member should have to register, no matter what share of their time it takes. Right now a big chunk of paid influence stays off the books entirely.
• Family disclosure. If a member’s spouse or adult kid becomes a lobbyist, the member says so - and steps aside on anything that touches their committee.
• Author disclosure on every bill, so if a lobbyist wrote the language, the bill says so right on its face.
• Public meeting logs for everyone. The standard I hold myself to should be the floor for the whole institution.

What I’ll do here at home

The test isn’t whether the law requires it. It’s whether you can see it.

Even if federal reform stalls again - and it has, for thirty years - the pledge itself is the lever. Other candidates can be asked if they’ll meet the same bar. The disclosure gets built one campaign at a time.

• A public meeting log for this campaign, starting now - not waiting for the seat. Every meeting with a registered federal lobbyist goes on this site.
• A candidate pledge. Every Tennessee candidate for Congress gets asked, on the record, if they’ll meet the five-point standard. The answers go here.
• Make the case for the states. Tennessee’s lobbying rules don’t require real-time meeting logs or author disclosure. I can’t change state law alone, but I can keep making the public argument for it.
• My own staff signs it too. Senior staff are in the room with lobbyists all the time. The cooling-off and disclosure rules apply to them.

What I’ll push my own party to do

Endorsement rules don’t need a floor vote.

The Tennessee Democratic Party could make signing this plank a condition of its endorsement - and pull the endorsement if anyone breaks it. That’s one committee’s decision, not a constitutional amendment. Same goes for state races. The party can hold its own candidates to a higher bar without waiting on the legislature.

The pushback I’m ready for

“A lifetime ban hurts the good guys too - nonprofits, unions, veterans groups.”

This is the line lobbyists use whenever this reform moves, and it deserves a real answer, because some of those groups do real work.

The pledge doesn’t ban advocacy. It stops former members from cashing in on the access they got in office, and it puts everyone who lobbies for a paying client in the same daylight. A union lobbyist, a nonprofit lobbyist, and a corporate lobbyist all show up in the same weekly log. Author disclosure applies whether the words came from the Sierra Club or a drug company.

Right now the corporate lobbyists work in the dark and everyone else works in the light - because the corporate ones are paid to know how to use the dark. Putting everyone on the same footing isn’t an attack on advocacy. It’s a level field. And nobody’s owed a lobbying career after Congress. If cashing in your connections is what makes the job worth taking, don’t take the job.