Anti-lobbyist Lobby Lobbies Against Washington Lobbying

Story by Casey Welsch 

| Published Oct 14, 2008

There’s a lot of controversy on Capitol Hill about the prevalence, influence and the sheer number of lobbyists influencing bills and leeching tax money from congressional programs into their respective represented fields. Most taxpayers don’t like lobbyists persuading money away from where they intended the money to go. Many lawmakers don’t like constantly being hassled by lobbyists.
   
There is a group in Washington that hates lobbyists above all else. It is an organization called the Objective Moral Group of Lobbyists Opposed to Lobbying. It is a collective of lobbyists who actively lobby congress to ban all forms of lobbying.

“As we’ve learned from being lobbyists, we all know just how much lobbying taints the democratic process,” said James Elrich, the head of OMGLOL. “It puts the taxpayer’s dollars in the pockets of whatever interest group has the smoothest talkers instead of going to programs that would actually aid the people at large.”
   
Elrich has been an anti-lobby lobbyist for the past nine years; before that, he was a high school social studies teacher in Ashville, N.C.
   
“I was pretty happy just telling the kids to read and coaching football, but I actually read some of the text in my modern problems class one day and was disgusted by the part on Congress,” Elrich said. “It turns out that there have been lobbyists influencing government decisions since the days of Ulysses S. Grant.”
   
According to Elrich, it was at that point he decided that he would work to change that.
   
“It was a real eye opener,” Elrich said. “So I figured it might as well be me to change that.”
   
At first Elrich simply petitioned the government to ban lobbyists from lobbying in the lobbies of Congress, but that proved unsuccessful. In 1999, he tried a different approach and successfully got a bill into the Senate. It was voted down 435-0 in the House of Representatives and 99-1 when Elrich reintroduced it in the Senate.
   
Sen John Edwards, D-NC, was the only Senate member who voted to pass the bill.
   
“I guess that shows he really didn’t talk to lobbyists,” Elrich said.
   
It was after these setbacks that Elrich decided that he would have to engage in some unwanted practice in order to reach his goal.
   
“None of the Congress people would listen to me as merely a voting citizen,” Elrich said. “So I decided that the only way to make them listen was to become one of the only people they listen to: a lobbyist.”
   
It was in late 1999 that Elrich started OMGLOL. At first, it was hard to convince people of the seriousness of his cause.
   
“A lot of people didn’t think I was serious, or that it was just a big joke,” Elrich said. “But with carefully selected words and lots of smooth rhetoric, I was able to convince a few of them to join on with me and lobby against lobbying.”
   
One of those people is George Merchant, a former Lincoln Savings and Loan representative and a former spokesperson for Fannie Mae.
   
“He (Elrich) approached me one day and asked if I’d like to join his organization as a lobbyist,” Merchant said. “I laughed out loud at first, but he kept persisting, and I finally saw the logic in his plan, so I signed on.”
   
Merchant, along with Elrich and a team of 36 other representatives, now actively lobbies selected members of Congress to ban the practice of lobbying in the federal government.
   
“It’s really bizarre,” Elrich said. “Before I started lobbying, all of the Congressmen I talked to wouldn’t listen to a word I said. Now they listen to everything, and I’ve even had a few speak on my behalf in session. If only regular American citizens had this kind of say in the government.”