The three candidates vying to be House speaker have considerably fewer staff ties with K Street than the man one of them will replace.
Since he took office in 1991, Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) has had at least 13 staffers in his personal office and an additional 51 staffers in his other offices who worked as lobbyists before or after their Hill position. Because lobbying and staff salary records are not readily available for much of the 1990s, the figures understate his lobbying ties.
With the Republican vote for speaker looming on Thursday, we have taken a look at how speaker candidates Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) and Daniel Webster (R-Fla.) stack up.
McCarthy, who took office in 2007, has had a total of 10 revolvers on his staff either in his personal or leadership offices. However, only two current staffers have lobbying experience, his chief of staff, Tim Berry, and a senior policy adviser, Matt Kellogg. Berry served as a lobbyist between 2005 and 2010 for Time Warner, and Kellogg joined McCarthy last month after lobbying for the Independent Petroleum Association of America. Both work for McCarthy in the office of the House Republican Majority Leader.
Chaffetz currently has three former lobbyists working for him on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee and has seen another come and go since he joined Congress in 2009. His communications director, Rebecca Edgar, and staff director, Sean McLaughlin both joined his committee office earlier this year from Podesta Group Inc, where they worked as lobbyists. His deputy staff director and former senior adviser Rachel Weaver also had a brief foray lobbying on behalf of Airports Council International in 2008.
Joining the House in 2011, Webster is the most junior member of the three, and has only had one revolver ever on his staff. Sam Olswanger worked as a legislative correspondent in the first half of 2011 before lobbying for Akin Gump Strauss Hauer and Feld LLP beginning in 2013.
