Stealth Lobbying

"Stealth lobbying occurs when lobby groups make hidden requests for low-salience legislation. The politician has an interest in doing the things that will help secure reelection while avoiding things that might generate negative attention. Stealth lobbying achieves this by facilitating microlegislation - very short pieces of legislation requested by lobby groups and added to amendments, bills, and committee reports. Microlegislation helps lobbyists obtain benefits that can easily mean millions of dollars for the client, especially if the client is a business. For Becton Dickinson, encouraging hospitals to check for infections before discharge (or even before admission) would, the company must have hoped, result in a significant increase in sales of its BD-Max testing devices. The potential financial benefit to the company far exceeds the value of lobbyists' paychecks. But importantly, the long-term effects of microlegislation are much less important to the individual lobbyist relative to the short-term benefit of securing written evidence that the lobbyist successfully persuaded a senator to introduce the microlegislation on the company's behalf. Lobbyists can point to this success in efforts to renew their contracts or to make pitches to potential new clients. For Senator Menendez, there was little reason to expect that anyone would notice any of the following events, all of which had to occur together for people to suspect a quid pro quo: (1) BD requested microlegislation that was (2) offered by Senator Menendez as an amendment to the Chairman's Mark and (3) was associated with campaign contributions from BD executives or lobbyists for BD to the Menendez campaign"--