No one is certain when Congress will leave for its summer recess. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) has said the Senate will recess only when it has passed several high profile bills, including lobby reform. Progress on this legislation has stalled because Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) has used parliamentary procedure to stop Reid from appointing the Senate conferees. One solution to the problem may be that the House and Senate pass identical bills to avoid a conference. However, reform groups have raised concerns about this process, since it may result in weakened legislation.

DeMint wants assurances that the conference between the House and Senate will keep strong earmark disclosure provisions. However, Reid cannot guarantee specific outcomes. As a result, DeMint has not budged. The Senate bill has strong earmark provisions, but the House bill does not address the issue. Instead, the House addressed the issue through rules changes. DeMint wants both Houses to lock down the rules in legislation.

Democratic leaders want to pass the lobby reform legislation, which also contains ethics changes. It was the first piece of legislation Democrats undertook in the Senate when they took over as the majority party, passing the bill 96-2. A similar measure passed overwhelmingly in the House by a 396-22 margin on May 24.

Since the bill passed the House, staff from the House and Senate have been meeting to iron out differences between the two bills — a sort of pre-conference. Roll Call ($) reports rumors that Reid and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) have worked out a plan to use the staff work in creating a unified bill and have each house pass the new legislation. Because the new legislation would be identical, there would be no need for a conference, and upon passage, the bill could be sent directly to the president for his signature.

This rumor has made groups monitoring the legislation very nervous. There are numerous technical issues that were different between the Senate and House bills. Additionally, there are at least two major issues that need to be resolved. One issue deals with bundling of campaign contributions and the other with slowing down the revolving door. The House bill requires registered lobbyists to disclose their bundled campaign contributions, but the Senate bill does not. The Senate bill requires a two-year cooling off period before legislators and key staff can lobby Congress, but the House leaves it at the current one-year cooling off period.

On July 17, reform groups wrote a letter to Reid and Pelosi expressing concern that the legislation will be further watered down, reducing the importance of the reforms. In particular, the groups said any effort to gut the bundling provisions by dropping a requirement for lobbyists to report bundled campaign contributions as part of lobby disclosure, and simply require candidates and political committees to report to the Federal Election Commission, is not productive. It is not clear what new information this would produce, and the reform groups said it would result in a "complicated, time-consuming and ineffectual approach that is in fundamental conflict with the goals and purposes of the lobbying disclosure reforms."

Some Republicans have already started to complain about this strategy, arguing that bypassing a conference would be cause for trying to slow down the legislation. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) said in a July 20 news conference that he prefers the conference committee process because it will give the minority party more influence over the content of the final bill. However, he said he has not been able to convince DeMint to change his position, and will not attempt to block the identical bill strategy, saying "I'd rather have the Republicans at the table than not. But I do think it's time to act." For his part, Reid has said that the Senate will not leave for recess until the lobbying reform legislation is addressed.