While many corporations seek to influence the decisions made by the government with the double whammy of campaign donations and lobbyists, Comcast pursued this strategy on what one consumer advocate described as a “grander scale.”

“Comcast did a sophisticated, well-designed, expensive lobbying campaign and it touched all the right buttons. It played its hands very well—I give them credit for using their political clout effectively,” said Andrew Jay Schwartzman, senior vice president of the Media Access Project, which campaigned against the merger. ”But the real scandal about the political process is what is legal; it’s that Comcast didn’t have to break any laws in order to get its way.”

Birth of one of the world’s largest media conglomerates
The likelihood of a Comcast and NBC-Universal merger was first reported in September 2009. It drew outrage from a spate of public advocates, including Minnesota U.S. Sen. Al Franken, who said the merger would lead to fewer options for the public.

“I am convinced that without significant changes to protect consumers, merging a company who provides programming and one who provides the pipes that carry said programming would be a raw deal for Minnesotans and independent content producers alike,” Franken wrote on his blog in February 2010.

Franken also rightly predicted that pressure would come from private interests over the merger deal.

“Fights like this one are more than worth having, they’re essential to preserving the fabric of our democracy,” Franken wrote. “I know full well that by taking positions like this, I’m inviting special interest groups to spend a lot of money to defeat me down the road. That’s OK by me—because corporations getting their way isn’t some bad medicine Americans need to swallow—we can stand, fight and win if we work together.”

A spokesperson for Comcast declined to answer answer any questions related to the company’s political activity.

But according to the company’s statement on political and trade activity, Comcast uses public policy advocacy, lobbying, political contributions and involvement in third party organizations to act on public policy issues of concern to the company: ”The political and trade association activities of the Company are directed to influencing the wide variety of public policy issues that impact the company’s business.”

That sort of activity can be expensive. Comcast has dumped tens of millions of dollars into the political system in the last decade, according to Federal Election Commission documents. Comcast has pumped more money into its political and lobbyist spending every year since 2001.

“There’s always an element of risk and gambling involved when it comes to influence peddling on Capitol Hill, what lobbyists and special interest groups and corporations do is make the odds the best they can in their favor,” said Craig Holman of Public Citizen. ”It’s all designed to buy influence and it usually does work. But not always.”

Pulling the strings of those who pull the strings
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC), appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate, was responsible for considering the Comcast and NBC-Universal merger.

Putting pressure on an appointed group of commissioners like the FCC isn’t actually that different from pressuring Congress.

“As a matter of fact, it can be harder for the public to trace,” Holman said. “It’s quite difficult to analyze, much of the lobbying activity for instance when it comes to working with FCC commissioners or others like that doesn’t get reported, it very frequently is not disclosed as lobbying activity.”

Comcast spent more than $75 million on federal lobbyists alone in the last ten years, with much of that sum coming in recent years, according to Federal Election Commission records compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics. Last year alone, during which much of the merger process took place, the company employed 109 federal lobbyists and lobbied both houses of Congress and the FCC.

The money a company spends on lobbying is important, Holman said, but even more important is the amount of money they can stuff into political campaigns.

“Besides direct campaign contributions, which are traceable from PACs, they will do bundling activity, which is very difficult to trace, and in many cases untraceable,” Holman said. “They will also now with Citizens United do direct corporate expenditures through third party groups, which are entirely untraceable, but their lobbyists will be on the Hill letting the lawmakers know what they’re doing with their money.”

While waiting on FCC approval of the merger in the 2010 election cycle, Comcast upped the amount of money they were directly donating through their political action committee, spending $3.5 million on political campaigns (favoring Democrats).

“There can also be the direct campaign contributor factor to any lawmakers, they can pull the strings of members of Congress and get members of Congress to apply pressure on FCC commissioners to vote a certain way on various issues, and they do,” Holman said. “The agency regulations are every bit as important as lawmaking, every lobbyist worth his or her salt knows that.”

Members of the Federal Communications Commission are appointed by the president and approved by the Senate. But Congress isn’t completely powerless in regards to the FCC, as recent Republican Senate disapproval of the FCC’s stance on net neutrality shows.

In a January letter to the FCC about the Comcast merger, Reps. Greg Walden (R-Ore.) and Lee Terry (R-Neb.) condemned the “heavy-handed tactics of an overreaching FCC” and threatened that they will be “examining whether changes in the FCC’s transaction review process are needed as we exercise congressional oversight in the weeks to come.”

In fact, 88 of 97 members of Congress who sent a January letter urging immediate passage of the Comcast merger had received money from Comcast’s political action committee, according to data from the Center for Responsive Politics.

In through the revolving door
By law, there’s never more than three members of one political party on the FCC, which can lead to partisanship around close issues.

“Even though FCC commissioners are not elected officials, many of them are exceedingly loyal to the elected officials who appointed them or who are responsible for them getting their appointments, they tend to be very partisan,” Holman said. “They’re made very aware as to who the big players are on Capitol Hill.”

The FCC voted 4-1 in January 2011 to approve the Comcast and NBC-Universal merger with some conditions, eliciting an outraged reaction from Franken: ”The Commission is supposed to protect the public interest, not corporate interests. But what we see today is an effort by the FCC to appease the very companies it’s charged with regulating.”

It was only a few months after the decision to approve the merger that Comcast hired FCC Commissioner Meredith Attwell Baker, who supported the merger, was hired as the new Comcast vice president for government affairs, what’s known in Capitol circles as the “revolving door.”

“It had the appearance of something that was problematic, but I don’t have any evidence,” Schwartzman said. ”You just don’t know the impact this kind of lobbying actually has or not, but the cumulative effect is pretty clear.”

Although the company pumped millions of dollars into the political system around the time the merger was being considered, the new Comcast saw a total revenue of $14.3 billion in just the second financial quarter of 2011.

Sign directing traffic to K Street, home to a row of infamous Washington, DC lobbying firms. (Photo/ M.V. Jantzen, Flickr)

It was one of the chief vows of the Democratic Party as it took control of both congressional chambers in 2007: to sever the cozy relationships between lobbyists and lawmakers brought to light by the Jack Abramoff scandals.

Congress passed sweeping lobbying and ethics reforms last year, and this was the first convention season under the stringent new rules. Yet, despite the enactment of the new regulations, campaign-finance watchdogs argue that much remains to be done to stem the abuses. The groups are pointing to the national conventions as evidence that ethics laws, both new and old, leave gaping loopholes still to be addressed.

“The law clearly had an effect,” said Josh Zaharoff, assistant director of campaign finance at Common Cause. “But there’s still very much of that element of companies using the conventions to gain access … Clearly these corporations saw it as a chance to buy influence.”

Zaharoff wasn’t kidding.

In Minneapolis last week, Republican leaders vowed to scale back the events surrounding their convention in recognition of those suffering from the arrival of Hurricane Gustav on Monday. Yet that call did little to break the partying spirit of convention attendees. Instead of scrapping the parties, many sponsors simply reconfigured them as charity events for victims of the storm.

Nancy Watzman of Political Party Time, a project of the Sunlight Foundation, a watchdog group focused on the federal government, trekked tirelessly from gala to gala in both Minneapolis and Denver — usually to be turned back at the door. She reported from Minnesota last week on a big-pharma-sponsored breakfast featuring an appearance by Rep. Michael Rogers (R-Mich.).

ABC’s Brian Ross discovered Mississippi River paddle-wheel boat excursions for Ohio’s GOP delegation sponsored by the chemical industry. Oil companies, he found, hosted the California delegation with a pig roast.

Despite Gustav, Ross concluded, “corporate lobbyists went ahead with their plans … to spend millions of dollars entertaining key Republican lawmakers and officials.”

The Democratic National Convention in Denver (DNC), meanwhile, looked like a party marathon. The DNC boasted more than 400 events sponsored by outside interest groups, according to a document created by Quinn Gillespie & Associates, a lobbying firm, and publicized by the Sunlight Foundation.

While many of those events were bare-bones, advocate-sponsored forums focused on issues, others were lavish, corporate-sponsored galas targeting members of Congress and other Democratic officials — everything from an AT&T-funded luncheon for the Maine, Vermont and Rhode Island delegations at the Pinnacle Club, a private event space high atop the Grand Haytt, to a gathering of Democratic attorneys general at the Ritz-Carlton, sponsored by AstroZeneca, a pharmaceutical giant facing numerous suits in federal and state courts.

Like many lobbying groups, the Poker Players Alliance sponsored events in both cities. To generate attention among many convention-related activities, the alliance brought along Hollywood stars. In Denver, for example, celebrities like Ben Affleck and Sarah Silverman were at the event. The alliance’s Web site does nothing to disguise the group’s intentions, saying it “is taking advantage of the concentration of delegates and members of Congress … to continue to lobby for the legalization of online poker.”

It wasn’t supposed to turn out this way.

In the wake of a series of ethics scandals involving several Republicans’ illegal dealings with lobbyists — most prominently the separate episodes that sent former Reps. Duke Cunningham (R-Calif.) and Bob Ney (R-Ohio) to prison — Democrats in 2006 ran on a platform of distancing Congress members from the influence of moneyed interests.

“Our goal is to restore accountability, honesty and openness at all levels of government,” reads a passage from the House Democrats’ “New Direction” agenda. “To do so, we will create and enforce rules that demand the highest ethics from every public servant, sever unethical ties between lawmakers and lobbyists and establish clear standards that prevent the trading of official business for gifts.”

That vow culminated in the 2007 passage of the Honest Leadership and Open Government Act, a law that prohibits members of Congress from participating in lobbyist-funded events designed to “honor” or “recognize” lawmakers at the conventions.

But the ethics committees in each chamber interpreted that law differently. The House panel claims that the rule applies only to events honoring single members, and not to those recognizing groups of lawmakers. Watchdog groups say the trouble is not with the law itself, but with this interpretation.

“The rules are actually very, very good — and very sweeping,” said Craig Holman, a campaign-finance reform lobbyist for Public Citizen. “The problem has been the enforcement. … When you’ve got different interpretations [of the law], you see lobbyists exploiting that as a loophole.”

Fred Wertheimer, president and CEO of Democracy 21, a campaign-finance watchdog, issued a statement last month warning lawmakers away from a corporate-sponsored Denver event honoring the freshman class of House Democrats. The ethics committee’s ruling, he argued, should not set members above the intent of the law.

“This so-called ‘guidance’ not only is an incorrect interpretation of the new ethics rule,” he said, “it makes no sense.”

Watchdog groups are also critical of an interpretation of the 2002 McCain-Feingold campaign reform act that allows corporations and other donors to make unlimited contributions to a national convention’s host committee. That ruling, passed down by the Federal Election Commission (FEC), reasons that the donations are aimed to booster the host cities, not the political parties — something many watchdog groups dispute.

“It’s party leaders who actually head the committee and make the decisions,” said Zaharoff of Common Cause. “[The companies] wouldn’t do it if it didn’t benefit them.”

Watchdogs want to amend these interpretations, or enact clarifying legislation if the FEC and ethics committees fail to revisit the current laws. Holman of Public Citizen predicted that Congress would take up the issue again next year.

“The FEC,” Holman said, “has a history of not closing the floodgates that they open. We’ll have to revisit it with new legislation.”