After a Stumble, Tech Lobby Refocuses on Immigration

Mr. Green was pressing the flesh to drum up support for Fwd.us, the advocacy group he created with financial backing from his college roommate, Mark Zuckerberg, the Facebook co-founder, and several of their mostly young millionaire friends in Silicon Valley. It was a critical moment for the organization, because soon after making its debut this spring, Fwd.us fumbled badly.

Its stated goal was to overhaul immigration law. But its first steps included financing flashy, campaign-style television ads for conservative lawmakers, whose votes were seen as crucial to passing an immigration bill in the Senate. The ads promoted their pet conservative causes, including the Keystone XL pipeline. Fwd.us immediately lost many of its existing and would-be supporters in the valley.

Now the group is trying to turn around its image as it gears up for the fight for immigration overhaul in the House.

For now, its ads focus squarely on immigration rather than other more incendiary issues like drilling in Alaska or health insurance regulation. Its most recent television spot, for example, praised Kelly Ayotte, Republican of New Hampshire, for supporting the Senate bill last week despite significant opposition in her state. Its latest Web ad is a paean to the ultimate American ideal: the Statue of Liberty.

The group also has a new executive director, Todd Schulte, a veteran political aide with the Washington experience that Mr. Green lacks. And it is organizing tried-and-true town hall meetings like the one here to rally industry support for lawmakers who support a more open immigration policy, including provisions to let tech companies bring in many more foreign engineers. Others are planned in critical battleground districts, like Utah and North Carolina.

This evening, Mr. Green invited entrepreneurs to speak about their run-ins with the immigration bureaucracy. A few engineers from overseas had joined the meeting using Skype; slow-moving, teleporting robots wheeled iPads around the room, showing their disembodied faces glowing on screen. One member of Congress was here to hear their complaints: Representative Mike Honda, a Democrat from nearby San Jose.

Despite the apparent tweaks to its approach, Fwd.us contends its original strategy worked, helping rally senators to pass the landmark immigration bill last week.

“I would argue we’ve been pretty consistent,” said Rob Jesmer, campaign manager at Fwd.us. “We are going to use a lot of different things to try and pass this, to try to affect the process.”

After weeks of silence, Mr. Zuckerberg publicly defended his organization’s strategy in mid-June, calling it necessary and “unique.”

“That approach — of actually trying to work with people on both sides — is what makes us unique,” he wrote in response to questions on his Facebook page, adding: “And without bringing people in different parties and with different views together, meaningful reform will never happen.”

His office declined numerous requests for an interview.

The group has not revealed how much money it has raised so far, saying only that it is enough to make a difference in the process. Nor has it revealed any details on how it plans to sway the Republican-controlled House, except that it will back lawmakers who support a favorable immigration bill.

“I like to think we here in Silicon Valley have a different — and I hope, better — way of doing things,” Paul Graham, a venture capitalist and a founder of the technology incubator Y Combinator said about his hopes for Fwd.us.

This is precisely what complicates Fwd.us’s mission. Its principal constituents, the wealthy entrepreneurs of the valley, like to think of themselves as exceptional — except that some of its tactics have been criticized here precisely for reflecting an unexceptional Beltway approach.

In addition to the controversial ads, Fwd.us hired well-known Washington lobbyists. Its subsidiaries count political veterans like Haley Barbour, a former Mississippi governor and a Republican, and Joe Lockhart, a former spokesman for the Clinton administration, as board members.

Some Washington lobbyists say rewarding lawmakers with costly television ads could have unforeseen consequences for the industry, not least by considerably raising the price of influence.

“Most companies face multiple issues in D.C.,” said Alan Davidson, who was Google’s legislative director in Washington from 2005 to 2012, and is now a visiting scholar at the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

“High-profile ad buys on unrelated social issues might help in one debate, but can alienate future allies and set unrealistic expectations,” he said. “Hopefully this is just another sign of the tech community’s evolution and growing engagement in public policy.”

Mr. Zuckerberg has said that he chose to tackle immigration after hearing the life stories of unauthorized students at a junior high school near Facebook’s headquarters in Menlo Park, where he taught a class. Although Mr. Green was his choice to lead Fwd.us, Mr. Zuckerberg has taken the heat for the group’s missteps. Lately, several people in Silicon Valley have singled out Mr. Green for mismanaging the campaign and in turn, damaging Mr. Zuckerberg’s brand.

“If you come out, as Mark did, you come out as a public piñata,” said one investor, who, like many people interviewed for this article, declined to be named, because, he said, he did not want to inflame sentiments. The investor said Mr. Green had asked him this year for a “seven-figure” contribution, with no explanation of Fwd.us’s strategy. He called it a “gun to the temple” approach.

Another industry investor surmised that Mr. Zuckerberg’s personal image had suffered because of the negative attention to the group. “It is not with the masses,” the investor said. “It’s with a few people, insiders in Silicon Valley who have checks to write. A lot of them are angry and disappointed about Joe Green’s approach.”

Mr. Green sent him an e-mail solicitation in early June, the investor said, which he declined because he disagreed with the group’s tactics so far.

Fwd.us declined requests for an interview with Mr. Green. Mr. Jesmer described him as the organization’s “visionary” and said, “We talk to him 14 times a day.”

A graduate of Harvard, Mr. Green in 2007 created a Facebook application for online advocacy and fund-raising, called Causes, and in 2011, joined NationBuilder, a company that makes digital tools for political campaigns. He stayed for just under a year, before joining Fwd.us.

Jonathan Nelson, founder of a networking group, Hackers and Founders, said Mr. Green saw himself as a “pragmatic idealist.” The two met for a beer at Antonio’s Nut House, a popular pub in Palo Alto, in mid-June. Mr. Green, he recalled, said he wanted to win the immigration fight in Washington — and was willing to play ball, Beltway style. Mr. Nelson replied that Mr. Green had misread his fellow geeks.

“It’s a sin in the techno religion to play dirty politics,” Mr. Nelson said.

Tax Lobby Builds Ties to Max Baucus

To make their case as Congress prepares to debate a rewrite of the nation’s tax code, this diverse set of businesses has at least one strategy in common: they have retained firms that employ lobbyists who are former aides to Max Baucus, the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, which will have a crucial role in shaping any legislation.

No other lawmaker on Capitol Hill has such a sizable constellation of former aides working as tax lobbyists, representing blue-chip clients that include telecommunications businesses, oil companies, retailers and financial firms, according to an analysis by LegiStorm, an online database that tracks Congressional staff members and lobbying. At least 28 aides who have worked for Mr. Baucus, Democrat of Montana, since he became the committee chairman in 2001 have lobbied on tax issues during the Obama administration — more than any other current member of Congress, according to the analysis of lobbying filings performed for The New York Times.

“K Street is literally littered with former Baucus staffers,” said Jade West, an executive at a wholesalers’ trade association that relies on a former finance panel aide, Mary Burke Baker. “It opens doors that allow you to make the case.”

Like Ms. Baker, many of those lobbyists have already saved their clients millions — in some cases, billions — of dollars after Mr. Baucus backed their requests to extend certain corporate tax perks, provisions that were adopted as part of the so-called fiscal cliff legislation in January. Baucus aides who later became lobbyists helped financial firms save $11.2 billion in tax deferments and helped secure a $222 million tax benefit that is shared with the liquor industry.

Sean Neary, a spokesman for Mr. Baucus, said the senator had regularly rejected requests from those lobbyists for provisions benefiting their clients, like an appeal from one former aide, Pat Bousliman, now working as a wind industry lobbyist, to extend an alternative energy loan guarantee program that expired in 2011.

Mr. Baucus’s decisions are based on the merits of the policies, Mr. Neary said, not on who is advocating for them. “The fact is, oftentimes good policy can indirectly benefit someone,” he said. “That doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be done.”

The debate over the tax code — which has emerged as part of the two-year effort to stimulate the economy and reduce the deficit — could turn into a battle royal. While many members of Congress talk about lowering the corporate tax rate, replacing that lost revenue would require eliminating many tax loopholes that legions of lobbyists, including many who had worked for other prominent lawmakers, make a living laboring to expand or defend.

Mr. Baucus, 71, the son of a wealthy Montana rancher, is somewhat of a wild card in the tax debate: he is the top Democrat in what arguably is the Senate’s most powerful committee seat. The finance panel helps dictate how the government raises almost all of its money, and spends nearly half of it.

But he often bucks his party’s leadership. Last month, for example, he voted against the Democrats’ budget proposal for 2014, which included nearly $1 trillion in new revenues. He also favored the Bush administration’s tax cuts in 2001 for Americans including the wealthy, putting him at odds with many Democrats.

Mr. Baucus, who has spent nearly his entire professional career in Congress, declined a request for an interview. But Mr. Neary said that every action the senator takes is motivated by his commitment to voters.

“Every vote has to answer one question for him and that is: How is it impacting Montanans?” Mr. Neary said.

Several veteran Capitol Hill aides said it was naïve to suggest that former aides could extract special favors from their one-time bosses — unless what they were pushing for had broad support. But the former aides still bring an advantage to the corporations that hire them.

“It does mean you will have someone who knows how the levers of power are pushed or how to push the levers, and who can describe to you how situations are going to play out based on their years of experience,” said Jim Manley, a former aide to Senator Harry Reid, the majority leader. Mr. Manley now works at a Washington lobbying and communications firm, QGA Public Affairs.

In recent interviews, four former aides to Mr. Baucus said that their ties to him heightened their appeal to potential clients. The link also helped justify their salaries, in some cases $500,000 or higher, more than double or triple their Capitol Hill paychecks.

Former Senate aides who become lobbyists must wait a year before they can contact Mr. Baucus or his staff on behalf of a client, according to Senate ethics rules.

Staying active in their circle, one former aide said, also requires that they help Mr. Baucus’s political career, through fund-raising and other assistance.

Several of the lobbyists regularly fly to Big Sky, Mont., for weekend fund-raising retreats that Mr. Baucus hosts, or attend more intimate events in Washington like a gathering last month near the Capitol, where Paul Wilkins, Mr. Baucus’s chief of staff, talked about the millions of dollars Mr. Baucus will need to raise for his re-election campaign next year.

Among them, the top givers include Jeffrey A. Forbes, Mr. Baucus’s former Finance Committee staff director, who has donated a total of at least $25,000 to Mr. Baucus, his political action committee or the Montana Democratic Party. He attended the retreat in February at the Big Sky resort, which included skiing, snowmobiling and a big family dinner at Buck’s T-4 Lodge. The totals grow much bigger — to hundreds of thousands of dollars — when donations from Mr. Forbes’s clients, including Verizon and Altria, and other partners at his lobbying firm, are counted.

Kitty Bennett contributed research.

Hobby Lobby asks for stay in birth-control lawsuit

OKLAHOMA CITY (AP) - Attorneys for both sides in Hobby Lobby Stores Inc.'s lawsuit challenging the federal health care law are asking a judge to stay proceedings as a federal appeals court considers the case.