In Monday’s Roundup I mentioned that Peter Roberson, a staffer for the House Financial Services Committee dealing specifically with swaps and exchanges in the new FinReg bill, left to lobby for a corporation that owns clearinghouses for derivatives. Ryan Grim added that Roberson was a bank lobbyist, who moved to the Financial Services Committee, and the back to K Street as a lobbyist.

House rules prohibit Roberson from having any contact with Committee staff for one year. But Barney Frank, the chair of the Committee, just sent out a statement saying that no member of his staff will be allowed to contact Roberson EVER, as long as he remains the Chair. Here’s Frank’s statement in full:

“Several people have expressed criticism of the move by Peter Roberson from the staff of the Financial Services Committee to ICE, after he worked on the legislation relevant to derivatives. I completely agree with that criticism. When Mr. Roberson was hired, it never occurred to me that he would jump so quickly from the Committee staff to an industry that was being affected by the Committee’s legislation. When he called me to tell me that he was in conversations with them, I told him that I was disappointed and that I insisted that he take no further action as a member of the Committee staff. I then called the Staff Director and instructed her to remove him from the payroll and provide him only such compensation as is already owed.

“Stories about this correctly noted that there is a one year ban on his interaction with members of the Committee staff, but I do not think that is adequate. I am therefore instructing the staff of the Financial Services Committee to have no contact whatsoever with Mr. Roberson on any matters involving financial regulation for as long as I am in charge of that Committee staff. Fortunately, examples of staff members doing what Mr. Roberson has done are rare, but even one example is far too much and that is why I wanted to make clear I share the unhappiness of people at this, and my intention to prohibit any contact between him and members of the staff for as long as I have any control over the matter.”

This makes Roberson fairly useless to the corporation who hired him to lobby, provided that the ban gets applied properly.

Good move by Rep. Frank. The revolving door has got to stop, and moves like this make it less likely for lobby shops to want to poach from Congressional staff in the future. Of course, you have to have a Committee Chair with some integrity to pull this off. I don’t see Max Baucus making the same blanket ban on Liz Fowler, for example…