HARRISBURG (TNS) — Activists demanding campaign finance and lobbying reforms staked out the office of Pennsylvania’s state Senate leader on Monday — and got a commitment to meet with top legislative staff on a bill they hope will clear the chamber soon.

Members of March on Harrisburg and other affiliated groups rallied at the state Capitol, with activists lining the atrium outside the office of Senate President Pro Tempore Kim Ward, R-Westmoreland. The group’s leaders entered Ward’s office and emerged roughly half an hour later saying they had made progress.

“We had a good, productive conversation,” said Michael Pollack, March on Harrisburg’s executive director. “We explained the bill, they asked good questions.”

The advocacy group’s legal team is tentatively scheduled to meet Thursday with Ward’s staff, which was confirmed by her office.

“There were a number of outstanding issues that we needed answered,” said Erica Clayton Wright, Ward’s spokesperson. “We agreed to talk to their legal team about outstanding issues that need to be reviewed and then we can talk from there about next steps.”

March on Harrisburg is aptly named for one of its most common protest stunts — and Monday was no exception. Activists made a 35-mile march from Lancaster to Harrisburg starting Friday, Pollack said, staying in local churches overnight, with roughly 15 people completing the entire journey.

The group is primarily known for advocating for a crackdown on gifts to lawmakers by lobbyists — something on which Pennsylvania is particularly lax, and which March on Harrisburg has likened to legalized corruption by lobbyists who pay for elected officials’ lavish junkets.

The bill discussed with Ward’s office on Monday is tangentially related; it would ban campaign contributions by “foreign-influenced corporations,” defined in the bill as those in which a single foreign investor holds 1% or more of the company’s total equity, or 5% or more in aggregate by multiple foreign investors.

Such investors are defined as foreign governments, political parties, and corporations or associations, as well as individuals who do not have lawful U.S. residency. A strict reading of this language would effectively ban multinational corporations from political campaigning, given how many U.S.-based companies are partially- or wholly-owned subsidiaries of foreign ones, and how many of them have internationally traded stocks.

A study by the Center for American Progress — which supports such foreign-influence bans — found that approximately 98 percent of S&P 500 corporations likely exceed the 5 percent aggregate threshold and would be disqualified from political campaign spending under the language being in Pennsylvania’s bill as well as in proposals in other states.

Critics have raised First Amendment concerns, saying such laws would chill the speech of Americans whose companies work with foreign investors; proponents say such proposals are consistent with the federal government’s longstanding ban on foreign nationals and governments contributing to political campaigns.

“There is nothing wrong with foreign investment in corporations — that’s a free market. And there is nothing wrong with barring foreign-influenced corporations from spending money to influence elections — that’s democracy,” said Alexandra Flores-Quilty with Free Speech for People, a national advocacy group that was also involved in Monday’s event.

“It’s time for Pennsylvania state law to stop multinational corporations from providing a pass for foreign entities to achieve — either directly or indirectly — what they were barred from doing as foreign governments or individuals,” Flores-Quilty continued.

The bill passed the Pennsylvania House of Representatives — where Democrats hold a majority — on a bipartisan basis in July, making its passage more quickly attainable than some of the other legislation that March on Harrisburg has supported.

Wright said, “We agree that there needs to be a comprehensive discussion” of election and campaign issues, potentially including disclosures by ‘dark money’ political action committees and voter ID rules, something which the Senate GOP has sparred with House Democrats over before.

March on Harrisburg at least got a “commitment to negotiate” from Ward’s office, Pollack said, cautioning his supporters that “we’ve heard that kind of thing before” from lawmakers, and stressing the need to keep up the pressure.