Are Members of Congress using inside information gathered as part of their jobs to make financial investments (and get rich...er?) That question is at the heart of yesterday's 60 Minutes report. Reporter Steve Kroft accused current House Speaker John Boehner and former speakers Nancy Pelosi and Dennis Hastert, among others, of engaging in a legal form of insider trading. (We first broke the Hastert story in 2006.)  What the story didn't explore was how transparency aided Hoover Institution research fellow Peter Schweizer in drawing these connections, and how better transparency would deter problems from arising.

Schweizer's analysis drew upon congressional financial disclosure reports, one of many ethics-related documents that the House and Senate make available to the public. While all these documents should be available online, in real-time, and in machine-readable formats, most are not.* Usually, members of the public must physically travel to the House or Senate and print out ethics documents, one page at a time -- you will not be provided an electronic copy, no matter how much you ask,  even though the documents are already digitized. In fact, we compiled the first public list of all the "publicly-available" documents from the House and Senate, with information about how to obtain the reports and what they contain. We also called for the GAO to finally live up to its statutory obligation to review whether the personal financial disclosure forms should be updated.

Looking at the financial disclosure reports, only the House publishes them online; the Senate archaically requires you to go to the Senate in person to ask for this information. If you want to analyze the Senate's financial disclosure reports, you have to re-key the data into a computer by hand; there's no database to facilitate analysis. This is equally true if you want to see which Member or senior staffer has been promised a plum job by an outside company, foreign travel expense reports, legal defense fund contributions, and more. If you're not in Washington, you'd better be willing to book a plane ride to DC; otherwise, you're out of luck.

We won't know how much effort it took to make the connection between congressional activity and investing, which formed the basis of the 60 Minutes report and Schweizer's well-timed book "Throw Them All Out," but it likely was considerable. Without better data, it is hard to tell who actually benefited from trading on inside information. We also don't know the extent to which investors mine data from capitol hill about industry activities to help make investment decisions, and we can't know that until legislation like the STOCK Act (which we wrote about here) becomes law.

But what we do know is that the House and Senate can do much more to be transparent. They need to make it easier for the public to see who is trying to influence them, how they behave while in office, and the work that they're doing. That's why we are advocating for lobbying reform, ethics reform, and a lot more Sunlight on the process.

• Update 1: These documents are not available online from the House or Senate, but some third parties, such as the Center for Responsive Politics and Legistorm, have digitized many of the documents. However, it's not always possible to access the data in bulk, and it is possible that the third parties introduced errors in the digitization process.

• Update 2: I should also mention that Sunlight gave a grant to CRP for digitization of the personal financial disclosure forms, travel disclosures, and other documents in 2007.

And now to totally contradict my previous post stating why no one needs to talk about tickle-monster Eric Massa.

The House voted today 404-2 to recommend that the House Ethics Committee reopen their probe into Massa's misconduct and examine whether House leaders were aware of his misdeeds and whether they failed act quickly enough. This follows on the heels of reports that an aide in Speaker Pelosi's office was informed in October that Massa was living with aides, hired too many aides, cursed around staff and appeared to be going on dates with openly-gay male staffers from other congressional offices.

On first blush these don't exactly rise to the level of ethics investigation material -- congressmen have been known to live with aides in the past and if he wants to cheat on his wife with adult men, that's his prerogative. Either way, the Ethics Committee should look into whether there was any more information relayed to leadership prior to the reported receipt of complaints about harassment in February and whether they responded properly or not.

Already, this case is being compared to the 2006 Mark Foley scandal. I'm not really sure that it rises to that level for a number of reasons. That being said, let's take a look at what made the Foley scandal toxic for the congressional leadership who covered it up.

1) Members of Congress were aware as early as 1995 that Foley was interested in teenage male pages. Foley was elected in 1994. A male page who served in 1995 stated later, "Almost the first day I got there I was warned. It was no secret that Foley had a special interest in male pages." In 2000, then-Rep. Jim Kolbe and Clerk of the House Jeff Trandahl were informed of complaints of inappropriate e-mails from Foley to teenage male pages. In 2002 or 2003, Foley appeared in the page dormitory after-hours and was visibly drunk. This information was conveyed to Trandahl who then informed Foley's chief of staff Kirk Fordham and Fordham subsequently informed Speaker Dennis Hastert's chief of staff Scott Palmer that Foley exhibited inappropriate behavior around pages, but did not tell him about the drunken dorm incident. Trandahl stated that Hastert's office was informed of Foley's behavior in 2003 and was given regular updates about his conduct.

2) In the specific incident that led to Foley's removal from the House, congressmen were made aware of the lascivious e-mails in early-2005 (the story broke in September of 2006). Hastert's office was made aware in the fall of 2005 and Hastert was specifically informed in early-2006. Other congressional leaders, Majority Leader John Boehner and National Republican Congressional Committee Chairman Tom Reynolds, were informed of the emails and IM conversations in the spring of 2006. Boehner and Reynolds stated that they both told Hastert about the allegations.

3) Foley was hitting on teenage pages and engaging in sexual relationships with ex-pages. This is a far-cry from going on dates with adult congressional staffers. Parents entrust their children to Congress when they are serving as pages and expect that members of Congress aren't going to be making sexual advances on them -- or that, if such a case were to arise that congressional leaders would do something about it. Also, did I mention that Foley was hitting on teenagers, not adults.

I can't really see the Massa issue rising to this level of extreme malfeasance by leadership. It appears to have come as somewhat of a surprise to people in Washington. This is probably because the guy was only a congressman for about 14 months. The complaints that were made with Pelosi's office, if the story is accurate, rise to the level of talking to Massa's staff, but certainly not to an Ethics Committee investigation. The complaints received by Hoyer's office were rather more serious and his office referred the matter to the Ethics Committee almost immediately. If this is the full story, it certainly doesn't rise to the level of the actual cover-up of Foley's repulsive behavior.

Since the House already voted to send the issue back to the Ethics Committee, we'll have to wait and see if everyone's story is accurate.

Buried in the final conference report for the Department of Defense Appropriations Act, 2006 (H.R. 2863) was a provision providing a lawsuit liability shield for pharmaceutical companies. The provision was aimed at preventing lawsuits against drug makers working to create vaccines for biological attacks and avian flu, but went much further in protecting many more kinds of drugs. What's notable about this provision is that no one thought it would be in the bill. The conferees did not sign off on it and the final bill was passed in less than 24 hours, providing little time to address the late night addition of this provision. This is our next case study for the Read the Bill campaign.

During the first year of the 109^th Congress much attention was paid to the development of drugs to counter biological weapons and avian flu. The Bush White House supported the position that companies helping to create and manufacture such drugs should be exempt from liability lawsuits, in the event of side-effects, injury, or death. One proposal pushed by Sen. Richard Burr, the Biodefense and Pandemic Vaccine Drug Development Act of 2005, provided a vehicle to pass liability shields for the drug industry and also created a new government department to work on creating vaccines that would be exempt from liability lawsuits, FOIA, and other open government laws. Burr’s bill passed the relevant committee intact but sat still on the legislative calendar.

Instead of pursuing the passage of Burr’s bill, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist sought to attach parts of the liability shield to the Defense Appropriations Act. The defense funding bill had already passed both chambers of Congress and awaited hearing before a conference committee. In the weeks leading up to the release of a conference report on the bill, Frist worked with drug industry lobbyists to craft and insert the liability shield language into the bill. The only problem was that they failed, initially.

On December 18, 2005, the conference committee met to hash out the differences between the House and Senate versions of the legislation. Upon completing the conference report both sides agreed to keep the liability shield language out of the bill and left the hearing room to announce the details to the public. In most cases, that would have been the end of it. Frist, however, was undeterred, and after the conferees left the hearing he sought Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert’s approval to insert the 40-page liability shield language into the completed report. Unbeknown to the conferees, the report would include the liability shield.

The next day, fewer than 24 hours after the final bill was released to the public, the House convened to vote on the bill. Rep. David Obey, one of the duped conferees, called the insertion of the shield a “blatantly abusive power play.” Sen. Robert Byrd, another conferee, declared it an “insult to the legislative process.” Rep. Dan Burton stated, “This kind of thing should not be done at 11 at night.” The bill passed the House on December 19 and the Senate on December 21.

It was later revealed that more than 100 lobbyists were working on the insertion of the liability shield language. Three of those lobbyists were former staffers of Sen. Bill Frist. One of those lobbyists was Speaker Dennis Hastert’s son, Joshua Hastert.

Congress doesn't spin records, they spin in revolving doors. And those doors are spinning faster than ever, according to a study from Public Citizen. The Politico reports on the study, which shows that between 1998 and 2004 a whopping 43 percent of retired lawmakers became lobbyists:

A study done in the post-Watergate era estimated that only 3 percent to 10 percent of retiring members of Congress became lobbyists.

But, from 1998 to 2004, 283 retired lawmakers became lobbyists — a whopping 43 percent of all retiring members, according to a study done by Public Citizen, a nonpartisan watchdog group.

In 2005, eight members joined lobbing firms, although only four ultimately registered to advocate on Capitol Hill. A year later, another nine members followed.

With another seat-cleansing November election apparently in the making, the lobbyist ranks are likely to swell again later this year.

While reforms passed in the Honest Leadership and Open Government Act were meant to stop the flow of lawmakers and staffers down the block to K Street, the cases of Al Wynn, Dennis Hastert, Trent Lott, and Richard Baker all show that the desire to cash in on connections on the Hill is not abating.

Unlike the video below, the revolving door in Washington doesn't appear to be ready to break anytime soon: