Today, Sunlight is announcing a package of House Rules reforms for the upcoming 112th Congress that can help create the most open and accountable Congress in history. In addition to calling for leadership in Congress to pursue these reforms, we would like to hear your feedback on our recommendations.

This is big news for a number of reasons. The House Rules have enormous power in determining how all aspects of the U.S. House of Representatives functions as a legislative body. Examining the rules also gives us a chance to assert some of our signature reform efforts: from the 2007 Open House Project recommendations to the ReadtheBill.org and Transparency in Government Act reforms—as well as a lot of new ground.

Sunlight is calling for doubling the Office of Congressional Ethics budget; for all public ethics filings to be posted affirmatively online; for all non-emergency legislation to be posted online for 72 hours; and for a single database of all earmark information. We’re also calling for a public database of “Dear Colleague” letters; shoring up ethics rules; providing greater access to legislative data; and making all committee rooms wired for video, just to name just a few. To look at our recommendations in more detail, we've published a one page summary, in addition to an HTML and PDF version.

We’ve identified well over 60 reform opportunities and welcome your reactions and comments at the end of this post. We’ll be writing a great deal over the coming weeks about the individual reforms listed here, both the research it represents and the vision it presents for a transparent, accountable Congress.

Want to read more about how the next Congress can be better? You can read the full list of recommendations here or view our policy overview here.

How do you know if a retiring Representative is negotiating for their next job while working at their current one? As a practical matter, you likely do not.

Under House Rule XXVII (PDF), Representatives and senior staff must file a form with the House Ethics Committee within 3 business days of the commencement of direct negotiations or any agreement of future employment or compensation. Although the "Notification of Negotiations or Agreement for Future Employment" form (PDF) must include the name of the private entity involved in the negotiations and the date those negotiations started, the rules do not provide for public disclosure.

So how do you know if a Representative or staffer working on the people's business has a conflict of interest with his or her future employer? For staff, there's no way for the public to know. The situation is only slightly better for Representatives, who are required to "recuse himself or herself from any matter in which there is a conflict of interest or an appearance" and file a "Statement of Recusal" form (PDF) with the House Ethics Committee. When the conflict arises, the Member also must submit to the Clerk of the House the original "Notification of Negotiations or Agreement for Future Employment" form for public review.

The "public review" is essentially in name only. The only way to review the Negotiation Notification form is to go to the House Legislative Resource Center, located in the basement of the Cannon House Office Building, between 9-6pm Monday to Friday. There you can photocopy the forms, for a fee. The office will not fax you the form, email you the form, or answer questions over the phone about what forms have been filed.

According to Roll Call, 20 members of the House of Representatives are retiring this year (of which one is running for another House seat) -- with most announcing their retirements months ago. A review conducted this past Thursday showed that no Representative has filed a Negotiation Notification form since 2008.

It seems pretty obvious that Notification of Negotiation Forms should be made publicly available at the time they're filed, without waiting for the official Recusal Form to be filed. But these forms should also be available online for inspection. There's only a handful of filings each year, and very little effort would be required to post them online on the Clerk's website.

These forms are just the tip of the iceberg. Both Houses of Congress require a number of ethics forms to be filed and made publicly available, but neither the House nor the Senate does a good job of making them available online. Today's Washington Post had several good stories on how difficult it is to obtain these ethics filings, and how it takes laborious efforts for outside groups to transform hundreds of pages of print-outs into a database the public can use. This is particularly infuriating since many of these files already exist in an electronic format that must be printing out page-by-page instead of copying onto a CD or thumb drive.

The disclosure rules are a decent step towards making Congress more transparent, but for these ethics rules to have real bite, these forms must be available online, in real time, and in machine-readable formats.