A bipartisan group of Members of Congress sent a letter to House and Senate leadership outlining specific transparency recommendations for the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction, aka the Super Committee.  The letter echoes Sunlight’s proposals for Super Committee transparency, calling for live broadcast of committee meetings; posting of the Super Committee’s final recommendations for 72 hours prior to a final committee vote; weekly posting of campaign contributions received by committee members; and weekly posting of meetings between committee members and special interests.

If these common sense proposals are enacted, they will help to begin to rebuild the public’s trust in the budget process. On the other hand, shrouding the work of the Super Committee behind a veil of secrecy will delegitimize its work, harkening back to the days when decisions were made in smoke filled rooms where money and power changed hands without pubic scrutiny.

None of the four proposals is controversial.  Ensuring the meetings and hearings of the Super Committee are public and online should be so obvious as to be a given. Given the importance of the Super Committee’s work, its hearings should not be held to a lesser standard than any other congressional committee—all of which assume hearings will be public unless national security would be at risk. Arguments that committee members won’t be able to deliberate if the meetings are public are, in a word, silly.  Public hearings will in no way thwart members from speaking and negotiating privately with one another. Making hearings public will provide an important window into the committee’s goals, its process and its progress.

The remainder of the recommendations similarly fall into a “been there, done that” category so should not be objectionable. Speaker Boehner has already endorsed a 72-hour rule for legislation. Seventy-two hours of public scrutiny and debate should likewise be required before a vote on the Super Committee’s recommendations.  Under current law, campaign contributions are public, and if they are given within 20 days of an election, they must be reported within 48 hours. Given the short life of the Super Committee, anything less frequent than the weekly reporting called for here risks nondisclosure of contributions until after the committee’s work is complete. Finally, as the letter points out, disclosure of meetings by lobbyists and other special interests has been required under the Troubled Asset Relief Program, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act and the Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act.  Given that the Super Committee lobbying frenzy has already begun, the public should be made aware of who is asking for what.

When they return from recess, House and Senate leaders should announce that these common sense transparency measures will be adopted to ensure accountability and integrity in the Super Committee process.

Over the last week, the push for an open "supercommittee" has grown into a national issue. The issue has become the subject of pronouncements from congressional leaders, numerous bills, analysis and advocacy from non-profits, and intense public debate. The issue has now crossed over from a sidebar issue, to being a central part of the "supercommittee" story.

We're now getting a sense of where opposition to an open "supercommittee" might come from.  While Sunlight is calling for 5 core transparency recommendations, among others, we've occasionally seen resistance to the idea of open meetings for the joint committee. We're calling for "live webcasts of all official meetings and hearings," and we still don't know whether the supercommittee will hold public meetings or not.

The concern is that public meetings will make it harder to make tough decisions, causing further political paralysis.  This criticism, however, fails to distinguish between two things: making official meetings of the committee public, and making all deliberations among members of the committee public.  The first should be a no-brainer.

Official meetings of important government committees are held in public in the US. That's been reliably true for decades, and it's how we expect our government to work.  For good reason, too -- representation can only work if voters have some sense of what their representatives are doing, so that their vote bears some relation to their representative's record.  There are some exceptions to this general rule; congressional committees meet in out of public view for well-defined, largely noncontroversial reasons that are spelled out in the rules of the House and Senate.  Conference committees are the biggest exception to this rule, often evading requirements to meet publicly, but their work is in reconciling already passed legislation that has passed both the House and Senate.

And this joint committee is doing far more than just reconciling already-passed legislation.  It's a replacement for Congress altogether, save final approval. The House and Senate may have bound themselves to this requirement, but that doesn't make it any less remarkable.  The prerogatives of the minority have been completely waived in both chambers.  For this bill, there is no motion to recommit in the House, and no filibuster in the Senate.  Perhaps most unusually, inaction has been made nearly impossible, as failing to act means incurring deep budget cuts that were designed to be politically unpalatable.  This committee was designed to have to work, and Congress has been shunted out of the way.  These procedural requirements add up to mean that the joint committee is functioning as a replacement for Congress, and needs to be more open than Congress in order to be considered legitimate.  Holding official meetings in public is only the most basic first step toward that accountability.

We've seen the misguided objection that open meetings would squelch deliberations, and make it impossible to work through politically difficult ideas.  This is wrong.  Nothing about holding public meetings would keep Senator Murray from talking with Senator Toomey in private about any topic they please.  Having official meetings be public just guarantees the limited window into official business that everyone has come to rightfully expect in a democracy.  While these meetings may be full of pre-prepared speeches and posturing, they're still a public exercise that is fully worth having.

To go beyond public meetings and affect deliberations and negotiations, as some commenters fear, would take far more than what Sunlight is proposing.  Ex parte rules do exist in other contexts (like the FCC), and in some legislatures.  But let's be clear: in order to force all negotiations among some Members of Congress to be public, we'd be imposing a speech restriction.  And restricting the speech of our representatives is an unwise idea, to say the least.

In place of trying to restrict the speech of Members of Congress, you can carve out certain kinds of interactions which need to be reported publicly.  And that's exactly what exists already through our Lobbyist Disclosure Act, that Sunlight (and Reps. Quigley and Renacci) are calling to have expanded for the supercommittee.  If only 12 Members are going to be given the power to decide our alternative to the unpopular trigger, we should know when they're meeting with registered lobbyists or other powerful interests, and who is donating to their campaigns.

But even more basic than lobbying disclosure is the idea that the official work of our government should be done in full public view.  The perceived legitimacy of the "super committee" depends on it.  American dialog and deliberation are not so weak that they can't survive alongside public meetings.

TPM has an important summary of the growing push for a transparent Joint Committee (aka the "SuperCommittee" aka the "SuperCongress"), with some new developments:

First, news that Speaker Boehner is speaking generally in favor of an open process for the joint committee:

"[F]rom the conversations I've had with the other leaders of both parties, I can tell you there's a strong commitment to having open hearings and a public process," House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) told his members on a Monday conference call, according to his spokesman.

And then, a very supportive Rep. Jason Chaffetz:

"Transparency is paramount -- you should operate in the full light of day as other committees do," Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) told me in an interview Tuesday. "With such a small group, with such power transparency is imperative. The last thing you want to hear about is some closed door meeting where something's getting done that nobody knows about. It's the peoples business and should be done in the light of day."

Having some support from Boehner and Chaffetz will go a long way in forcing the "supercommittee" to operate in the open. After Leader Pelosi's explicit call from last Friday, it's beginning to look like House leadership is aligning to fight for an open process. This makes sense, since most of the Members of the House have no chance of being appointed to the panel. In order to preserve their relevance to the enormous power this panel has been given, Members (and their constituents) need to at least be able to watch its official meetings.

Yesterday, we cheered as Reps. Quigley and Renacci sent a Dear Colleague calling for a full suite of transparency requirements for the joint committee. As TPM observes, momentum is indeed on our side in the push for open meetings. (Yesterday Senator Cornyn joined the ranks of those pushing for open official meetings, if his retweet can be interpreted as an endorsement.)

Even if we win in the push for open meetings for the "super committee" (and it's shocking that we still don't know whether this body will even meet in public), that's far from enough to guarantee a reasonable process. We're also demanding (as Quigley and Renacci's letter demands) lobbying disclosure, campaign finance disclosure, 72 hours for the committee's recommendations, and financial disclosures online for members and staff.

You can bet we'll be following this every step of the way, and brainstorming ways for everyone to help.

We're quickly approaching the next deadlines in the formation of the new "supercommittee" tasked by law with identifying $1.5 trillion in debt reduction.

Sunlight has assembled a coalition of groups pushing for a transparent, accountable process, and is today sending a second letter to congressional leaders. This letter adds to Sunlight's initial letter, going beyond our 5 core requests to identify other steps the joint committee should take to ensure accountability.

The letter is below, and represents the next step in a growing public demand for accountability from Congress, and one that Leader Pelosi recognized on Friday.

Organizations Call on SuperCommittee to Operate Openly

Late yesterday, Leader Pelosi called for the new Joint Select Committee on Debt Reduction (or "SuperCongress") to hold open meetings and webcast their proceedings. This is an important development, as Pelosi is the first congressional leader to call for this powerful committee to operate openly, as Sunlight has been urging since Tuesday. The statement is below, Sunlight's statement can be found here, and updates from yesterday can be found here.

August 5, 2011 Contact: Nadeam Elshami/Drew Hammill, 202-226-7616

Pelosi Statement Calling for Transparency on Joint Committee Deliberations

Washington, D.C. – Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi issued the following statement calling for transparency with respect to the Joint Committee’s deliberations:

“Without regard or respect for the recent S&P comment on our nation's credit rating, it is important to note the role that transparency and accountability play in making their judgment. As S&P stated, 'The transparency and accountability of institutions bear directly on sovereign creditworthiness because they reinforce the stability and predictability both of political institutions and the political framework.'

"The American people are watching to see if the bipartisan Joint Committee will develop a plan to responsibly reduce the deficit in a balanced way while promoting economic growth and creating jobs.

“The work of this Committee will affect all Americans, and its deliberations should be open the press, to the public and webcast.

“Any acceptance of the Committee proposal will be dependent on the ability of the American people to fully view its proceedings.”

# #

Sunlight is ramping up our effort to get the new "Super Congress" committee to be as transparent as they are powerful.

We have honed yesterday's blog post into five requirements, and today we're sending a letter (see below) to congressional leaders demanding a transparent process.  We're inviting other organizations and individuals to support the effort, and so far CREW and Openthegovernment.org have signed on.  Please visit our campaign page, and sign up to show your support.

Open government doesn't happen automatically.  If the debt ceiling negotiations thus far haven't lived up to your expectations, then it's time to demand a better process.  And if you've got other ideas for how the process should be more open, we'd love to hear, and link to them.  POGO has a great post with more ideas for the "Super Congress" here.

Congress is clearly listening, as we've already seen one bill introduced with similar requirements -- Senator Vitter introduced a real-time campaign finance transparency bill yesterday.  Please add your support and demand a transparent "Super Congress".

Our five asks follow, and then the letter we're sending congressional leaders today:

Five things that the Super Congress should post on its website:

• Live webcasts of all official meetings and hearings
• The Committee's report should be posted for 72 hours before a final committee vote
• Disclosure of every meeting held with lobbyists and other powerful interests
• Disclosure of campaign contributions as they are received (on campaign sites, not the committee site)
• Financial disclosures of Committee members and staffers

Sunlight Letter to Leadership on Super Committee 2011-08-03

We've just gotten the following document, which gives us the latest on the Senate's plan to post official Senate expenses online this Congress.

Sunlight has been anticipating the first ever digital release of Senate expenses since 2009, when the new policy was passed, as a result of Senator Coburn's amendment, which followed on Speaker Pelosi's new policy.

It looks like the first view of the disclosures will happen in November, and cover April to September. Most disappointingly, the information will be disclosed as a PDF. The legislation was rather clearly intended to create the release of actual data, not data in the difficult-to-reuse form of a paper document. Unfortunately, PDF documents can meet the standard of searchable (as long as the text is exposed), and itemized (if the items are listed), so the Senate is getting by on a technicality, and reaching for the lowest common denominator.

You can expect us to continue to try to get this released as a proper dataset -- more often than semi-annual, and perhaps most importantly, as structured data.

This should still be a big step forward, since the Senate expenses were only released before as a semi-annual book that almost no one knew about. We'll also be watching to be sure that the information available is at least as detailed as the information contained in the old, print edition of these disclosures.

Here's the letter:

Senate Expenses PDF

As House Republican leaders examine their options for House reforms, the 72 Hour Rule, or ReadTheBill, is always near the top of the list.

The form this reform will take, though, is far from clear.

Daniel recently gave details on the technical limitations a 72 Hour rule will face, noting that bills need to be shared better -- on THOMAS, in a machine-readable format, and available in bulk -- in order to maximize reuse online.

In addition to those technological hurdles, procedural hurdles also stand in the way of an effective 72 Hour Rule.

Presumptive Speaker Boehner has already taken one step past Speaker Pelosi on the ReadtheBill front, by committing to putting all non-emergency legislation online for 72 hours. The form this reform takes, however, will determine its strength and reliability.

Here are some procedural complications that could weaken a 72 Hour Rule.

Is it a rules change? It's unclear, so far, whether the 72 Hour Rule will be codified as a change to the House rules. Most focused advocacy for the ReadtheBill effort has focused on a particular proposal, H.Res 554 in the 111th Congress, which is primarily a rules change. If Republicans don't pass a rules change, then the rule will continue as an informal commitment from the Speaker of the House, with an uncertain future. A future Speaker wouldn't have to undo anything to walk away from it, and neither would Boehner, should he choose to.

What about amendments? H.Res. 554 punts on amendments. The bill actually contains Sense of the House language, basically asserting that major amendments should be online for an appropriate period of time. While this may seem like an oversight, further reflection reveals that requirements for amendments to be online can be tricky. Imagine if all bills were online for 72 hours before floor consideration, and all amendments were online for 72 hours before the same floor consideration. If that's the case, then no one can amend the bill they're reading, since the deadline for amendments would have already passed. The solution here may be to require bills to be online for 72 hours and amendments online for 24, but there's no clear consensus that that's the right solution. And that brings us to the second problem relating to amendments.

What about manager's amendments? Even if all amendments were online for one day before floor consideration, it's likely that large, contentious bills would get enormous managers amendments introduced at the last possible moment (whenever that moment may be). If it's just a day, that may still be a very short period of time to read and evaluate what may be an enormous and complex pile of compromises. Worse, these last minute changes are often the most contentious features of the bill -- they're the things being negotiated, after all. A strong, reliable 72 hour rule will eventually need to address managers amendments, and the complex negotiations they inevitably contain.

Depending on one's ideological relationship to any legislation in question, those negotiations can represent anything from valuable bipartisan compromise and careful deliberation all the way to vote-buying and backroom deals. One's feelings about the 72 hour rule also follow a similar pattern. How else do Michael Moore's meditation on the USA PATRIOT Act and the Republican opposition to the health care bill end up on the same script?

The Rules Committee Can Waive the Rules. Most bills are passed in the House under special rules, which govern debate, and can waive any House rule. Even rules about the Rules Committee can be waived by a rule reported out of the Rules committee and passed on the floor. Republican leadership, especially Eric Cantor, have been vocal about what they term a return to "regular order," but the Rules Committee is an extension of the prerogatives of the Speaker, one of the defining characteristics of the House. If the Senate is deliberative and slow, the House is decisive and authoritative, and the authority is the Speaker's, often expressed through the majority party's disproportionate control of the Rules Committee.

Self Executing Rules can change bills. Similarly, the special Rules from the Rules Committee can contain language that changes bills, essentially functioning as an amendment. Both parties have objected strongly to the other party's use of such rules, but, to our knowledge, no one has suggested a viable mechanism for reigning in this prerogative of the Rules Committee.

Conference Reports may be tricky. Most legislation will need to pass both chambers of Congress and go through a Conference Committee before heading to the President's desk. 72 hours for the initial House version would be nice, but without a chance to see what comes out of Conference, we won't know what's in the final law until too late. This can be tough, because each chamber can make changes to what comes out of the conference committee, and send the legislation back and forth. Should every iteration, if there are several, be subjected to 72 hours anew? We faced this difficulty before, and hedged, saying that conference reports and any major changes that follow should be online for 72 hours.

Is the Rule powerful? In addition to the fact that House Rules are waivable, some House Rules are simply ignored. A powerful 72 Hour Rule (like H.Res. 554) will change what is in order, effectively empowering the minority to raise a point of order against an offending motion. Without such an appeal to procedure, the requirement would be far weaker. Changes to the Congressional Record, for example, are supposed to only be typographical or grammatical, but Members regularly make far more substantive changes to their remarks as they appear. This is against the Rules, but essentially, no one cares. Even the best rule will need popular expectations to back it up.

This is actually true for all of the complications we've identified. Even the most well meaning 72 Hour Rule will be a seductive sacrifice for any Speaker who is faced with a potential legislative achievement. These are probably only some of the ways a public posting requirement could be evaded. Congressional floor procedures are incredibly complicated, and governed not just by Rules, but by complex precedents. The real arbiter of acceptable congressional procedure will ultimately always be the electorate. No one else can, or even should, have that kind of power of Congress.

Even so, we're hoping Speaker Boehner and Republican leaders choose to codify a strong, effective 72 Hour rule, and lives up to his promise, even when it's inconvenient, as he has readily acknowledged it will be.

In each of the last 3 political cycles, transparency has been a campaign issue. In 2006 we saw ethics and disclosure issues lead directly to the Honest Leadership and Open Government Act reform package, in 2008 transparency was a major tenet of the Obama campaign, and now in the 2010 midterms, candidates across the political spectrum have government reform platforms with different takes on government transparency.

Our recent House recommendations look at the rules that control transparency in the House, and offer detailed recommendations for opening Congress. We’ve renewed our call for a rules change to require all bills to be posted online for 72 hours before floor consideration, something Sunlight has long advocated for.

In a few years, the 72 hour rule has gone from a perennial complaint to a serious leadership issue -- the sort of attention the issue deserves.

Over the last year, Speaker Pelosi has repeatedly committed to posting major legislation online before floor consideration, and stuck by those promises. 72 hours online has become the new normal.

CBS News has apparently posted an advance draft of the House GOP platform, with some 72 hour language:

Read The Bill:We will ensure that bills are debated and discussed in the public square by publishing the text online for at least three days before coming up for a vote in the House of Representatives.No more hiding legislative language from the minority party, opponents, and the public.Legislation should be understood by all interested parties before it is voted on.

The language throughout the “Pledge to America” platform is fascinating to me, because it frames process reforms as a move away from the privileges of the Speaker, toward a more decentralized House.

The House of Representatives continues to move further away from its roots as a deliberative body, toward acentralized power structure where the majority does whatever it needs to win at all costs

A House with less centralized control won’t necessarily be more likely to post bills online before they come to the floor, though.

The only ways to get the House to publish bills online before they’re voted on are through the Speaker’s discretion, Rules changes, or through public expectations. Commitments from leadership are a step forward, but a rules change is far more decisive. And leadership commitments and rules changes both depend on the public caring -- without that, the rules can be ignored, and leadership will just go back to rushing bills to the floor.

The US House is expected today to release the quarterly Statement of Disbursements online for the first time.

Sunlight has long called for electronic disclosure of the accounts of Members and other offices within the House, and last June Speaker Pelosi announced this new policy.  The US Senate quickly followed, announcing a new policy set to take effect in 2011.

We expect today to be the first time the public will be able to see how their representatives spend their office budgets online, adding a new layer of accountability and trust to the process of representation.  As Paul Blumenthal has detailed before, past decades have seen scandal around Members' expenditures, and the House of Commons in the United Kingdom was recently rocked by a similar scandal, when the public learned how Members of Parliament were spending official funds.

Today's release will mark a proactive stance from the US House, voluntarily creating more effective disclosure, and responding to new expectations that information be available online for it to be truly public. It will also be just a first step.  Since the disclosure will likely take the form of a big PDF, we're going to be hard at work making the information more accessible and meaningful, and we'll have updates here and on future posts explaining what we're up to.

We'll also be pushing, in the medium term, for this disclosure system to be strengthened.  Eventually, this information will be posted in a structured format, in real time, for the public to process and examine online.  Moving from huge books examined by very few people to PDFs posted publicly once a quarter is an enormous step forward.  Moving from those files to a real-time feed of structured data will be a similarly huge step.

For more information on what these reports may contain, the Committee on House Administration is a good place to start.

Update: The House will publish the expenditures here:

http://disbursements.house.gov/

...and the site says they'll go live around 1 PM.

Update 2: The site is up, and you can download the PDFs here:

http://disbursements.house.gov/

We'll be mirroring a copy soon.

Update 3: Eric Mill on the Sunlight Labs blog has some hosted PDFs, and discusses what we'll be working on...

Update 4: Looks like CongressDaily is trying to make this into something it's not.  Their brief coverage (sub only) says this:

The reports posted today reflect activity from July through September. Pelosi made the decision to post the reports after published stories this summer raised questions about how some House members are using their office allowances, which cannot be used for personal benefit. While most spending by lawmakers goes to staff salaries and office expenses, the reports documented how some has gone toward items such as luxury cars and high-end electronics.

The implication is clearly that this is the result of some scandal.  The Wall Street Journal coverage they're presumably referring to doesn't make that case at all:

A spokesman for the speaker said her action wasn't prompted by the articles, which found mostly routine spending on staff salaries, travel and office rent, as well as supplies, printing and mailing. The 2008 reports also showed taxpayer money spent on luxury car leases, big-screen TVs, pricey laptops known as "Toughbooks" and fresh-cut flower arrangements.

House and Senate lawmakers receive annual allowances of $1.3 million to $4.5 million to run their offices. All the expenditures reviewed by the Journal were legal, and the disclosures complied with congressional rules.

Sometimes the sexiest answer isn't the right one.

Update 5: RollCall has an interesting quote from a spokesman for the CAO:

Jeff Ventura, spokesman for House Chief Administrative Officer Dan Beard, said the House doesn’t have any plans to put the information into a more accessible and searchable form. But if there’s a “huge demand” in the future, he said, the chamber may reconsider.

“We’d be disrupting a process that currently exists,” he said, “and we’re very hesitant to mess with that.”

It'll be interesting to see whether that "huge demand" will come to exist.  In the coming weeks, we could see complete silence or scandals, apathy or impassioned debate over House expenditures.  I wonder if local media outlets will look into their own Members' expense records, now that they're more easily accessible?