If you've been following the Real Time Investigations hunt for House lawmaker earmark disclosures you probably already know that many lawmakers did not post their earmark requests online by the required deadline. Well, don't you worry, they won't be punished for that (as they are supposed to be under the new rules). According to the Hill:

The House Appropriations Committee will likely give a pass to the dozens of members who missed the panel’s deadline for posting their earmark requests on the Internet.

The decision not to punish members will avert nasty confrontations, but raises questions about how Democratic leaders will enforce their new earmark requirements.

Lawmakers had until April 4 to submit and disclose earmark requests; a deadline that dozens missed. Lawmakers who failed to disclose by this date were supposed to have their requests rejected. Instead, these tardy lawmakers are getting a pass.

So much for the rule of Rules.

Each weekday, Sunlight's communications team collects all the press mentions of Sunlight and of our grantees.  Instead of just keeping that to ourselves, we thought we'd try something new by highlighting some of the more interesting mentions  and sharing that with you each week. (You can also check out our Delicious page and our Press Center to see who's writing about us.)

Elizabeth Brotherton at Roll Call (subscription required), Associated Press Managing Editors, Paul Krawzak with CQ Politics and Deb Price with The Detroit News wrote stories about about U.S. House of Representatives lawmakers posting their earmark requests for the 2010 budget on their Web sites as new transparency guidelines required. Bill Allison, Sunlight’s senior fellow, researched the disclosures. Journalists used Bill's research as the base for their articles, including many regional papers reporting on earmarks requested by their respective congressional delegations.

National Journal’s "Tech Daily Dose" blog reported that the Center for Responsive Politics’ site OpenSecrets.org is going "open data" this week. For the first time in their 26-year history, CRP "is making its most popular data archives fully available to the public for download for free,” The Journal writes.  Sunlight helped fund CRP's OpenData initiative to make millions of records available under a Creative Commons license, The Journal adds.

Sheryl Gay Stolberg with The New York Times wrote about President Obama's promise to bring transparency to the federal government. She notes the administration is finding that fulfilling the pledge is easier said than done. Technological hurdles, privacy concerns and the Washington's entrenched culture of secrecy have so far proven hard to overcome. Stolberg lists several steps the Obama team have successfully taken, the streamlining of a health care summit over the White House Web site and the setting up of Recovery.gov to help track the stimulus package. She quotes Ellen Miller, Sunlight’s executive director, as saying the site is “an amazing potential model of how information is made available to the public."

The Huffington Post published an op-ed by Mike Klein, Sunlight’s co-founder and chair, where he commends President Obama for establishing a transparency policy applicable to lobbying and the stimulus program. Mike encouraged the administration to not limit transparency just to lobbying the stimulus program. "The president should now mandate real time online transparency of lobbying throughout the executive branch." He also called on Congress to amend the Lobbying Disclosure Act so that lobbyists would be required to disclose all lobbying, whether of the Congress, the executive branch or the independent agencies, and in real time and online. Ryan Singel at Wired's "Epicenter" blog profiles Sunlight Labs’ contest Apps for America, and asked his readers to vote for their favorites.  Mark Tapscott, editorial page editor of the Washington Examiner, also wrote about Apps for America. Winter Casey and Bara Vaida at National Journal's "Under the Influence" blog and Jonathan Stein of Mother Jones wrote about mockups of Web-based lobbying disclosure forms John Wonderlich, Sunlight’s policy director, and Ali Felski, Sunlight Lab’s senior designer, created.

A while back, I wrote about the House and Senate plan to make members release earmark requests on their sites without specifying any format.

Sen. Smedley Smith does it like this: Sen. Smedley Smith secured from the Defense budget $18 million to purchase state-of-the-art $600 hammers from Springfield-based Boondoggle Inc. as part of the Army’s Operational Management account. Not exactly easy to turn into data. Rep. Rube Ryan does it like this: $1 million: To the University of Shelbyville Systems Material Management Institute in Shelbyville, to develop crunchless potato chips for MREs, from the Army RDTE budget. While you probably wouldn’t end up with 535 different formats, it’s unlikely that you’d end up with earmarks disclosed in a uniform format that could be easily scraped from member Web sites and loaded into a database. Add to this the likelihood that these disclosures would be disclosed in different places by different members — Sen. Porkbragger puts them on his home page, Rep. Limelighter posts each disclosure as a separate press release while Rep. Fillibluster likes to hide the link in his 72 screen long list of legislative accomplishments (helpfully labeled, “other actions”), and you begin to see what you’re up against.

After looking at some of the postings from Rep. Norm Dicks, Rep. John Murtha and Rep. James Moran, I think it's fair to say that some of my fears are being borne out.

John McCain and Russ Feingold are putting the old team back together to push for earmark reform in the Senate. Joining the old reformers are young guns Claire McCaskill, Tom Coburn, and Lindsey Graham. CongressDaily (subscription required) details what the reform package will look like:

[T]he measure would allow individual senators to raise points of order against unauthorized earmarks in appropriations bills. Earmark backers would need 60 votes to overcome the objection and the cost of the bill would be reduced by the amount of the earmark.

The measure also requires appropriations and authorizing conference reports to be electronically searchable for 48 hours before the Senate considers the conference reports and requires that recipients of federal funds disclose payments to registered lobbyists.

This is a big improvement over the current earmark process. While the Sunlight Foundation believes that all legislation should be available online for at least 72 hours before a vote, the 48-hour proposal is a step in the right direction. Making the bills searchable is an incredibly important step as thumbing through appropriations legislation is cumbersome.

Still to be determined is what would be disclosed for each individual earmark. Are recipients included? What else must be listed? Also, will the new reform team try to extend their reform package to cover the newly released rules for earmark request disclosure?

Yesterday, the House and Senate announced new earmark rules, which Sunlight's Bill Allison addressed here on the Sunlight blog and at Real Time Investigations. (John Wonderlich also looked at the proposal here.) Taxpayers for Common Sense has a similar take as Allison and listed changes that would make these reforms far more effective.

Perhaps the most crucial problem in the new rules is that they do not require a single point of disclosure, instead mandating each individual lawmaker disclose earmark requests on their official web site. In a response to a comment suggesting that Sunlight (or some other group) could create a unified, searchable earmark request database out of the soon to be newly disclosed information, Bill Allison explained how the dispersion of earmark disclosure can be such a huge problem:

We’d love to do all of that, of course, but how Congress publishes the data has a direct bearing on how feasible that is.

Let’s say that members have to disclose the following for every earmark: Project Name, Location, Recipient, Amount Requested, Dept. or Agency that would oversee earmark and Justification. So Sen. Smedley Smith does it like this:

Sen. Smedley Smith secured from the Defense budget $18 million to purchase state-of-the-art $600 hammers from Springfield-based Boondoggle Inc. as part of the Army’s Operational Management account.

Not exactly easy to turn into data. Rep. Rube Ryan does it like this:

$1 million: To the University of Shelbyville Systems Material Management Institute in Shelbyville, to develop crunchless potato chips for MREs, from the Army RDTE budget.

While you probably wouldn’t end up with 535 different formats, it’s unlikely that you’d end up with earmarks disclosed in a uniform format that could be easily scraped from member Web sites and loaded into a database.

Add to this the likelihood that these disclosures would be disclosed in different places by different members — Sen. Porkbragger puts them on his home page, Rep. Limelighter posts each disclosure as a separate press release while Rep. Fillibluster likes to hide the link in his 72 screen long list of legislative accomplishments (helpfully labeled, “other actions”), and you begin to see what you’re up against.

Let’s first make sure that Congress gets the basic disclosure done properly, and then we–along with other groups and individuals–would be happy to find ways to add value to it, allowing for citizen input, cross-referencing with other data, and all kinds of other tools.