Come Christmas Eve, when the Senate is likely to wrap up its work for the year, one piece of legislation they will have failed to enact is a bill to mandate that Senators file their campaign finance reports electronically. Majority Leader Reid has neither found a way around Republican obstruction of the noncontroversial measure, nor has he committed to holding a vote to defeat a promised Republican poison pill amendment and once and for all complete work on the measure. By failing to get this bill enacted this year, it is almost certain that there will be no mandatory electronic filing system in place for the 2010 elections.

But even without a mandate, Senate candidates can assure their campaign finance information is online, in real time, by simply voluntarily filing their campaign finance reports electronically with the FEC. Unfortunately, of sitting Senators, only Senators Feingold, Feinstein and Wicker have taken this simple step to make their campaign finance reports available to the public as soon as they are filed. As Senator Reid is up for re-election in 2010, we strongly urge him to demonstrate his commitment to public access to campaign finance information and file his reports electronically.  Hopefully, others will follow.

We’ll keep working to get an electronic filing bill passed by urging Republicans to stop needlessly blocking the bill and, if that fails, convincing the Democrats to make this bill a priority and hold a vote. Until that happens, we’d like to see every candidate running for Senate in 2010 to pledge to make his or her campaign finance reports transparent.

Here are a few of the more interesting media mentions of Sunlight and our friends and allies from the week:

CNN interviewed Ellen Miller, Sunlight’s executive director, in an article on lobbyists and the need for disclosure of their interactions with congressional lawmakers and other federal officials.

Katharine Q. Seelye at The New York Times reported on the fact that, five months into his administration, President Obama has signed two dozen bills, but he has almost never waited the five days, as he promised during his election campaign. She noted how open government and other watchdog groups have criticized the president for not living up to his pledge. Seelye quotes Ellen as saying it’s less important for the president to wait before signing a bill than it is for the Congress to wait 72 hours before voting on it. “There isn’t anybody in this town who doesn’t know that commenting after a bill has been passed is meaningless." The article also has an accompanying video.

Politico's Victoria McGrane reported on how the Senate is considering putting all their office expenses — including staff salaries — online, as well as requiring campaign fundraising reports to be published on the Web. The mere fact that the Senate leadership has conducted a whip count is an encouraging sign for the reforms' passage, McGrane writes. And she quotes Lisa Rosenberg, Sunlight’s , “They wouldn’t be talking about bringing it up for a vote if it wasn’t pretty solid."

The Washington Examiner reports on Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington calling on the Obama administration to release the names of health care executives who have visited the White House. “If you are going to criticize other people for secrecy, you better have an open door,” said Melanie Sloan, CREW’s executive director. “They talk about transparency more than they exhibit it.”

Brian Wingfield at Forbes.com wrote about the health care reform debate and linked to Sunlight’s senior writer Paul Blumenthal's blog post about former senators Tom Daschle and Bob Dole releasing a health care plan while being health care lobbyists.

Lisa Wangsness with The Boston Globe reported on bloggers from the medical, technology, and patient advocacy worlds organizing to win the right of patients to gain access to their computerized health records from their doctors in an electronic format. She quotes the Center for Democracy & Technology’s Deven McGraw noting that federal law already entitles patients to easy, inexpensive access to their health records in whatever format they exist. Too often, she said, patients, doctors, and hospitals are not aware of the law. She added that Congress included $19 billion in the stimulus package for electronic medical records systems. Patients and their doctors need to have a clearer understanding of that right, she said.

The New York Times picked up Anne C. Mulkern’s Greenwire piece on how money has helped to grease the skids of the Cap and Trade Energy Bill on Capitol Hill. The report used data from the Center for Responsive Politics to show how industry with a stake in the legislation has attempted to influence the vote in their favor.

Sunlight’s concern over how fast the energy bill Congress is moving the generated a number of editorials in support of our position. The (St. Paul, Minn.) Pioneer Press editorialized about the energy bill, "Has anybody read those 1,200 pages?” The editorial says "it is a big deal," and the "virtues of transparency don't apply only to the work of one's opponents. If the price of broader public understanding of major legislation is a slower process, good." And the editorial ended with, "To our friends at the Sunlight Foundation, we say: Keep the pressure on." The Chicago Tribune also editorialized about Cap and Trade. "Remember that gargantuan climate change bill we told you about last week? It's gotten bigger. Over the weekend, the bill grew from 946 pages to 1,201 pages, according to the Sunlight Foundation. It's still changing, with important amendments in flux. And The (Riverside, Calif.) Press-Enterprise wrote a Cap and Trade editorial as well that used many of Sunlight's talking points.

ReadWriteWeb's Marshal Kirkpatrick wrote about the U.S. Office of Management and Budget issuing new reporting guidelines this week for recipients of the $787 billion Recovery Act. "The normally polite geek watchdog organization the Sunlight Foundation has come out swinging," Kirkpatrick wrote, referencing Ellen's blog post from yesterday where she called it a "significant failure" on the part of the administration by not living up to its promise for full and complete disclosure. Kirkpatrick also mentions how the Senate is now offering mashup-friendly XML (extensible markup language) feeds for Senate voting history. He lifted quotes from Sunlight's policy director John Wonderlich from a Politico article from April on the arguments against the chamber offering the voting history in XML. "The secretary of the Senate has cited a general standing policy that they're not supposed to present votes in a comparative format, that senators have the right to present their votes however they want to."

Speaking of the OMB’s new reporting guidelines, NextGov.com’s Aliya Sternstein noted other problems. The latest guidance does not include previous instructions from an earlier incarnation directing agencies to configure news feeds that would allow citizens to receive automatic updates. She interviewed Craig Jennings from OMB Watch, who said for standardization purposes, "it does make sense that there is some restriction to the raw data . . . to make sure [that, for example,] 'assn' equals association, 'Boeing Inc.' is the same as Boeing Incorporation."

Thanks.

Since Wednesday, when the sex scandal engulfing Sen. John Ensign morphed into a public expense scandal, we've learned quite a few new details. Ensign was not blackmailed by Douglas Hampton. Cynthia Hampton's salary at Ensign's campaign doubled during the time of their affair. Ensign helped get jobs for Douglas Hampton and his son after they left Ensign's Senate office and the NRSC, respectively.

What we still don't know is whether Douglas Hampton was handsomely paid with taxpayer money when he left Ensign's Senate office and whether this could constitute as hush money. There are beginning to be calls for a Senate Ethics Committee investigation with Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) asking for the committee to investigate and require disclosure from Ensign. This is just such an awesome idea and here's why:

Back in 2007, around the time that Ensign was pursuing his close friend's wife, Ensign was leading a crusade to derail a bill that would require electronic filing of Senate campaign finance reports. (Yes, this bill, the one Sunlight has been advocating for since 2006.) How was Ensign trying to derail the bill? By offering an amendment that would require any group filing an ethics complaint with the Senate Ethics Committee against a senator to disclose all of their donors (pretty much any lawyer will tell you that this is unconstitutional). This would, in effect, stymie the open process by which the Senate Ethics Committee accepts complaints and would likely stop the committee from pursuing investigations. The Senate Ethics Committee is currently far more active than the House Ethics Committee, which does not accept outside complaints.

(Currently, Sen. Pat Roberts is trying to block the same electronic filing bill with Ensign's anti-investigation amendment. If you want to get rid of this Ensign protecting amendment, you can help out here.)

Now, I don't know if Sen. Ensign was trying to make the ethics process difficult to protect his own hide, but give a listen to how important he takes this issue. He even states that ethics complaints could be written on a bar napkin. I'd gander that writing on bar napkins is something that Ensign is more used to than the Senate Ethics Committee.

David Waldman (aka Kagro X) posted a very good piece on Congress Matters regarding congressional transparency and the bureaucratic arguments by institutionalists that often prevent positive action. Waldman's piece focuses on the priority of technology-enabled transparency in voting records and how the members of Congress may simply say, "Gather the info and do it yourself. We don't want to spend the money to do it." He also touches on one area that we focus on a lot here, the lack of electronic filing for Senate campaign finance forms. Waldman draws an analogy between the institutional arguments for not releasing voting records with Senate obstinacy on electronic filing of campaign forms:

A similar issue arises, it turns out, with the drive to get the Senate to file its campaign finance forms electronically, too. I haven't had any particular need to comb through that information (though it wouldn't be hard to imagine needing it), but in my discussions with people in the transparency biz, that's clearly been a big sticking point. Again, though, I could see the institutionalists saying, "You want campaign finance forms? Go ask the [FEC]. We're the Senate. We're what happens after all that stuff." That's a gross oversimplification, of course, since everyone knows that the general public at least considers it important to know where incumbent Senators have raised and are raising their money from.

If the Senate wants to make an institutional argument about whether it is on them to properly file their campaign finance forms or whether this is an FEC issue, that is perfectly fine. That's because the problem lies solely with the institution of the Senate and cannot be deferred as an issue with the FEC.

You see, senators do not file with the FEC directly. Instead, they file, on paper, with the Secretary of the Senate's office, which then passes the documents onto the FEC (where they are copied and housed in a series of file cabinets). Thus, the Senate insists on making its bureaucratic inefficiency a problem for both the information provider and the information seeker. They can't possibly say, "You want campaign finance forms? Go ask the [FEC]. We're the Senate. We're what happens after all that stuff," because they have made themselves file with the Senate, not the FEC.

When Congress mandated electronic filing of campaign finance forms in 1999, the Senate exempted themselves by carving out a loophole that requires only those filing directly with the FEC to file electronically. Since senators file with the Secretary of the Senate, they became exempt, thus they can't push this issue off to the FEC or any other information providing body.

If you think this is absurd and want transparency from the Senate, you can help us pass S. 482, a bill that would require senators to file directly with the FEC, thus ending the Senate exemption. Go to the Pass 482 site and tell your senator(s) to cosponsor the bill.

Sen. Jeff Merkley recently signed up as the 36th cosponsor of S. 482, the Senate e-filing bill. We're excited that he is supporting Senate campaign finance transparency and if you want to let him know you can hit him up on Twitter at @senjeffmerkley. If your senator(s) hasn't yet signed on as cosponsor you can head to the Pass 482 site and let me know that they should support transparency.

A good week for electronic filing in the Senate. Sen. Claire McCaskill becomes the second senator to cosponsor S. 482 this week. We are up to 35 cosponsors! If you want to help move the Senate into the 21st century, go to the Pass 482 site and call your senators.

If you're on Twitter, feel free to thank Sen. McCaskill (@clairecmc) for cosponsoring this important bill.

Thanks to Sen. Olympia Snowe, we are up to 34 cosponsors on S. 482, the Senate e-filing bill! If you want to help us pass this bill, go here and call your senators to tell them to cosponsor S. 482.

The campaign to pass S. 482, the Senate e-filing bill, continues apace with a great mention in the Politico today. If you want to us pass this commonsense bill, go to the Pass 482 site and ask your senators to cosponsor the bill. The Politico article hits some great points and features Sunlight's Lisa Rosenberg:

You can learn instantly via Twitter that Claire McCaskill needs an iPhone repair or that Chuck Grassley burned his leg on his Iowa farm.

But if you want to comb through the details of a senator’s quarterly campaign finance reports online, it’s going to take a month to get the information — and a boatload of government money to make it available.

While presidential candidates and members of the House of Representatives file their financial disclosures electronically, the Senate still does it the old-fashioned way.

Senate campaign committees print out thousands of pages of forms and hand them over to the secretary of the Senate, who delivers them to the Federal Election Commission, which pays people to key in the information so that, at some point down the line, you can search the data online.

The result: Senate campaign finance data costs more to produce but takes longer to get and is ultimately less accurate than the same information presidential and House candidates submit electronically.

Go to Pass 482 and help us pass this bill!

This excellent Mother Jones article on Sen. Chris Dodd's panfinancial pay-to-play party contains a hidden problem that we have focused on here for quite some time. Due to the Senate's lack of electronic filing for campaign finance reports, journalists must sort through copies of campaign finance disclosure as opposed to searching for them in a database to do this type of important research.

Research into House campaign finance data is much easier, due to their use of electronic filing, and thus the proliferation of House campaign finance stories over the past few days.

If you want to help change this, we've set up a site in support of S. 482, the bill that would mandate electronic filing, that you can go to and make sure your senators hear that you want them to cosponsor the bill.