It's been 225 years since the signing of the U.S. Constitution in September 1787, so the three years that have elapsed since we first asked the Library of Congress to publish the invaluable legal treatise Constitution Annotated online in a machine-readable format are little more than 1.3% of the age of our country. And the 670 days (i.e. 1 year and 10 months) that have flown by since Congress directed the Constitution Annotated be published online as it is updated, along with two other "vital legislative and legal documents," are but a brief flicker in geological terms. But in political terms, another congressional session is about to pass without the Library of Congress and GPO making good on their obligation to provide this important document to the American people.

I've run out of clever ways to say this, especially with so many others saying the same thing, but here goes. The Constitution Annotated is an important legal treatise that provides an easily understandable exploration of how Supreme Court decisions interpret the U.S. Constitution. It's already published on Congress' internal website as it is updated, and it should be published online in the same way. At a minimum, the Library and GPO should meet their obligation to do as Congress directed: publish these documents online "as quickly as possible." An informed public is the cornerstone of our democracy, and they should have this information readily available to them.

In the near future, Congress is expected to release a major upgrade to its aging legislative information website THOMAS. The long-overdue update is part of a much larger effort to "enhance the effectiveness of mission-critical systems," a response to significant public and internal pressure to improve congressional efficiency and transparency. The launch of "THOMAS Beta" is the first step towards developing what the Library of Congress describes as a completely "modern legislative information system" that will replace THOMAS and Congress' more sophisticated internal legislative tracking website "LIS" in FY 2014. Both THOMAS and LIS will stay online alongside the beta website for several years.

While THOMAS Beta has been shown to stakeholders inside Congress, as far as I am aware there has been no formal engagement process with the public to identify specifications, discuss wireframes, or generally make sure the site meets the public's needs. It is expected that such conversations will occur after the launch as the site is built out. My understanding is that the majority of the work on THOMAS Beta thus far has been to modernize the underlying information architecture, with many of the new bells and whistles and apps to be rolled out over time.

Two years ago, the Sunlight Foundation gathered ideas from the community for upgrading THOMAS, and in July 2010 we highlighted three additional ideas, but the primary recommendation continues to be requiring all of the underlying information behind THOMAS to be made available to the public "in bulk."  In other words, all of the legislative information behind THOMAS and LIS should be made available in a way that's easy for machines to understand so that developers can more easy and reliably build tools like OpenCongress, GovTrack, the Congress Android App, and Scout that re-use information in clever new ways.

The House leadership has endorsed the idea of bulk access and established a nascent bulk data task force, but not everyone inside Congress is fully on board with the effort. From an external perspective, we have requested that public stakeholders be included on the bulk data task force, which is being coordinated by the House Clerk's office. Along similar lines, for several years we and others have asked the Library of Congress to form an advisory group on THOMAS (as it is responsible for overseeing THOMAS), and we hope the impending launch of THOMAS Beta will make this a reality.

It's important to understand the context in which the THOMAS Beta rolls out. In the last year, the House of Representatives released an innovative legislative information portal, docs.house.gov, which provides bulk access to House data in a way that is more timely than THOMAS, and will soon provide materials from House committees in addition to documents concerning floor proceedings. The House also held three conferences on legislative transparency and created the bulk data task force. In addition, more than 85 organizations will release a declaration on parliamentary openness in Rome this Saturday at the World e-Parliament Conference that endorses providing information in open and structured formats. And the free, open-source parliamentary information system-in-a-box Bungeni is continuing to gain steam around the world.

We are eagerly looking forward to the launch of THOMAS Beta, and will pay particularly close attention to whether the Library of Congress, which has general responsibility for the project, has built a system that uses modern techniques -- such as bulk access and APIs -- to make information available to the public.

Tomorrow the Access to Congressionally Mandated Reports Act will get its turn in the spotlight. The legislation, which would require reports from agencies to Congress be available online on a single website, is set for a mark-up before the Committee on House Administration. The bipartisan bill was already favorably reported by the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform in June 2011, but must pass another hurdle before going to the House floor. It enjoys widespread support from members of the transparency community.

The bill fixes a problem that has bedeviled Congress and watchdogs for years. Federal agencies are required to submit reports to Congress, but they often fail to do so, and even reports that have been submitted often cannot be found on agency websites or congressional webpages. This makes oversight incredibly difficult.

ACMRA solves these problems by requiring that all congressionally mandated reports be sent to GPO, which would then publish them online on a single website. (The House Clerk already compiles a master list of the reports that must be filed.) Centralization publication will make the reports easy to find -- and it would become a trivial task to identify when agencies have failed to file on time. The reports must be submitted in open formats and can be downloaded in bulk, so they are easy to open and analyze. In limited circumstances, some of the contents of the reports can be redacted for national security or other reasons, but only if the redaction is permissible under FOIA. It's also worth noting that GPO says that the costs of implementing the legislation are not significant and would be borne by the agency.

Rep. Mike Quigley introduced the legislation and spearheaded efforts to get it enacted in the House. He is now joined by 17 co-sponsors. Senator Lieberman introduced a companion measure in the Senate, which is cosponsored by Senators Collins and Coburn.

A favorable report by the Committee on House Administration could set the stage for quick passage in the House and a hearing in the Senate. CHA has supported a number of other open government measures, so it is hoped that the legislation will meet quick approval.

Where else but the United States Senate would digital documents containing vital public information be printed, scanned, emailed, printed again and re-keyed into computers before they could be searched, sorted and analyzed by the public? Because the Senate has exempted itself from the electronic filing requirements that apply to all other political committees, the absurd process is repeated multiple times a year by every candidate vying for a Senate seat.

Tomorrow, the Senate Rules Committee will hold a hearing on S. 219, the Senate Campaign Disclosure Parity Act, a bill designed to bring the Senate into the 21st Century by requiring Senate candidates to file their campaign finance disclosure reports with the FEC, as House candidates, presidential candidates and PACs have been doing for years. Sunlight submitted testimony urging senators to support the bill. We also joined a coalition urging quick passage of this bipartisan legislation.

There is nothing controversial about the bill. No one has publicly opposed it on its merits. Possibly the most notable feature of the legislation is that a hearing is necessary at all. This bill should have been enacted a decade ago.

The primary culprit behind the failure to enact this bill is Senator Mitch McConnell. For reasons that only he could explain (although he never has) he has blocked passage of this bill by subjecting it to secret holds and poison pill amendments. This is the same Mitch McConnell who once asked, “Why would a little disclosure [of money in politics] be better than a lot of disclosure?"

We are left to assume that McConnell only supports a lot of disclosure when he thinks it advantages him or his party. Otherwise, he will do everything in his power to deny the public timely access to information that is critical to a functioning democracy.

The current process by which Senate candidates file their campaign finance reports wastes time and money, not to mention reams of paper. It is particularly troublesome in the days before an election, when there is more information filed and when delays may mean the public must go to the polls without access to complete information about candidates’ finances.

We hope the days of political gamesmanship surrounding this simple bill are over. It is past time for the Senate to adopt mandatory electronic filing of campaign finance reports.

Testimony of Ellen Miller in Support of S. 219

Today 30 organizations from across the political spectrum joined together to ask Congress to improve public access to legislative information. Our joint letters to congressional appropriators and rulemakers urges Congress to direct that the THOMAS legislative database be published online and to establish an advisory committee on further improvements.

THOMAS, Congress' legislative information website that provides basic information about legislative and congressional actions, has fallen far behind the needs of its users. Many have turned to important websites like GovTrack, OpenCongress, and WashingtonWatch to monitor congressional activities.

These sites and others, which repackage and add important context to legislative activities, extract data from the THOMAS website through a painstaking and often brittle process. To make this process easier and more reliable, the Library of Congress should publish THOMAS information "in bulk," which makes the entire legislative database available for download at once, instead of publishing information in such a way that it can only be gathered by scraping data from hundreds or thousands of webpages.

Bulk access to legislative information is already common practice inside and outside the government. For example,

•  The Government Printing Office publishes six major databases, including the Federal Register, in bulk;
•  The House's Office of Law Revision Counsel publishes the U.S. Code in bulk;
•  New Jersey and New Hampshire publish their legislative information in bulk; and
•  Data.gov has nearly 400,000 datasets available in bulk, including 4,395 high-value datasets.

The transparency community, technology innovators, journalists, good government organizations, and private companies have long sought bulk access to legislative data. In May 2007, a coalition of organizations called on Congress to "embrace structured data by publishing the status of legislation and other information to the web ... in structured data formats". In 2009, Congress articulated support for bulk access to legislative data in an explanatory statement accompanying an appropriations bill. And in November 2011 one of the action items emerging from the House's Congressional Facebook Hackathon was an endorsement of releasing "structured machine-readable legislative data ... in a bulk format."

This past year the Sunlight Foundation, GovTrack, and Open Congress submitted testimony to House Appropriators calling for bulk access to legislative information. We applaud the major strides made by the House of Representatives in improving public access to the House's legislative information, but what's missing is the kind of information only available through the THOMAS website. This includes bill summaries, bill status information, bill co-sponsors, and other information that provides important context for legislation.

We estimate that for every person that goes directly to the THOMAS website, at least two people visit a third-party website. But even these sites must rely on legislative information generated and maintained by Congress, which is only available through the difficult-to-use THOMAS website. There will always be a need for a congressionally-mandated website, but Congress should ensure that the innovative and transformative uses of legislative information by third parties is grounded upon accurate and timely data. And that means providing bulk access to everyone.

Organizations encourage rulemakers to publish THOMAS legislative information in bulk

Organizations urge appropriators to publish THOMAS data in bulk

The Senate Rules Committee will hold a hearing on Thursday to discuss S. 2219, the “Democracy Is Strengthened by Casting Light on Spending in Elections Act of 2012” (The DISCLOSE Act.) Sunlight’s Ellen Miller is submitting testimony in support of the DISCLOSE Act.

We hope this hearing will put to rest all of the arguments against the bill. In dismantling 100 years of prohibitions against corporate treasury funds being used to elect candidates, the Supreme Court, in the Citizens United case put a great deal of faith in the idea that disclosure will remove the taint of corruption from the new influx of cash. The majority opinion observed that the Internet is becoming the best way to hold politicians and influencers accountable. But, the Court created an entirely new spending regime for which no disclosure system is in place. For online transparency to perform the functions ascribed to it by the Citizens United ruling, Congress has to create new laws that reflect the new reality of expanded independent spending. DISCLOSE 2012 creates that system of transparency and as such should receive wide support from members on both sides of the aisle.

The DISCLOSE Act introduced earlier this year goes straight to heart of the problem: the lack of transparency for unlimited, dark money and the influence it has on our elections and our elected officials. The updated bill removes extraneous and controversial provisions that plagued an earlier version of DISCLOSE, instead focusing on what the public demands — transparency. 


Specifically, the bill’s robust reporting requirements for Super PACs, corporations, unions and nonprofit organizations that make independent expenditures and electioneering communications will begin to address many of the problems wrought by Citizens United: It will shine a light on dark money; it will provide an enforcement mechanism to ensure that no foreign money is influencing our political process; it will allow citizens to determine the credibility of campaign ads based on the messenger as well as the message; and it will arm citizens with information about campaign funding before they go to the polls, in real time and online. The disclosure and disclaimer provisions of the DISCLOSE Act are narrowly crafted so as not to infringe on constitutional protections. The Act does not require organizations to disclose donors who have contributed less than $10,000 and allows groups to create a firewall that allows donors who do not wish to contribute to political activities to remain anonymous. At the same time, the DISCLOSE Act, for better or worse, does not put an end to concentrations of wealth being used in an effort to impact elections. Simply put, it does not chill speech. But the Act rightly and importantly shines a light on the dark money now infecting our elections and creates informed citizens and a more accountable government.

So far, the bill has the support of Senate Democrats. The issue of transparency in government is too important to become bogged down in partisanship, and we hope many more Senators on both sides of the aisle will cosponsor the legislation after Thursday’s hearing.

Ellen Miller Testimony DISCLOSE 2012 Final

On the eve of the midterm elections and with the 111^th Congress all but wrapped up with its business, Sunlight has been brainstorming a list of bipartisan, “low-hanging fruit” of transparency ideas that the House and Senate can hit the ground running with as soon as they come back into session next year. One of those proposals is to make all amendments filed in the Senate immediately available to the public online.

The American public has the right to know what their elected officials are debating and voting on in Congress. However, as the current process stands, Senators and their staff are granted privileged access to information about some amendments while the general public is kept locked out.

Amendments are often filed to bills during debate on the Senate floor. While these amendments are available for immediate internal Senate review, the public often must wait until the amendments are published in The Congressional Record the next day to see just what they do to the legislation. In a lot of cases, the Senate may have already voted on one of these amendments the day before -- in a way, sidestepping public scrutiny. Whether the change is an addition of a single word or a sweeping manager's amendment that rewrites large sections of a bill, this presents a missed opportunity for constituents to review the amendment language and contact their representatives with any concerns.

Conversely, the Senate may also end up voting on an amendment that was filed and printed days earlier in The Congressional Record, which makes the language of the amendment difficult to find.

Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA) introduced a resolution to address this very issue in June of this year without much fanfare or attention from the press. But quiet as its introduction was, the resolution's impact is significant in that it would bring the Senate in line with policies already long in place in the House.

Senator Grassley’s resolution mirrors larger reform efforts to ensure underlying legislation is made available to Congress and the public for a reasonable amount of time before it is voted on. It stands to reason that the amendment process should be made as transparent as possible as well. And, like the 72 hour rule that Sunlight has continually pushed for, the Senate could act proactively on revising its amendment process by enshrining this change in any new rules package it adopts for the 112th Congress. Whether as a stand-alone bill or incorporated as a rule, Senator Grassley's proposal is an easy step in the direction of a more transparent and accountable Senate.

Today the Senate Rules Committee held the first of what’s likely to be a series of hearings on Capitol Hill analyzing the fallout and proposing solutions to the havoc sowed as a result of the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United v. FEC. Sunlight submitted written testimony outlining our seven-point plan for a new, comprehensive disclosure that emphasized getting the panoply of campaign finance information online, in real time.

Thought you might like to see it.