Throughout the last year, we've repeatedly pointed out that Speaker Boehner repeatedly pledged to put all bills online for 72 hours before they're voted on, reflecting Sunlight's call and the ReadtheBill.org campaign.

Boehner's pledge was unambiguous and repeated often -- all non emergency bills for 72 hours.  Unfortuantely, this has become a pledge that has been broken often, most recently last week with the bills rushed through the House.

For easier reference, here are the commitments on video, edited into one shorter clip.

These commitments matter. Remember when Republicans derided Pelosi for the healthcare bill, and claimed that bills were being "rammed down" their throats? Similarly, remember when (mostly) Democrats were outraged that the PATRIOT Act wasn't read before it was passed?

When we're pushing for important transparency reforms, like having all bills online for 72 hours before floor consideration, the minority party is often a natural ally. Each time the majority changes hands, there's usually a rush to reform processes, and promises to run a more accountable ship. Of course, many of these promises are kept, and we make progress.

But the toughest promises to keep are often the most important, and this Congress has a very poor track record on legislative secrecy. When the most important bills are written by a tiny number of negotiators, and then foisted on the rest of Congress at the eleventh hour, we can expect dismal approval ratings and mistrust to rule the day.

While such discord in Congress is more likely under divided government like we've got now, perhaps Boehner (and Obama) should revisit the visions they set for their current roles before they began -- Obama on Change.gov, and Boehner in the Pledge to America.

They should remember that when they run up to the last possible second to negotiate deals between party leaders, it's not a zero sum competition. It's not whether Republicans or Democrats gain ground, or are seen as taking the more reasonable position. When the 72 hour expectation is flaunted, our trust in government suffers, as does our sense of merit in policymaking, and our sense of self governance.

Leaders from both parties have largely turned their backs on transparency in policymaking. Whether it's the perceived necessity of SuperPACS, or the acceptance of the ridiculous secrecy of the SuperCommittee, neither party has found solid ground to discuss transparent process.

Let's hope they revisit their past rhetoric, because without solid footing, we'll just keep sliding downhill.

Having legislation that is meaningfully public isn't a luxury, it's a requirement. A closed Congress is an abused process. Our leaders should remind themselves of the times they've agreed with that sentiment.

Of the 12 members of the failed supercommittee that were tasked with cutting $1.2 trillion from the federal deficit, five have disclosed records with the Federal Election Commission stating that they’ve received bundled contributions from lobbyists exceeding $16,000.

Representative Dave Camp, R-Mich, is the only member of the committee that has reported receiving bundled contributions so far this cycle. All $32,000 he received was bundled by one lobbyist named Harry Sporidis. Sporidis works for the firm Polsinelli Shughart and represents a number of clients in the healthcare industry, including the National Association for Behavioral Health and the American Society of Clinical Oncology.

According to the records, Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash, has been the greatest supercommittee recipient of bundled contributions since 2009. She’s received just over $262,000 from large corporations including AT&T, Microsoft, Boeing, and Amazon, and well-known lobbyists like Tony Podesta who represents many prominent clients like BP America, Credit Suisse and Boeing.

This information has been made available as a result of the Honest Leadership and Government Act of 2007, which amended the Lobbyist Disclosure Act of 1995. The act made gifts to lawmakers illegal, was supposed to close the revolving door and required more disclosure regarding lobbying activity and spending – including the disclosure of bundled contributions, among other things. The act came about after Jack Abramoff, the infamous lobbyist turned felon, was convicted of fraud, tax evasion and conspiracy. His case demonstrated the wide-ranging corrupt practices that could take place in Washington. The rules require disclosure of bundled contributions went into effect in 2009, and have so far generated a rather small dataset of just over 300 records but have revealed $17.1 million in contributions to just 76 recipients including party committees. The largest bundler, the Edison Electric Institute (EEI), has given $2,120,952 in bundled contributions to just two recipients. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee is one of them and received the bulk of that money: $2,072,950. The Republican Senator from South Carolina, Lindsey Graham, received the remaining $48,000 of that money. According to records filed with the Senate Office of Public Records, EEI has lobbied on a variety of issues related to energy, including regulating greenhouse gases and Clean Air Act regulations.

The remaining supercommittee members that received bundled contributions subject to the relatively new rules are Jeb Hensarling, R-Texas, Chris Van Hollen, R-Md, and John Kerry, D-Mass,. The three received $235,500, $40,000 and $20,425 respectively.

The lobbyist bundler data is now available on InfluenceExplorer.com and TransparencyData.com. The data comes directly from the FEC. Contributions are disclosed by recipients (reporting committees) to the FEC when a lobbyist/registrant or lobbyist/registrant PAC makes at least two contributions to a single recipient totaling at least $16,200. Recipients report according to their regularly scheduled reporting periods and according to biannual reporting requirements put into place just for bundled contributions, according to the FEC.

It looks increasingly likely that the supercommittee is going to fail to recommend a deficit reduction package to Congress.

As it fails, we should remember what exactly it is that is failing.  What were the assumptions behind the supercommittee's creation?

The assumptions of the supercommittee's design:

• public discussion is a distraction, and public attention reduces substance
• fewer voices at the table leads to clarity
• contrived deadlines created a shared sense of purpose and urgency
• it's acceptable for party leaders to force Congress to choose between the supercommittee-creating debt limit "deal" and defaulting on the nation's debts, with no time to examine the "deal", and no ability to change it

Let's look at these assumptions in a little more detail.

Public Attention is Necessary for Legitimate Discussions

Sunlight has been railing against this assumption for most of the last year. The argument can perhaps be best summed up by pointing out that supporters of supercommittee secrecy are saying that it's okay to rewrite the tax code, change social security and medicare, cut defense spending, and rewrite agriculture policy, all in one measure, without any public hearings (on those topics) and with no chance for the rest of Congress to amend or block it.  That's not just misguided, it's antidemocratic and actively invites disaster, just as the Budget Control Act did.

Our votes are meaningless if the most fundamental decisions are completely divorced from the representatives that are making them. The supercommittee's secrecy should become legendary in its wrongheadedness. When Supercommittee members demand secrecy for their talks while anonymously leaking plans and attacks to the press, we don't have to take their professed need for secrecy seriously anymore, and shouldn't in the future, either.  The Supercommittee's failure should become synonymous with ill-advised legislative secrecy.

The only possibility for enduring damage from the supercommittee's secret meetings is that their distorted definition of "meeting" may be contagious. The supercommittee's own rules required their meetings to be public, and the chairs apparently relied on a contrived definition of "meeting" to avoid open meetings. If all the members of a committee in an official room doing official business for 8 hours isn't a meeting under the Rules of the House and the Senate, then we've got to fix that definition. Murray's and Hensarling's disrespect for norms about what constitutes a meeting should be derided, and made impossible to emulate.

Empowering a Small Secretive Group Does not Create Clarity

Just as has been the case with all the other negotiations over the last year, the supercommittee negotiation process has been marked by anonymous leaks, rumors, and an utter lack of public substance.  When Senators accuse each other of lying on the Sunday shows, we have to conclude that, despite having only a few hand-picked members in the room for the negotiations, clarity of purpose was not among the things that the process created.

The supercommittee's design reflects the assumption that politics are for manipulating after the fact, and that real decisions should be the result of inter-party trading.  It turns out that in the absence of the public will, which is intended to motivate congressional action, we ended up with a listless morass.

The supercommittee's failure will probably not move our politics forward at all. Each side's partisan supporters will be told self-supporting stories of valor and purity by their respective representatives, and the complete lack of a public record will enable their manipulation. By assuming that our American political discourse is too hollow for real deliberations, the supercommittee members will ensure that their negotiations make no valuable contribution to the next year's politics. The offers and counteroffers become the basis for competing self-aggrandizing vignettes, our politics becomes even harder to connect to our actual national situation.

Contrived Mechanisms are Contrived

The looming sequestration / trigger was conceived as the keystone of serious negotiations, where a shared stake in avoiding catastrophe brings out lawmakers higher purpose.  In reality, attempting to bind Congress to contrived consequences has become a national laugh line, as Members of Congress attest their willingness to undo the trigger in part or in whole.

If Congress is doing a bad job of understanding consequences, creating "automatic" consequences isn't going to help. The trigger is the mechanism by which Congressional leadership and the President raised the stakes enough to get the supercommittee's agenda to be taken seriously. The power the supercommittee was given, however, (immunity from amendment and obstruction) elides the fact that the House and Senate alone control their procedures, as Section 404 of the Budget Control Act redundantly asserts.  When the Constitution gives you the power to set your own affairs, even previous Acts of Congress are irrelevant.

The sequestration is real, and will take an Act of Congress to undo or change.  But the special powers given to the supercommittee over the chambers (in order to deal with the impending trigger) are only as real as the Chambers' desire to continue accepting them.

Creating impending doom turns out to be a very poor way of  creating a shared sense of purpose.

Party Leaders Should Lead Parties

The entire supercommittee debacle was started when Obama, Boehner, and Reid apparently took seriously the idea of giving enormous power to just 12 people, and trying to intimidate and bind Congress to their decisions. Announced as an act of courage, the supercommittee ended up undermining our trust in Congress, even when lower numbers seemed impossible.

At its core, though, creating the supercommittee was an overreach from party leaders. Given a recalcitrant and divided Membership, party leaders created a proxy for Congress. They jammed all of our national disagreements under one tiny roof, and threw their weight behind the seriousness of that process.  Nevermind the lobbyists, the fundraisers, the secrecy, and the disagreements. The supercommittee scheme assumed that if we had a small enough room, with a looming enough deadline, and forced Congress to go along, we could create compromise.  It turns out, though, that the alchemical formula for bipartisanship, if there is one, isn't comprised of power, secrecy, and contrived deadlines.

If Congress is to learn anything from this debacle, maybe it should be to treat leadership differently.  The supercommittee process was essentially an agreement among the party leadership -- the negotiators from July's debt ceiling debate.  When they foisted the Budget Control Act on Congress at the 11th hour, they gave Congress the ridiculous choice between a sane process and a national default.

Congress shouldn't accept this from leadership ever again.  An 11th hour "deal" is inimical to self-governance, and leads to ridiculous schemes like the supercommittee process.

If party leaders decide to hammer a deal amongst each other, then they should do that, among each other.  They should write up a public memo of understanding, and share it with everyone.  Say what your "deal" is.  A balanced budget amendment vote as trade for unemployment extensions? Fine, write it up.  But the Budget Act deal wasn't a compromise at all, it was an attempt to make a better Congress, created with no reflection or public consideration.  Every assumption that went into the supercommittee's creation was anti-democratic and ill-conceived.

The Supercommittee was One Among Many Plans

If the party leaders need to make deals in order to face tough issues, so be it.  There are any other number of "you measure, I cut" compromises that could be created by party leaders, without giving up on how a democratic legislature is supposed to work. Boehner and Obama apparently bought the argument that public discussion was toxic, and that contrived doom would motivate progress.

What if they had started with other assumptions?

If the leaders had all decided that deficit reduction needed a contrived process, what other possibilities could they have chosen?  What if they had declared a deadline for a fall proposal from the Republicans, and vowed an up or down vote in both the House and Senate on their plan, on the condition that if Republicans fail, Democrats get their chance in the Spring? And that this process would continue until one side's bill passed? If the agreement were built on the public word of the party leadership, then both parties would start vying for legitimacy, rather than positioning themselves for failure.

That might be a ridiculous idea.  But the point is that the supercommittee process was borne of a particular set of assumptions about how compromise should work, and was structured to reflect those assumptions.  Those assumptions have been discredited.

Secrecy plus power plus contrived deadlines equals embarrassing failure.

May our leaders see the supercommittee as rock-bottom for their secrecy addiction, rather than finding a new way to double down.  And the next time they create a power-sharing scheme, they should remember the difference between their discretion as party leaders, and the expectations for self-governance inherent in a democracy.

 

 

Halloween may be over, but our fight for greater Super Committee transparency isn’t. Want to know what Haunt the House was really like on Monday? Check out this sweet video:

Thanks again to those of you who participated!

As hinted in my last post on Monday’s action, we’ll be promoting more ways for you to take action on the Super Committee early next week. In the meantime, check out more ways to make your voice heard at http://sunlightfoundation.com/opensupercongress.

Conventional wisdom holds that if the Super Committee does not come up with a plan to reduce the federal deficit by November 23, that failure will trigger $1.2 trillion in budget cuts. While this is useful shorthand, the reality is more complex. What's the importance of November 23rd?

It's the deadline by which the Super Committee must vote on a report and legislative language or lose the special privileges that ease consideration by the House and Senate. These privileges are particularly important in the Senate, where any recalcitrant Senator can hold up proceedings absent the special provisions. Failure to meet the deadline is not fatal: each chamber could re-enact special rules (similar to those in the Budget Control Act) to allow debate to move forward.

But, there's a curious provision in the law. Assuming the report and legislative language are approved by the Super Committee on Nov. 23, the law doesn't require them to be submitted to key elected officials until December 2, 2011 -- ten days later. Why the gap? Some time could be eaten up by the three calendar days allocated to Super Committee members who want to express additional views in the report. And if amendments are agreed to by the Committee, it may take some time to edit the legislative or report language reflect those changes. The December 2nd date places a drop dead date to any scrivener work.

Whenever the final draft is finished, the Super Committee is required to "promptly" make the report, legislative language, and vote available to the public. While we agree the public has a right to see the finished product, we also should be able to see final drafts. Specifically, the proposed report and legislative language should be available to the public on the Super Committee's website at least 72 hours before the committee vote. Some may argue that politicians only work well under a deadline, and the bill will keep changing right up until midnight. That's not entirely true, and brings me to my second point.

Even if the legislative language and report is voted on by midnight on November 23rd, much of the work will have to be completed before then. The Super Committee is not allowed to vote on any version of the report, recommendations, or legislation unless CBO estimates of its effect on the deficit are available for consideration by all members of the Super Committee at least 48 hours prior to the vote -- no later than midnight on November 21st. CBO will likely need significant time before then to come up with a score.

The Super Committee proposals are already being debated in public, but in a leaked, bastardized, dumbed-down form. We should remember that the Budget Control Act and the Super Committee Rules are only as enforceable as our political leaders want them to be. While there's still time left -- and in the hope of regaining some credibility -- the Super Committee should open its doors to the public.

Giant frogs. Bugs. Wild, ferocious-ish bears. These are but a few examples of the daring costumes worn by Sunlighters this past Monday as they stopped by their nearest Super Committee member’s office. Dozens of people in over 10 cities made this unconventional trick or treat trip as part of our Haunt the House (and Senate) campaign. To be fair, not everyone came in costume, but we all carried the same powerful message:

We are tired of the lack of transparency in the Super Committee and we support common sense reforms to improve the process.

We’ve blogged extensively about these reforms here (and here and here and you can learn more here), but the long and short of it is that the kind of access that we need to ensure that the Super Committee’s recommendations are made as part of a democratic process are easy to achieve and painless for the Committee to enact. So, they should.

Sunlight and our coalition of nearly 40 partners have been pushing this message through conventional means -- letters to Congress, calls, etc. On Halloween, we asked you to help us take this message directly to the source. In response, Senators Portman, Kerry, Kyl, Murray, and Toomey, and other members of the Super Committee got multiple knocks on the doors of several of their district offices.

Overall, Sunlighters seemed to have a great haunting experience, with friendly, attentive, note-taking staff who promised to take the message to the top. (We'll post and blog about any responses received as we get them.) At a few offices, Senator Portman’s in particular, staff were aware we were coming -- of course, the “we” they expected was a rancorous rally, not the friendly haunters looking to sit for a chat. Still, it made for an extra splash for the people in Cleveland, Columbus, and Cincinnati making their visit.

We’ll have more info -- and a super sweet video -- to share about this event within the next few days, and will be sure to keep you posted about how the Senators and Representatives act in response. Curious for what’s next or bummed that you didn’t get to participate because you don’t have Super Committee representation? Don’t worry. We hear you. We are going to keep up the pressure on the Committee, so look for more ways to participate soon. In the meantime, check out http://sunlightfoundation.com/opensupercongress for more ways to make your voice heard.

The congressional debt committee, commonly referred to as the super committee, has been a popular topic in the news since it was created by the Budget Control Act of 2011. We have been tracking lobbyist ties and campaign contributions to members of the committee since August. The Washington Post published an interesting report in early September announcing that many of the super committee members had ties to lobbyists. The Washington Post article uses GE as a case study to discuss the almost 100 registered lobbyists who are former employees of super committee members and are now "representing defense companies, health-care conglomerates, Wall Street banks and others with a vested interest in the outcome of the panel's work." While this article involved some heavy duty investigative journalism, many of its major claims can be substantiated by publicly available data. The article states that Senator Patty Murray (D-WA) "has employed more than a dozen currently registered lobbyists." The Center for Responsive Politics' "Revolving Door" tool allows investigators to search for individuals by former employee or by former employer. A search for "Murray, Patty" as "employment" returns 18 people who have formerly worked for the senator. Clicking on an individual record shows the individual's former position as well as their new employer and title. Digging into the 18 people returned by the initial search gives us 16 former Murray staffers who may currently be working as lobbyists. (See the end of this post for a full breakdown of the 16.)

1. Douglas Clapp, a former Aide to Murray, now works as the director of Washington state's Washington, DC office.
2. Rick Desimone, Murray's former Chief of Staff and former Vice Chair and Chair of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, is now an Executive Vice President at McBee Strategic Consulting.
3. Carrie Desmond, a former Legislative Assistant to Murray, now works at Lockheed Martin's Washington Operations organization.
4. Christy Gullion, a former Northwestern Regional Director for Murray, now works as chief federal lobbyist for the University of Washington.
5. Shay Michael Hancock, a former Legislative Assistant to Murray, is now a Senior Vice President at the lobbying firm Denny Miller Associates.
6. James Jones, Murray's former Speechwriter (as well as Sen. John Kerry's former Communications Director), now works as a Manager of Integrated Communications at Exxon Mobil.
7. Joy Langley, a former Legislative Assistant to Murray, now works as the Assistant Director of Government Affairs at J Street.
8. Dale Learn, a former Senior Legislative Assistant to Murray, is now the President of Gordon Thomas Honeywell's Governmental Affairs.
9. Justin LeBlanc, former Senior Staffer to Murray, is now the President of LeBlanc Government Relations.
10. Eric Masten, former Legislative Assistant to Murray, now works as a Public Policy Associate at the Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network.
11. Ben Lee McMakin, former Legislative Director to Murray, is now the Managing Director of Government Issues at Van Ness Feldman.
12. Heather Meade, former Deputy Scheduler/Assistant to the Chief of Staff for Murray, is now the Senior Manager at Washington Council Ernst & Young.
13. Nate Potter, former LA to Murray, is now a Federal Affairs Consultant for Gordon Thomas Honeywell.
14. Casey Sixkiller, former Policy Advisor to Murray, is now a Senior Advisor at SNR Denton's Indian Law and Tribal Representation practice.
15. Karen Waters, Murray's former Deputy State Director, is now a Senior Vice President at Strategies 360.
16. Todd Webster, Murray's former Communications Director, launched his own strategic communications firm, Webster Strategies.

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"The News Without Transparency" shows you what the news would look like without public access to information. Laws and regulations that force the government to make the data it has publicly available are absolutely vital, along with services that take that raw data and make it easy for reporters to write sentences like the ones we've redacted in the piece above. If you have an article you'd like us to put through the redaction machine, please send us an email at mbuck@sunlightfoundation.com.

The healthcare industry is dominating lobbying activity before the Super Committee, according to third quarter lobbying reports. Almost 30 percent of the organizations that reported lobbying the Super Committee represent healthcare companies or associations. Together, the 61 healthcare companies and associations have spent more than $10 million on lobbying. Add in single-issue healthcare groups (such as the American Cancer Society, the American Heart Association and the National Kidney Foundation), and a total of 74 groups (more than a third of the total) lobbying the committee work on health issues.

 

Other leading industries flexing their lobbying muscle are the communications/electronics industry (20 filings and $7.1 million in lobbying spending between them) and the finance/insurance/real estate industry (18 filings and $5.5 million in lobbying spending). Taken together, the three industries mentioned represent almost half of the organizations and more than half of the lobbying muscle aimed at shaping the decisions of the super committee.

Other ideological groups filed 15 relevant reports and disclosed spending $3.9 million on these issues and others. This includes such groups as AARP (which spent $2.75 million), Planned Parenthood, the National Taxpayers Unions and the American Civil Liberties Union.

What’s also telling is who’s not putting effort into lobbying the committee. Only four filings represent the defense sector, despite the major cuts to defense spending looming if the super committee cannot reach an agreement by the Thanksgiving deadline. Additionally, only four filings represent agribusiness, despite threatened cuts to agricultural spending programs.

Anupama Narayanswamy with the Sunlight Foundation’s Reporting Group wrote about the entities that disclosed lobbying the super committee last week. Her article provides a link to all the organizations filing lobbying reports linked to the super committee.