We've officially entered a new phase in the supercommittee negotiations.

Just as yesterday's public hearing was being held, news was breaking of plans and counter-plans being proposed by supercommittee members. Just like the negotiations over the debt limit that led us here, we've entered the phase where anonymous quotes and accusations are reported alongside vague outlines of what we're told are serious plans. Unfortunately, we haven't actually seen any plans.

The press, starved of real content to ground their coverage, is reduced to "Exclusive" accounts of private conversations. Without real plans that are proposed by real Members of Congress who vouch for them, though, what we're really dealing with are policy table scraps. When two parties are negotiating, we should assume that anonymously sourced "packages" and "counteroffers" represent what the parties want us to know about their ideas, far more than they represent their actual ideas. Indeed, if these "packages" were really offers and counteroffers, wouldn't we be able to link to an official source?

Does nobody in the supercommittee have access to a scanner, laptop, or camera?

They even had a prime opportunity to discuss their "ideas" in yesterday's supercommittee meeting. Unfortunately, somehow the new ideas never came up. Apparently the supercommittee members had been instructed to avoid actually discussing the substance of their proposals, even as the details were leaked to one press outlet after another.

So we're left reading one account of the supposed "proposals", with accompanying vitriol and accusations from anonymous staffers. This may be the most honest thing about the supercommittee narrative that the public can actually see. The vague, anonymous, undetailed "proposals" that are apparently being shuffled among the committee members are given their appropriate due when published alongside such gems as this:

The GOP aide accused Democrats of leaking details of their offer to the press and said it is a clear sign Democrats believe the super committee will fail. "It's because they know, or they think, or they believe this committee is going to fail," said the GOP aide, who insisted on anonymity in order to discuss the highly sensitive negotiations. "So they need a marker saying this is where we are."

This shouldn't be a surprise, though. When supercommittee members' tight-lipped attitudes toward the press suggest that it's the attention of voters that stands in the way of their work as representatives, then breaking their rules requiring open meetings shouldn't be a surprise, and neither should anonymous proposals and accusations.

Perhaps what's most striking about the new playground-rules PR fight from supercommittee staffers is that it directly contradicts their professed need for secrecy. If a closed door is necessary for adult conversations about deficit reduction, then why are both sides leaking cartoon versions of their "plans" to the press? It's apparently acceptable to try to anonymously spin the public, but not ok to honestly describe your work and stand by it.

When it comes down to it, the supercommittee members aren't really interested in protecting the sanctity of their conversations. Lobbyists are invited into the process whenever their services prove useful, and the media is brought in whenever there's a partisan chit to be won. Until the supercommittee starts actually talking about its work in public, all of their claims should be approached with skepticism and derision.

One way or another, the Super Committee is going to fail.

If the 7 of the 12 Members of the joint committee don't approve a plan by November 23, then they will fail in their stated purpose of finding $1.5 trillion in deficit reduction. Many observers expect this to happen, and it seems increasingly likely, if today's New York Times story full of leaked innuendo and anonymous quotes is any indication. Unfortunately, anonymous staffer sniping is probably the only real substance we'll have for the coming weeks, since the Super Committee has given up on public hearings.

But even if the Super Committee does reach some agreement over deficit reduction, it'll be a dismal public policy failure. The Super Committee is reported to be considering changes like restructuring the tax code, changing eligibility for basic social services, and creating a new spectrum auction. When someone defends secrecy for the Super Committee, they're saying that it's acceptable to change those public policies without public hearings, and without the accountability that comes with a truly public process.

If the Super Committee does approve those changes, we won't know where the ideas came from, or what motivated the specifics of their decisions. Fundamental changes to American law will emerge from a legislative black box, without justification or public consideration. And if the committee doesn't reach an agreement, we're similarly situated, forced to retroactively guess the terms of the debate.

The Super Committee is trying to create a public policy process where no one can be seen as a villain. A politics where no one is to blame, though, isn't accountability, but collusive storytelling.

Remember the Democrats' anger about the Patriot Act being voted on with no time to read it? Remember Republicans who said the healthcare bill was illegitimate because it was "rammed through?" These same figures are now holding the Super Committee process up as the adult way of creating policy. Many Members of Congress rallied on process grounds against bills they could read, amend, filibuster, bills that constituents wrote letters about, and got a full public hearing. They denounced their opponents, and screamed about illegitimacy over a processes that were far more accountable and open.

If the Super Committee doesn't change its conduct, the public (and the rest of Congress) are left with two options. We either get policy created in secret that fundamentally changes American law, or watch as the slow motion Super Committee train wreck fails to move our political discourse forward at all, because the terms of the debate are never aired publicly. Either way, the Super Committee fails and the public loses.

If public policy isn't moving forward, and our politics aren't going to progress either, the best we can hope for is to realize that "debate" and "deliberation" aren't something Congress can outsource.

That will become clear, yet again, as the next few weeks will be full of dueling leaks and accusations, and the media continues to do the best they can to report on the "negotiations." Maybe as we go through this round of public policy through prognostication and innuendo, we'll remember that we don't have to accept the premise that our leaders are trying to sell us: that it's the attention of voters that causes them to fail at their jobs as elected officials.

In his first extensive interview about his membership on the Super Committee—the super powerful deficit reduction committee charged with finding $1.5 trillion in cuts to the federal budget—Senator John Kerry said he will give up fundraising while the Super Committee is doing its work. He will also limit his meetings with lobbyists, saying:

I’m not meeting with a lot of lobbyists; I’m meeting with people I choose to meet with, who can inform me, assist in the process of crunching numbers and dealing with consequences, and so forth.

Full disclosure: I worked for Senator Kerry a decade ago, making me one of those hundred or so registered lobbyists with ties to Super Committee members. While the Senator is on the right track, he should ensure that any campaign contributions or special interest meetings that might appear to influence his work on the Super Committee are exposed to sunlight in real time.

By instituting a moratorium on fundraisers, Senator Kerry is attempting to insulate himself from being lobbied by people while they are handing over bundles of checks. But it won’t necessarily stop checks from flowing into his campaign coffers while the Super Committee is at work. And, because of the timing of the campaign finance disclosure calendar, contributions to Super Committee members will be hidden until after the committee wraps up. Just as members of Congress must disclose within 48 hours contributions they receive within 20 days of an election, Super Committee members should disclose campaign contributions within 48 hours of receipt. Only with real time disclosure will the public know, before the barn door is closed and the Super Committee makes its recommendations, who might be trying to gain access or curry favor with any of the its members.

Senator Kerry’s statement not to meet with “a lot of lobbyists” leaves room for him and his staff to meet with some, not to mention the many non-lobbyist lobbyists—defense contractors, heads of hospitals and others—who aren’t registered to lobby but who have a huge interest in the Super Committee’s recommendations.

This is not to suggest that Kerry has any intention of meeting with such powerful stakeholders. His statement indicates that he is more interested in meeting with numbers people and actuarial types who can hammer out with him the impact of any proposed cut—which sounds very much like the John Kerry I worked for those many years ago. But if the Senator wants to demonstrate his commitment to making his deficit cutting decisions free from powerful outside influences, he has a simple tool: He should disclose all of the meetings he and his staff have with outsiders about the Super Committee within 48 hours.

Sunlight strongly supports HR 2860, the Deficit Committee Transparency Act, a bill that would impose transparency requirements, like real time disclosure of meetings and campaign contributions, on all Super Committee members. Since time is short and the wheels of Congress turn slowly, we also urge all 12 Super Committee members not to wait for transparency legislation to pass, and instead voluntarily disclose, in real time, meetings they have with special interests and campaign contributions they receive.

A number of press reports suggest today that the Super Committee's rules permit it to close meetings to the public. Here's the Hill:

Under a rules package that was unanimously approved during the first supercommittee meeting, the 12-member panel can go into a secret meeting if a majority of seven members agrees to do so. Otherwise, meetings are to be held in public.

This may seem extraordinary, but this is how all Congressional committees work.  If they meet to consider national security information, or trade secrets, they're allowed to have a public vote where they decide to go into closed session.  These procedures are laid out in the House and Senate Rules, and apply similarly in both chambers.

The Rules of the House and Senate that govern closing meetings, House Rule XI and Senate Rule XXVI, are actually incorporated into the Rules of the Joint Committee (or "Super Committee"):

2. The rules of the Senate and the House of Representatives, to the extent that they are applicable to committees, including rule XXVI of the Standing Rules of the Senate and clause 2 of rule XI of the Rules of the House of Representatives for the 112th Congress, and do not conflict with the applicable provisions of the Budget Control Act, shall govern the proceedings of the Joint Select Committee.

So they still apply.  The committee will only be able to close its official meetings to the public if they vote publicly to do so, and if they have a strong justification.  Political inconvenience isn't among them.

The Super Committee's just-posted rules do say that the meetings can be shut:

  2. Each hearing and meeting of the Joint Select Committee shall be open to the public and the media unless the Joint Select Committee, in open session and a quorum being present, determines by majority vote that such hearing or meeting shall be held in closed session.  No vote on the recommendations, report or legislative language of the Joint Select Committee, or amendment thereto, may be taken in closed session.

But again, permitting the meetings to be shut doesn't override the House and Senate Rules that dictate the conditions by which that is permissible, especially since the Joint Committee rules explicitly invoke those particular sections.  As far as we can tell, the Super Committee's rules dictate that their official meetings will be public, and have no unusual provision allowing them to close them capriciously.

In other good news, the Super Committee will be getting a website, posting its amendments and votes online, and generally providing video and audio coverage of their proceedings.  (Today's hearing was covered by C-SPAN, and also streamed live by Rep. Camp.)

Representatives Loebsack (D-IA), Quigley (D-IL) and Renacci (R-OH) introduced the Deficit Committee Transparency Act today, an important bill that would shine a light on efforts by outside interests to sway the twelve members of the Committee on Deficit Reduction, whether by lobbying them or donating to their campaigns. The bill would also require the committee’s report to be made public for 72 hours before it is voted on, and mandate the creation of a web site so all disclosure information and hearings will be publicly available online in a central location. Sunlight strongly supports this effort and applauds the bill’s cosponsors for recognizing the critical need to shine a light on avenues of access and influence to Super Committee members.

Unfortunately, as the Super Committee holds its first official meeting on Thursday, the chances of this bill being enacted before then are, to put it mildly, slim. But members of the Super Committee are in the process of establishing rules for the committee and this bill should be a blueprint to guide them.

The bill’s authors recognize that the unprecedented powers granted to Super Committee members should be paired with full transparency of their work. There already has been direct pressure from lobbyists and other interested parties asking the committee members to salvage some programs or cut others. Under this bill, the public, as well as the members of Congress whose clout has been diminished because they weren’t granted a spot on the Super Committee, should know, in real time, who is asking for what.

The transparency provisions in the bill are not unprecedented and members of Congress have no legitimate reason to resist them. For example, the Obama administration required meetings to be disclosed when special interests lobbied the executive branch on the implementation of the Troubled Asset Relief Program, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act and the Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act.

Likewise, real time disclosure of campaign contributions is also standard. Under current law, if a contribution is given within 20 days of an election, it must be reported within 48 hours. Given the short life of the Super Committee, whose work must be wrapped up before the end of the year, failure to require reporting of contributions in 48 hours means campaign contributions to Super Committee members will be hidden until after the committee’s work is complete.

If these proposals are enacted, they will help to begin to rebuild the public’s trust in the budget process. If time constraints or other pressures prevent this common sense bill from becoming law, we would hope the bill’s provisions are contained in committee rules. On the other hand, if transparency measures are ignored and the work of the Super Committee is hidden behind a veil of secrecy, it will reinforce the public’s mistrust of the process and will delegitimize the committee’s work.

We're enormously relieved to read that the Super Committee will hold public meetings:

Both meetings are open to the public and the press, according to the release from Hensarling and Murray.

This is actually the first time we've been sure that the new Joint Committee on Debt Reduction was formed in late July, despite press broad advocacy and press coverage, and even an explicit call from Leader Pelosi.

Cochairs Hensarling and Murray have made the right decision, as they apparently recognized that meeting entirely in private would be wildly inappropriate, given the Super Committee's broad, sweeping mandate.

Citizens, organizations, and Members of Congress all helped make clear that the Super Committee's official meetings must be public.  Our work isn't done yet, though.

Nothing guarantees that the rest of the Super Committee's official meetings will be public, and, perhaps more importantly now, we've got to be sure that lobbying and campaign finance disclosures for the Super Committee members are public in near real time.  The status quo is utterly unacceptable, as the lobbying and campaign finance reports won't be public until well after the committee's work is done -- in mid-January.

So we're very glad the Super Committee is listening, because holding a few meetings in public is only the first step.

Although we preach the importance of public meetings, we recognize that there are some legitimate frustrations to be had with their openness. For instance, a lot of public meetings are boring. And long. And, critics are right: public meetings aren’t necessarily the best format for every single deliberation made by a governing body.

But most of these “issues” are besides the point. As our Policy guy, John, noted, the need for public meetings doesn’t mean that every conversation needs to happen in public, but that all the official meetings should. That’s the basis behind our push to open up the meetings of the “Super Committee” -- the body created by Congress to deal with our national debt -- and an important factor to consider in the arrests made at a DC local gov meeting in June.

I wrote about the event shortly after it happened, but the quick version goes like this: Two reporters were arrested by Park Police at a Taxicab Commission public meeting at the request of members of the commission: the first for taking photographs of the meeting. The second, for filming the arrest of the first. The charge? Disorderly conduct and unlawful entry...which, at a public meeting (and with video evidence of how they actually acted), is absurd. Thankfully, the charges have since been dropped and there’s been a lot of conversation about the future of the Taxicab Commission (Council Member Tommy Wells wants to scrap it, local blogger David Alpert wants to reform it), but there's been little conversation about the impact of this event on DC’s public meetings law.

The gray zone in this issue is that DC’s Open Meetings Act doesn’t actually specify whether or not meetings can be photographed or recorded. But, as the DC Open Government Coalition pointed out, “The absence of an explicit statutory mandate to allow recordings of open meetings does not translate into a prohibition [of recordings].”

Following pressure from the media and advocacy groups like the DC Open Government Coalition and the National Press Photographers Association, on August 1st the Taxicab Commission issued a revised policy on public attendance, behavior, and recording during meetings:

Pursuant to section 742 (the “Open Meetings Act”) of the District of Columbia Home Rule Act ... all meetings and hearings of the Commission are open to the public. Also, a recording (or transcript) of the proceedings will be made available to the public free of charge. A member of the public, including any representative of the media, may record or photograph the proceedings of the Commission at an open meeting by means of a tape recorder or any other recording device so long as the person does not impede the orderly conduct of the meeting, by, for instance, creating excessive noise that impairs the ability of others to hear the proceeding or using excessively bright artificial light.

The policy goes on to review all the ways the commission does not have to support public recordings, but open government activists in America’s littlest state should still take heart. Perhaps this renewed policy will set a precedent for the broader Open Meetings Act, or will at least inspire District residents and activists to advocate for one. In their statement about the Taxicab Commission debacle, the DC Open Government Coalition highlighted the fact that the role of director for DC’s Open Government Office has been vacant for almost 4 months. The office, they note, was established as the public’s primary means of enforcing the Open Meetings Act and funding for the Office has already been provided.

Filling this office is a step DC can take to show their commitment to open government and to reduce the “burden” of meeting citizens’ requirements for greater transparency. DC is by no means the only governing body wrestling to adjust to the increased demands on and attention paid to its public meeting and public records laws: this sort of news is making headlines all across the country. The important thing is that, going forward, DC and other governments do find ways to adapt to the Age of the Interwebs and the increasing expectations constituents have for public access -- and that they take advantage of the free tools (YouTube...) and advocacy groups out there offering help.

*Photo credit: matthewgriff, via Flickr.

Just a reminder: the issue of transparency for the Super Committee isn't going away.

It's been three weeks since the debt ceiling law was passed that created the new joint committee, and we still don't know how open it will be in its work, or even if it'll hold public meetings.

Sunlight will be all over this issue every step of the way, and we've put together a new resources page so you can see the variety of things we're pursuing.  We'll be adding more as we go.

Recently, OpenCongress, a joint project of The Participatory Politics Foundation and the Sunlight Foundation announced a new and improved way of contacting your Members of Congress.

Open Congress version 3 is a new, free & open-source public resource website that helps both groups and individuals email their members of Congress from one webpage while tracking and sharing their correspondence. Two of the most engaging tools of OpenCongress version 3 are:

1. Contact Congress: which lets you write a letter to all three of your members of Congress and send it to their email addresses. It also enables you to track responses, and share your letter with the OpenCongress community and your social media followers.

2. My OC Groups: which is an open-source social network, provides members with the tools to share their position on an issue and work together on watchdogging, educating and organizing actions directed at Congress. My OC Groups can be used by both organizations and individuals.

My OC Groups can help you connect with established organizations and groups that are already working on the same issues that you are interested in. For instance, as I am interested in government transparency, I searched using keywords such as “transparency” and then joined the Sunlight Foundation OpenCongress Group (which you too can join). So now, together as a group, we can illustrate our position regarding a specific bill in Congress.

What is most empowering, however, is that as an individual, you can be a lead organizer by starting your own group and finding others like you to rally behind a common interest. In essence, it gives you the perfect resources to self organize!

If you’ve been following the debt ceiling debate and the recent creation of a “Super Committee” in Congress, you’ll know that this is the perfect time to contact our representatives to demand a more open and accountable government. So I wrote to my representatives -- here’s how:

First I chose S.365  - The Budget Control Act of 2011 - as the bill I was interested in. The S. 365 is the debt ceiling negotiations bill which aside from increasing the debt ceiling, also required the creation of a Joint Select Committee now known as the “SuperCommittee”. Then I tracked it (one has the option to either support, oppose or track any bill).

After deciding whether you want to support, oppose or simply track a bill, the next step is to fill in your contact information (the letter can not be sent without all required information).

I used the message builder (which is great to use because it contains detailed information about the bill -- including last action taken on the bill, committee assigned to it, the highest rated articles on it and most commented sections of the bill). In my letter, I also asked my Members of Congress to make sure that transparency is observed during the joint committee’s meetings including disclosure of all powerful interests connected to any Committee member.

Lastly, I got a message that all three of my Members of Congress have been emailed and was given the option of sharing my correspondence via social media.

You might notice below I got an error message for two of my representatives. This is happening in a small minority of cases (unfortunately, those include my district). It generally means that a Member’s webform isn’t configured properly in the OpenCongress “Formaggedon” module or that their .gov website has changed, but the bugs are being rapidly worked out.

If you notice other kinks while using the tool, please shoot us a note in the comments section.

Check this out to see what else OpenCongress can do for you and/or your organization including providing you with new widgets, Facebook Connect and API enhancements.

Note: It is advisable to check your account settings to “public” in order for other users to connect with you.

We hope you’ll join us in not just using Open Congress v.3 but also to let Congress know we need the new “Super Congress” to be open and transparent. Please join us! And feel free to leave your thoughts or impressions on the new tools in the comments.

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.