Forgive me, but I couldn't help but be startled by the above headline of the latest analysis by the Campaign Finance Institute. I mean, the much lauded campaign finance reform effort of a few years ago - the so-called McCain- Feingold bill was supposed to have banned soft money. In fact all the campaign finance reform groups -- I don't think there was a single exception -- made a devil's bargain. In order to get that much praised ban on soft money, the reform groups agreed to double the limits that individuals could give to campaigns. (Someone has yet to explain to me how allowing the less than one-tenth of one percent who give big money to give even more money was a reform.) McCain still carries the mantel of "reformer" because of his championing the legislation
This was a no brainer to predict even then: soft money is back in a big way.
What to do now? See this.
Continue readingLegistorm Launches Blog
Legistorm, the Web site that shares similar goals to Sunlight, that is to make Congress as transparent as possible, has launched a blog. I'm putting it in my RSS reader and I'd guess most readers of this site will want too also.
On this site you can find information about Congressional staff and lawmaker salaries, travel, personal financial disclosures and more.
Update about the hysteria on Capitol Hill about posting staffer's financial disclosure forms.
Continue readingOMB Watch Launches Regulatory Resource Center
Yesterday, OMB Watch, a Sunlight Foundation grantee, launched its Web-based Regulatory Resource Center, which they built to provide guidance for citizens wanting to get involved in the federal government's regulatory decision making. It promises to be a valuable resource, serving as the place to go to understand how regulations work. The center has two parts: Advocacy Center and the Policy Library. The Advocacy Center shows users how to comment on regulations and how to use Regulations.gov, the government's site that allows public comments. The center also has a page that helps users find, read and interpret the Federal Register. The Policy Library has a flow chart showing how regulations come about, a list of regulatory agencies explaining what each one does, and other neat tools.
Congratulations to our friends at OMB Watch. They continue to thrive at the cutting edge of government transparency and accountability. Check it out!
Continue readingPublicMarkup.org
Today, Sunlight is launching a new online collaborative, legislative initiative at a new site: PublicMarkup.org. We have drafted what we think can become model transparency legislation for the government -- the Transparency In Government Act of 2008 -- and we now need your help to further shape, refine and edit it. Our hope is that the final product can be used as a model for transparent government.
The bill on PublicMarkup.org offers some initial thinking about updating current congressional disclosure requirements for the Internet age. It specifies technological and reporting requirements to make more information about lawmakers and their influencers, the work of Congress and of the executive branch meaningfully accessible to the public, with an emphasis on digitizing and publishing congressional information online. Several of the provisions are the direct result of the Open House Project, and the conversations and ideas that have grown out of it.
Developing this model bill via PublicMarkup.org offers an exciting opportunity to experiment with collaborative bill-drafting online. As this is our first stab at creating such comprehensive transparency legislation, we want others to tell us if we aren't being aggressive enough, or are too aggressive in our initial approach to these issues. For example, should we have included a requirement mandating daily filing (not monthly) for lobbyists? Part our team thinks that if lobbyists aren't required to file daily, then citizens will often know after the fact about who was being lobbied about what. What do you think?
OSI Fellowships
Earlier this week, the Open Society Institute (OSI) announced they are launching a new fellowship program to support "idea entrepreneurs" across the globe. OSI hopes the Open Society Fellowship will generate new thinking on some of the most pressing questions of our day. The foundation list's journalists, activists, scholars, and practitioners as the pool they will draw their Fellows from.
This is a terrific idea. The fellowships will focus on four areas: National Security and the Open Society; Citizenship, Membership and Marginalization; Strategies and Tools for Advocacy and Citizen Engagement; and Understanding Authoritarianism, according to their press release. The fellows will work for one year on a variety of projects, including books, articles, documentary films, online media, and efforts to seed new campaigns and organizations. OSI is investing $2 million in the program through this year. The foundation will provide each fellow with a competitive stipend and communication assistance, and will incorporate them into the organization and its grantees.
Continue readingTwo Great Sites That Go Well Together
Following the money just got easier. MAPLight.org (a Sunlight grantee) and Congresspedia, a project of the Center for Media and Democracy and Sunlight, just joined forces to bring their data together so you can learn more about members of Congress all in one place.
Now, when you are looking up lawmakers on MAPLight.org’s Legislator pages, click on the new Congresspedia Tab (example) to get background and source information without having to leave MAPLight.org’s site.
This is another great step toward creating more merged data streams to make it easier than ever to shine Sunlight on Congress.
OMB Watch Releases Top Five Open Government Questions for Candidates
When it comes to valuing openness and transparency in their government, the public is far ahead of most politicians as a new survey conducted by OMB Watch makes clear. The public is "clamoring" for a change in priorities. Last week, OMB Watch released the report [PDF] on the survey where they had asked the general public for their input on the top open government questions for candidates for federal offices. "Responses show that, more than anywhere else, Americans want greater transparency in the Executive Branch, particularly the White House," OMB Watch writes.
Continue readingThe Nice Polite Campaign to Gently Encourage Parliament to Publish Bills in a 21st Century Way, Please. Now.
It's quite surprising, but the UK's House of Commons does not put the text of its bills on the Web in a user-friendly manner, making it bloody difficult -- as they would say -- for British citizens to know what's really going on in Parliament when it comes to legislating.
Earlier today, our friends at MySociety.org, the U.K.-based nonprofit that builds Web sites to open up government and its services to benefit citizens, launched a campaign to convince Parliament to embrace the Internet Age.
The goal of the Free Our Bills campaign is to have Parliament put the text of bills online. The effort is titled "The Nice Polite Campaign to Gently Encourage Parliament to Publish Bills in a 21 Century Way, Please. Now." (We'll give it an award for simply being the best named campaign ever.) How polite and British. (American style would be something like "Just Do It.")
Continue readingFollow the Oil Money
So this is a cool new resource. One with a definite opinion about the role of money in politics.
Follow the Oil Money is a new website that tracks which oil companies are pumping their money into politics, who is receiving it, and how it correlates to key climate, energy and other votes. You can check out the connections via relationship graphs, or tables of information.
The folks behind the site are Oil Change International and the winners of Sunlight's 2007 Mashup contest, Greg Michalec and Skye Bender-deMoll. The data are from the Center for Responsive Politics, GovTrack.us, the Sunlight Labs API and the Federal Election Commission. They write:A few weeks ago, the House passed a bill that would fund clean energy and end some oil subsidies. Members who voted against this bill received on average more than 5 times more oil money than those who supported it. Overall, we found that members of Congress who voted for Big Oil took almost four times more oil money than those who voted in the public interest.
Follow the Oil Money isn't just a cool new tool. It presents some striking evidence to the potential connection between dollars and votes.
Continue readingA Challenge from Beth Noveck
Late last week, after the Sunshine Week Lessig lecture, the always thoughtful Beth Noveck -- law professor and director of both the Institute for Information Law and Policy and Democracy Design Workshop, and friend -- compared the Lessig speech to a June 2007 speech, by open-source-licensing crusader Eben Moglen.
Beth said Moglen is an optimist who is inclined to trust people's ability to collaborate and work together. She wrote that his take on government is revolutionary and evolutionary. Lessig is a pessimist, she says, full of dismay at the state of the body politic, yet wants to preserve the status quo ultimately. (I'm not sure I completely agree with the assessment of Lessig as pessimist but that's not the point I want to make right now.)
Beth says that the best approach is a mash-up of both approaches:"Lessig's orientation toward action and pragmatism with Moglen's boldness of vision." She advocates that we take a whole new look at government institutions and governance, and start using technology to empower citizens in order to fundamentally change the way government works.
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