The Congressional Management Foundation released their annual Golden Mouse Awards today for the best Member websites. The numbers, like our own “Tools for Transparency” project, are not too encouraging. The average score for our citizen powered project was 31.3755. The most common score for the CMF Golden Mouse Awards was a “D”, which is between 30 and 39.
The CMF study is a shade different from what we, with your help, were doing here at Sunlight. CMF uses the following categories to determine if a website is operated properly:
Continue readingSome Member Page Transparency
What are you finding in the search for Member page transparency? Give a spin around and you're bound to find something interesting. We all now know about Rep. Kirsten Gillibrand and Sen. Jon Tester posting their daily schedule on the web but we haven’t seen too much from other Members. This post highlights some things Members are doing that you might run across while undertaking our new citizen journalist assignment.
Posting a schedule is an innovative way to provide constituents with more information and provide them with a better feel for what a Member of Congress does. While Gillibrand and Tester are at the forefront of a new kind of schedule transparency they were not the first to post some form of personal schedule online. Rep. Michael Capuano (D-MA) has been posting a schedule on his site for years now, although the schedule does not list more than one thing for each day. Sen. Larry Craig (R-ID) also posts a schedule on his website that does provide a bit more information than Capuano’s schedule.
Continue readingSome Member Page Transparency; What Have You Found?
What are you finding in the search for Member page transparency? Give a spin around and you're bound to find something interesting. We all now know about Rep. Kirsten Gillibrand and Sen. Jon Tester posting their daily schedule on the web but we haven’t seen too much from other Members. This post highlights some things Members are doing that you might run across while undertaking our new citizen journalist assignment.
Posting a schedule is an innovative way to provide constituents with more information and provide them with a better feel for what a Member of Congress does. While Gillibrand and Tester are at the forefront of a new kind of schedule transparency they were not the first to post some form of personal schedule online. Rep. Michael Capuano (D-MA) has been posting a schedule on his site for years now, although the schedule does not list more than one thing for each day. Sen. Larry Craig (R-ID) also posts a schedule on his website that does provide a bit more information than Capuano’s schedule.
Continue readingChanging the Rules
Lately I’ve been trying to think about how to make online access to personal financial disclosure reports palatable to the lawmakers who file them. As Ellen pointed out after the Senate debate on lobbying and ethics reforms Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Ca.) voiced complaints that online posting of the documents could lead to identity theft or other crimes. So I went back and took a look at the Ethics in Government Act, which governs personal financial disclosure, to try and figure out to change the law in a way that could actually pass. While considering these changes I realized that doing this would require a balancing act between getting citizens access to the information without too many hoops while making lawmakers feel comfortable. So, I figure I’ll put it to you people of the Internet to help figure this one out.
Continue readingMembers of Congress, Please Fasten Your Seatbelts
Not many planes going back to Washington. Is Congress missing out on all that corporate jet travel they used to enjoy?
DIY Transparency in Virginia
Is Virginia the epicenter of the use of digital video in politics? First we have S.R. Sidarth’s YouTube video of then-Sen. George Allen (R-Va.) calling the University of Virginia student a “macaca” (which we all now know to be a racist term). Now the Democrats in the state legislature have gone to videotaping committee hearings that have been scheduled during off-hours -- early in the morning and late at night -- and therefore do not have to be recorded. Call it DIY transparency.
The videotaping effort, called Assembly Access, began after the Republican majority changed the rules to allow bills to be killed in subcommittees without recorded votes. After a minimum wage increase bill -- the top bill on Democrats’ agenda -- was killed in a subcommittee without ever receiving a vote the minority went to the videotaping tactic to show the public what was going on behind the scenes.
Continue readingNo Raise for You
Russ Feingold and Jim Matheson beware, if you vote to restrict Member's pay again you'll feel it in your own wallet. An overlooked provision in the Senate ethics reform bill would refuse COLA pay raises to any Member who votes for an amendment (or against tabling an amendment) that would stop the COLA pay raise. Pay raises always used to be a difficult vote for Members of Congress as public opinion is consistently against higher wages for our elected officials (although some have opined that Congress would be less corrupt if they all made more money). So, our elected officials put in a mandatory cost-of-living-adjustment (COLA) that automatically raises Member's salaries every year.
Continue readingWhat’s in the Ethics Bill?
Last night the Senate passed the much anticipated ethics bill that was almost stopped in its tracks. Nearly every newspaper has written up its account of the bill and most are aware of the major provisions of the bill. Many provisions, however, that were added by amendment during the debate have not gotten their fair share of attention. This is a relatively complete summary of all the major and overlooked provisions of the Senate ethics bill:
Continue readingEthics Bill Cleared, Everyone Happy
Well, we have a deal on the ethics bill stall. Republicans have agreed to support cloture for the ethics bill while Sen. Reid has agreed to include the Gregg amendment in the debate of the minimum wage bill next week:
Senators are expected to move toward ending debate on a lobbying and ethics reform bill tonight, after Democratic and Republican leaders reached agreement on a spending rescission proposal from Sen. Judd Gregg (R-N.H.) that had threatened to sink the entire package.
The Senate is expected to work into the night to clear as many amendments as possible before a final vote is taken tomorrow.
Continue readingRepublicans Blame Byrd But That’s Not the Whole Story
Jon Henke, Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s New Media Advisor, is saying that Sen. Byrd’s opposition to the line-item veto was a part of the series of events that led to the stalling of the ethics bill.
It was Senator Byrd, not the Republicans, who derailed the ethics reform vote. Here’s Harry Reid last night, discussing the agreement between the Republican and Democratic leadership that would allow the ethics reform bill and the Gregg Amendment to move forward to a vote.
“Mr. President, to bring everyone up to date as to where we are, I made a good-faith offer to the minority that we will put the line-item veto off to another day. Senator Byrd was not agreeable to that. I talked to Senator Byrd on more than one occasion this evening, the last time for a significant amount of time, and he simply believes this line-item veto is a matter of great constitutional import, that for us to agree at this time to debate this would be wrong and that he simply will not do that.” -- (Sen. Harry Reid, Congressional Record, 1/17/07, p. S647)
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