In case you missed it, I wanted to share this message that Ellen Miller, our Executive Director, sent out this... View Article
Continue readingPresidential Super PAC disclosures may leave voters in the dark
When voters cast their ballots in January’s presidential nominating contests, they may not know the moneyed interests behind the attack ads run by shadowy outside groups trying to influence their votes, despite a Federal Election Commission deadline requiring many of them to disclose information next week.
Although FEC regulations suggest that groups making expenditures in New Hampshire’s Jan. 10 primary must file a pre-primary report on Dec. 29, it’s not clear how many of them will do so.
There are plenty of opportunities for these groups to avoid scrutiny until, in some cases, Jan. 31. The first ...
Continue reading2Day in #OpenGov 12/21/2011
Policy Fellow Matt Rumsey wrote this post. Here is Wednesday’s look at transparency-related news items, congressional committee hearings, transparency-related bills... View Article
Continue readingThe data behind Capitol words
Last Monday we launched an update to our Capitol Words project, which indexes and tokenizes the Congressional Record daily. With the launch behind us and the dust starting to settle, I'd like to walk through how we get from raw text to attributed, searchable quotations, and provide some examples of how you can interact with the data directly.
Before delving into how it works, though, it's important to acknowledge the myriad developers whose work on this project has made it possible. I'm only the most recent steward of the site; the bulk of the data legwork for this iteration was handled by Aaron Bycoffe and Jessy Kate Schingler, and the web interface owes its beauty to Caitlin Weber and Ali Felski. Timball provided the hardware, and the list continues from contributions to the scrapers all the way back to the original conception and implementation of the idea by Josh Ruihley and Garrett Schure. It's the combined efforts of everyone involved that brought us the site that's available today.
Now, without further ado...
Continue readingFood and media companies donated generously to lawmakers opposing food marketing guidelines for kids
Last summer, a bipartisan group of House members from Pennsylvania wrote federal agencies complaining that proposed guidelines restricting the marketing of unhealthy food to children marked “an alarming regulatory overreach.” They emphasized their sugary roots in “the leading confectionary producing state in the nation.”
Indeed, Pennsylvania is home to the 117-year-old Hershey Company, maker of the ubiquitous Hershey’s kiss. But what the lawmakers from the Keystone State didn’t say was that they had other “constituents”—out-of-state campaign cash constituents, many of them Washington-based trade associations.
The massive lobbying push by food and media interests against the controversial guidelines ...
Continue readingSunlight Supports a Centralized FCC Database of Information about Political Ads
Today the Sunlight Foundation submitted comments encouraging the FCC to quickly create a centralized, publicly accessible database of information about... View Article
Continue reading2Day in #OpenGov 12/20/2011
Here is the Tuesday's take on transparency-related news items, congressional committee hearings, transparency-related bills introduced in Congress, and transparency-related events. News Roundup: Lobbying
- National political parties took more money from lobbyists in the first half of this year than in any other six-month period on record. Democrats raised 30% more lobbyist cash than Republicans. (Washington Times)
- Rep. Tom Cole's (R-OK) former deputy chief of staff is heading through the revolving door to join Steptoe & Johnson as a senior government affairs adviser. (National Journal)
- Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) introduced legislation as an alternative to the Protect IP and SOPA measures currently being considered. His OPEN act will soon be joined by a companion bill set to be introduced in the House by Darrell Issa (R-CA). (The Hill)
- Mitt Romney called recent changes in campaign finance law a "mockery" of campaign season and advocated getting rid of Super PACs. (Washington Post)
- A government watchdog filed a complaint with the FEC against Newt Gingrich's production company. The complaint alleges that Gingrich Productions made illegal contributions to Gingrich's presidential campaign. (National Journal)
- The International Association of Fire Fighters is coming back from a nine month hiatus on giving and donating to members of Congress. In the past, the association has been among the biggest PACs in terms of candidate contributions. (Politico)
- Representatives from member countries of the Open Government Partnership met in Brasilia, Brazil last week. There was plenty of Twitter chatter about the event. (Global Integrity)
- Libyans are excited to exercise new political freedoms, but are concerned about their lack of exposure to democratic practices and transparency in government. (NDI)
The News Without Transparency: Military Voting on the Upswing
The Washington Post looked at the impact of new legislation facilitating absentee ballots and found that overseas military personnel voted... View Article
Continue readingBoehner’s 72 Hour Pledges, Condensed
Throughout the last year, we’ve repeatedly pointed out that Speaker Boehner repeatedly pledged to put all bills online for 72... View Article
Continue readingHouse Approves Sweeping Open Data Standards
At a Friday hearing, the House of Representatives significantly raised the bar on open data by passing a resolution requiring that a wide variety of crucial House legislative information be published online, in open formats, and at permanent predictable URLs. Daniel Schuman covered this on the Sunlight Foundation blog on Friday.
The new standards create a new central website, run by the Clerk of the House, that will host all House bills, resolutions, amendments, and conference reports. These documents will be online on January 1, 2012, and will be in XML.
Beyond that, the standards require committees to post their amendments, votes, hearing notices, which bills and resolutions they're considering, and lots of other documents. The Clerk is charged with building tools for committees to post this information to the new website; in the meantime, committees must post them to their own website, in PDF. Committees are also encouraged to post this information in XML, and "should expect XML formats to become mandatory in the future".
This is hugely valuable information that, to date, has been extremely difficult to discover in a reliable way. To get House legislation, one either needs to scrape THOMAS.gov (a Sisyphean ordeal), or to rely on the good work of people who've already done it. Committee information is terribly fragmented, and in some cases there is often no way to get it at all (such as committee votes and amendments), short of hiring people to go sit in committee rooms and record what goes on (a practice that forms the basis for a number of business models here in DC). This is the beginning of bringing much needed order to chaos, and sunlight to the legislative process.
These standards demonstrate excellent leadership on the part of the House, and offers a modern vision for how a legislative body should view its responsibilities to the public. The Senate should hear the sound of a gauntlet being thrown. The Committee's action is in keeping with Speaker Boehner's and Majority Leader Cantor's April call for the House Clerk to release legislative data in machine readable formats. It is very gratifying to see this call taken so seriously.
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