Last week, Sunlight hosted Larry Lessig as he unfurled the carpet for his new project, Change Congress. The Change Congress effort will ask candidates to select from a pledge whether they will refuse lobbyist and PAC money, refuse earmarks, support public financing, support full transparency in Congress, or a selection of all or some of these proposals. Today, Roll Call reports on the kind of practice that seems to highlight the institutional problems that Congress faces in dealing with the issue of money and influence in the Capitol. The problem does not rest solely with members themselves:
Continue readingSuper Insider Lobbyists
I'm doing some catch up blogging now that I've had a chance to recuperate from Sunshine Week.
Last Thursday, Congressional Quarterly reported that 18 members of Congress had registered lobbyists serving as treasurer of their re-election campaign or their leadership PACs during 2007. Despite the passage of S.1 Honest Leadership and Open Government Act of 2007 (HLOGA), last year’s overhaul of lobbying regulations, “those in the business of seeking favors and those in a position to grant favors can be intertwined in such ways without running afoul of lobbying or ethics laws or congressional rules,” CQ write. And if that isn’t enough to raise your eyebrows, CQ says that lawmakers also asked for earmarks for the clients of their lobbyist-treasurers. (We’re trying to dig up a list of those.)
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Video of Lessig’s Change Congress Launch
As promised, here's video of Lessig's Sunshine Week lecture, sponsored by Sunlight and Omidyar Network:
Official Footage from National Press Club:
Sunlight Footage:
Audio from the Change Congress lecture (mp3, 34mb)
End of Sunshine Week Thoughts
If you could treat information about your work the way information about Congress is treated, it would be the equivalent of going into a job interview with a nearly blank resume. A resume is information that a potential employer uses to hire you for a job. And because members of Congress work for us, how can we evaluate their job performance if we don't have meaningful access to information about what they do and who they do it for?
Congress should put information, which relates to the business of lawmaking, online in real time. All their required filings (such as reports about their personal financial investments and their campaign finance reports) should be posted on the Internet in real time and in a way that people can easily search them. The legislation that lawmakers are going to vote on should be posted online three days before the vote so ordinary people can read and evaluate it. The correspondence between Congress and the executive branch should be put online. Congressional earmarks in both the Senate and the House should be fully disclosed with the who, what, where, and why before they are decided on. (For more information click here.)
These measures - and there are no doubt others -- can help create a more open and accountable Congress. The purpose of Sunshine Week is to partake in dialogue about what it means to have an open government and how we can achieve it. The events of the past week are a call to lawmakers to be more transparent and accountable. The image that this week provides is of a united citizenry asking government to be more open so we can trust them again. Let us in because we can help each other run a great nation.
Continue readingMr. Lessig Comes to Washington
Lawrence Lessig, Stanford University law professor and world-renowned expert in intellectual property, is announcing that he's going to invest a significant amount of his time and energy confronting the pervasive and corruptive influence of money in our democracy. You may have heard of the recent Draft Lessig movement that almost convinced him to run for Congress. He ultimately decided not to make the run, but he's not retreating from the fight.
Today, at a lecture here in Washington, sponsored by Sunlight and Omidyar Network, he's launching the ChangeCongress project where he'll focus his academic interests on the issue of the systemic corruption of American democracy. Lessig will outline his hopes for ChangeCongress and how it will help citizens reclaim their democracy from the culture of corruption.
Lessig will give his lecture at 1:30 p.m. (Eastern Time) today at the National Press Club. We are very proud that Lessig recently joined Sunlight's advisory board, where he's helping us stay on the vanguard of using technology to promote a transparent and open government. If you can't make it to the lecture you can watch the Web cast.
Continue readingEarmark Requests Overload House Servers
The House Appropriations Committee has an online interface for members to submit their earmark requests. I haven't been able to find it anywhere on the public portion of the committee's site, but Rep. Peter DeFazio gives us a good idea of what the interface must look like--click here to see what information goes into an earmark request. My favorite bits: "Briefly describe the activity or project for which funding is requested (please keep to 250 words or less, subcommittee online submission will not accept more)" and "Description of project’s legal authorization (e.g. Transportation Bill, Energy Bill, etc.) ... Not all projects are legally authorized and authorization is not a prerequisite for funding." Yesterday was the deadline for members to submit their fiscal year 2009 earmark requests, and Roll Call reported that...
In a sure sign that earmarks remain as popular as ever, an overload of pork requests clogged the House Appropriations Committee’s Web site Wednesday, forcing an extension to the request deadline to next week.The cynicism of Rep. Jim Moran appears to be well founded. Instead of a one year moratorium, how about making all those online earmark requests to the Appropriations Committee instantly public? Continue reading
Two Events for Open Government Fans
We're continuing the Sunshine Week festivities with two events dedicated to promoting a more open government. We invite you to join us, and for those of you who can't make it to Washington, DC, we encourage you to watch the webcasts of the events.
Today at 1pm EDT, in conjunction with Open the Government, Greg Elin of Sunlight Labs will moderate a panel to demonstrate new ways nonprofits have made government data open and useful to the public.
NetSquared.org’s Mashup Challenge
Our friends at NetSquared.org understand as well as anyone the tremendous potential the Web holds for non-profits and NGO's working for social change. They help these groups build strategic capacity, knowledge and skills through online tools, greatly enhancing their effectiveness and impact.
And voting has begun for NetSquared.org's Mashup Challenge to decide which projects will go on to the 3rd Annual NetSquared Conference (N2Y3), which is to take place May 27 - 28 in San Jose, Calif. You may remember that our grantee MapLight.org was a winner last year.
The community will select the 20 mashups that will go to the conference on March 24. At the conference, NetSquared will ask the 20 selected project teams to present their mashups and attendees will vote to select the top three. They will receive a share of $100,000 in prize money.Here's the link to this year's candidate projects.
Continue readingMaybe We Need Some New Ideas for Earmark Reform?
Here's something that hasn't gotten much attention that should. Late last week, OMB Watch released a valuable background brief on earmarks that gives a good overview of the earmarking process.
Dana Chasin says that the real issue for earmarks is the lack of transparency in the process that has led to corruption. The most effective earmark reforms, Dana writes, would be timely disclosure, revealing to the public what earmarks are being proposed by what lawmakers. He makes a strong case that an outright ban on earmarks won't reduce federal spending...and that really shouldn't be the real focus since earmarked funds are a tiny fraction of the federal budget.
We at the Sunlight Foundation agree that transparency is the needed reform. The Honest Leadership and Government Act of 2007 made some important reforms by providing some of the needed transparency, particularly for the House, but there is so much more that needs to be done.
This document from OMB Watch provides some very useful guidance a set of reforms that could be achievable first steps and that might actually provide some transparency and accountability. Those are good initial goals and they might just prove sufficient.
Continue readingThis Explains It!
From the Wall Street Journal:
What is it about a Web site that might make it literally irresistible? Clues are offered by research conducted by Irving Biederman, a neuroscientist at the University of Southern California, who is interested in the evolutionary and biological basis of the human need for information.......coming across what Dr. Biederman calls new and richly interpretable information triggers a chemical reaction that makes us feel good, which in turn causes us to seek out even more of it. The reverse is true as well: We want to avoid not getting those hits because, for one, we are so averse to boredom.
It is something we seem hard-wired to do, says Dr. Biederman. When you find new information, you get an opioid hit, and we are junkies for those. You might call us 'infovores.' "
Now we know!
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