The Center for Responsive Politics (a Sunlight grantee) is displaying some cool new ways to view the role of money in the presidential election. Look here for the "Money Web." This shows you the links between candidates and donors, including the five top contributors and industries (including ties) to each of the candidates. Click on a bubble to start making connections among candidates, their top-giving industries and top contributors.
Here's a cool map that illustrates how much money is going to Republican and Democratic candidates from each state and which presidential candidate got the most.
If you want to see how a candidate's fundraising stacks up against another's week by week, or month by month, look here. On this map click on a state to see contributions from that state to each candidate, as well as money isolated by metropolitan area and top ZIP codes. (Note that the Web site is geteting some heavy traffic this afternoon. If you have trouble loading anything, try back later.)
A Little More Accountability, Please
Three watchdog groups have sent a letter to House appropriators urging more oversight of the oil and gas royalties owed to the federal government. Friends of the Earth (FOE), Project on Government Oversight (POGO), and Taxpayers for Common Sense (TCS) sent the House Subcommittee on Interior, Environment, and Related Agencies Appropriations a letter calling on the appropriators to set aside additional funding to hire auditors to oversee what they called the Department of the Interior's (DOI) troubled oil and gas royalty programs.
DOI made two increases to the offshore royalty rates over the past year. Those rate increases are ridiculous the groups say if effective auditing and enforcement functions are not in place to keep the oil companies honest, who over the past decade have been forced to pay almost $600 million in settlements for shortchanging the government in royalty payments. Since 2000, DOI has cut the number of auditors by 45 or 15.7 percent (from 287 to 242). As the groups say in their letter, "With fewer watchdogs minding the store, oil and gas companies have fewer incentives to pay up."
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Can You Hear Me Now?
Telecommunication industry giants AT&T, Microsoft and Verizon are lobbying hard to kill a data-breach notification bill in the Indiana statehouse, according to Chris Soghoian at CNET.com's Surveillance State blog. Many state legislatures are passing security breach notification laws as a response to the increasing number of governmental and corporate databases divulging personal identification information either by mistake or by criminal enterprise. The Indiana bill would set the state attorney general as the single point of contact for data breaches, who would then post a report on the breach on a Web site, setting a single place for citizens to go to find out about data breaches.
Soghoian reports that at a state Senate Committee meeting earlier this week, 10 lobbyists, most from the telecommunications industry, criticized the bill as setting up a system that would be vulnerable to online fraudsters. The bill's sponsors were the only people speaking in favor of the legislation. He said he expects the lobbyists will succeed at killing the Web site notification requirement in the bill. If money talks, and we know it does, then he is almost assuredly correct. By searching National Institute on Money in State Politics' database Followthemoney.org, you will see that during the last election cycle AT&T made over $172,000 in contributions to Indiana state office holders or candidates running for state office. Verizon made over $48,000 in contributions, while Microsoft gave $2,000. No matter the merits of the bill, the moneyed lobbyists have little fear of their voices not being heard load and clear.
Continue readingLet the Parties Begin
The Hill reports on pressure directed at Speaker Nancy Pelosi to reconcile House ethics rules on lobbyist-sponsored convention parties with the more strict Senate rules, which the Senate reinforced on Monday. A grouping of six watchdogs (Campaign Legal Center, Common Cause, Democracy 21, League of Women Voters, Public Citizen, and U.S. PIRG) argue that the House rules punch huge holes in the ethics rules passed last fall that were meant to end the long-standing culture of corruption on Capitol Hill.
The new ethics law contains a convention party rule meant to prevent lobbyists from hosting parties to honor members in an effort to curry favor with them. The Senate Ethics Committee makes it clear that lobbyists or the organizations that they work for can't sponsor events feting a group composed solely of members of Congress. In contrast, the House Ethics Committee's guidelines said the new rules do allow lobbyists to sponsor parties honoring more than one member as long as those members are not mentioned by name.
Continue readingNAM Files Lawsuit Against Ethics Law
As the Legal Times' Influence Blog predicted yesterday, the new lobbying and ethics law received its first legal challenge. Earlier today, the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) announced it is suing the federal government over the Honest Leadership and Open Government Act of 2007 saying the law's lobbying disclosure rules are "vague, overbroad and burdensome" and infringe on the constitutional right of freedom of association.
Note that the law requires any organization actively participating "in the planning, supervision, or control" of lobbying efforts that ponies up more than $5,000 in a quarter to disclose their activities and expenditures. The law's purpose is to shine a light on stealth lobbying and sham coalitions, pushing legislation such as those that are often promoted by groups like NAM. The law's criminal penalties on groups that fail to accurately disclose their lobby efforts succeeded at getting their attention. NAM says that the clause in question is imprecise and impacts groups that it is not intended to target. They fear the law will also require it to disclose the names of its members. NAM has requested the court issue a preliminary injunction on the disclosure rules until the court decides the case.
Continue readingNew Filing Requirements Will Reveal New Information
Here's a pleasant surprise in the just passed Honest Leadership and Open Government Act (HLOGA). One of the law's new filing requirements is that individual lobbyists have to report all "covered official positions" held for 20 years prior to their current filing period. This could provide an amazing amount of new information about where people have lobbied in the past -- information that we've never seen before.
The new provision will be quite significant for lobbying firms. For them, the 20-year lookback applies to all lobbyists listed on any new registration filed for any client with an effective date of Jan. 1, 2008 or later. For most lobbying firms, this means that eventually all lobbyist employees will need to disclose their prior employment under the 20-year lookback.
Continue readingLegislative History Detective: Senate Electronic Filing
We've expended enormous energy and blog space to advocate for the Senate to file their campaign finance reports electronically, something that probably shouldn't take that much effort, but it does. If you need a primer on the issue you can watch this video we made. One thing of note in this whole saga is that Congress, in 1999, mandated electronic filing for all campaign committees, but somehow the Senate doesn't have to comply. Why is this?
In December of 1995, Congress passed a bill to amend the Federal Election Campaign Act to allow the FEC to accept electronic filing, a legislative recommendation previously made by the FEC to give them a statutory requirement and funding to create an e-filing system. The bill, which became Public Law 104-79, also changed the filing location for members of the House from the Clerk of the House to the FEC. This seems innocuous, but it is important.
Continue readingIt’s All Starting to Come Together
Dan Newman, of MAPLight (and Sunlight grantee) writes to say:
We just added links to OpenCongress from every bill on MAPLight. It's part of our new "In the News" tab. For example click here.The link to the same bill on OpenCongress is just above the "Date" column on the right-hand side.
We also created a simple URL structure to make it easy for OpenCongress and others to link to specific bills on MAPLight. (Inbound links like this now work.
We're also in the process of integrating Congresspedia entries into MAPLight's legislator pages, pending some changes on the Congresspedia side to make this technically workable.
And David Moore, of OpenCongress responds saying:
This is great stuff. Check it the interconnections between these two sites. Continue readingWe're happily in the midst of adding reciprocal links on our bill pages. Shouldn't be long.
Death By Budget
Rebecca Carr of Cox Newspapers reports on President Bush's efforts to gut the Open Government Act of 2007 Congress passed last year and he signed into law on Dec. 31 via death by budgeting. In the 2009 budget submitted yesterday (as we wrote last week), Bush eliminates the key provision of the law -- the ombudsman whose job it is to oversee all Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) disputes, by moving it from the National Archives and Records Administration to the Department of Justice. The ombudsman office was added to provide independent oversight and settle disputes over FOIA requests. The law authorized funds to address backlogs in the requests and resolve them in a timely manner.
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