Today's edition of the New York Times has an op-ed highlighting a provision that's buried within the newly enacted Honest Leadership and Open Government Act that compromises the intended transparency.
As we know, members of conference committees often secretly inserted earmarks and other items into already finalized bills. To combat this, the Senate instituted new rules saying that any individual senator can object to such provisions, threatening the whole bill. In the category of giving with one hand and taking away another, the Senate also said that they could vote to waive all objections to any bill. If 60 senators agree, all the provisions are approved.
No great surprise that this gives new power to the majority party especially if the majority has close to 60 votes. A dissenting senator would have to muster 41 votes to stop the process. In the very bill meant to open up the bill writing process , we have a new technique to thwart openness and transparency. Harumph.
Continue readingAppropriators Want to Hog Transportation Spending Documents
Call it the Opaqueness in Government Act. A provision slipped into H.R. 3074 of the Transportation/Housing and Urban Development Appropriations bill would bar the Department of Transportation from "using any funds from this Act to provide a congressional budget spending any delay public access to the budget justifications--which provide specific descriptions of and reasons to spend taxpayer money on specific projects--for several months after they're released. Members of the Appropriations Committee, by contrast, would get the documents right away. 
In other words, congressional appropriators are saying, "Now we see it, now you don't." Well, it's not as if average citizens across the country have much of an interest in finding out if adequate funds will be available to maintain the roads and bridges, airports and so on in their own districts... Some more background on the provision is available here.
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Political Web Innovations
The political Web continues to grow as new databases are established every week regularly using new technologies to present important information. I came across three new Web sites, one government and two from nonprofits, today and figured I'd pass them along. The first is the Government Printing Office's online guide to members of Congress. The GPO's online guide allows users to search members of Congress by a number of categories, including name, hometown, terms served, and more. The database is fairly rudimentary but it does allow someone to do quick searches for members from a particular state or see how many members have served for 5 terms. This is good step for GPO as it shows that they looking towards using the Web to project information; all they need is to add more search categories and more information for the member profiles. More links to more information makes the data more useful.
ProgrammableGov
ProgrammableWeb recently launched a new central resource of over a dozen government-related mashups and Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) to improve access to legislative, civic and political information.
ProgrammableWeb is already a major hub for the Web 2.0 technology community around its directories of mashups and Web service APIs. The new site is now listing Web applications that help citizens examine and remix government data to shed more light on the work of the federal government.
ProgrammableGov's APIs and Mashup Dashboard currently offers government information APIs and mashups developed by government agencies and those developed independently by citizens and transparency advocate organizations, including several created or supported by the Sunlight Foundation.
Continue readingLarry Lessig on Obama
Larry Lessig blogs today about why he's supporting Barack Obama for President. There are a number of reasons, including this one:
... a commitment to making data about the government (as well as government data) publicly available in standard machine readable formats. The promise isn't just the naive promise that government websites will work better and reveal more. It is the really powerful promise to feed the data necessary for the Sunlights and the Maplights of the world to make government work better. Atomize (or RSS-ify) government data (votes, contributions, Members of Congress's calendars) and you enable the rest of us to make clear the economy of influence that is Washington.
Here's a link to the entire policy statement by Obama, and another report.
Continue readingCall for Ensign to Stop Obstructing Electronic Filing Bill
Going on eight months now the Senate Campaign Disclosure Parity Act, requiring senators to file their campaign finance reports electronically, has been held up by proceedural maneuvers from the Republican side. After a series of secret holds placed on the bill were thwarted once secret holds were banned (Senators with secret holds must reveal their identity after 72 hours) Sen. John Ensign blocked the bill by offering a poison pill amendment that lacked relevance to the bill. Ensign's amendment, revealed on this blog to have originated from the offices of Mitch McConnell, requires outside organizations filing ethics complaints to reveal their donor list. For months now, this irrelevant, poison pill amendment has blocked a simple change in how Senators file their campaign finance reports that would help make the data more readily accessible to the voting public. Now a coalition of groups, including a number of conservative groups, has formed to ask Ensign to drop his amendment and allow the electronic filing bill to pass. The groups include:
Alliance for Justice
Americans for the Preservation of Liberty
The American Conservative Union
James Bopp Jr., General Counsel James Madison Center for Free Speech
Center for Lobbying in the Public Interest
The Free Speech Coalition
Gun Owners of America,
National Center for Public Policy Research
OMB Watch
The full letter is after the jump.
Continue readingCrossposted from my personal blog
If you like APIs and mashups, you should check out ProgrammableWeb - it’s a directory/advice/analysis site for all things API-ish.
Continue readingNew Address to Congressional District API Method
Sunlight and mySociety
Several of us from Sunlight spent the past weekend in the London environs sharing organizational stories, strategies, challenges, and blue sky thoughts with the good people who founded and operate mySociety.org.
As Micah Sifry said it later: It's not just that we keep hearing about mySociety whenever we meet people and tell them about Sunlight. It's that we definitely knew about mySociety when we were starting Sunlight and definitely knew that we wanted to take a similar approach: Broadly speaking, to use the web to open up citizen understanding of Congress and to open up feedback loops to produce a more responsive institution.
From TheyWorkForYou,WriteToThem,to HearFromYourMP, to the e-petition site produced for 10 Downing Street, mySociety has made extraordinary use of the web to connect citizens and their elected representatives in groundbreaking ways. While their effort differs in various ways from Sunlight because of the different ways our systems operate, their thinking has already inspired our work. And naturally, we are already conspiring to bring some of what they have done directly to the US.
Continue readingWalk the Scandal Walk
This morning the Washington Post featured a great article and video by Dana Milbank highlighting all the locations in the district that hot spots in the current pantheon of political scandals. From Abramoff's restaurant Signatures to the Capitol Yacht Club, where Sens. Ted Stevens and Larry Craig slept while Duke Cunningham ran amok, this scandal tour has everything. So, I decided to do the Web 2.0 thing and turn this tour into a Google Map. I whittled the list of locations down to congressional scandals. (Make sure to zoom in on the D St. locations. That's a central point of muck.) Check it out and let me know what I missed.
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