About that Washington Post story that Ellen links to immediately below, which explains that members are getting around the earmark disclosure rules through a number of means, including writing letters to the administration asking for or insisting on funding for pet projects. (Here's an example of a letter writing campaign we noted a while back--senators telling the Department of Health and Human Services exactly who should get what funds; the same post notes that Sen. Ted Stevens was able to earmark funds by giving a floor speech.) What's needed is more transparency in the interaction between members of Congress and the executive branch. Post reporters John Solomon and Jeffrery Birnbaum get at this at the very end of their piece: "[Rep. Rahm Emanuel] (who'd used letters to request funding for projects in his discritct) declined to say whether he and other lawmakers ought to disclose their private contacts with federal agencies when they seek money for projects." Why not disclose every single "private contact" (which seem to involve public money, public employees, and public policy)? Anupama, my colleague on RealTime, just received, in response to a FOIA request, three months of correspondence logs between members of Congress and the Energy Department. The logs--which offer brief summaries of the subject of the letters--stretch for 70 pages, and include requests for energy to approve loans for private companies, to support research and to pay for pet projects -- asking for $5.5 million here, $17 million there, and certainly far more elsewhere. Shouldn't all these requests from members of Congress -- whether they're for earmarks or for grants or contracts -- routinely be a matter of public record?
Continue readingJust How Effective Is Earmark Reform?
This is a pretty depressing article, if like Sunlight and Taxpayers for Common Sense you think transparency is a good thing when it comes to earmarks. It shows just how tough our job is, and just how crafty members of Congress are. No great surprise on either end, but still...
Continue readingDiggin’ a Little Deeper
Mike McIntire's front page story in the Times this morning put a little more meat on the bones of the Wall Street Journal story that outing Norman Hsu as a problematic political fundraiser (forget, for the moment, the fugitive on the lam piece of this tale.)
Here are some of the telling details:
The records show that Components Ltd., a company controlled by Mr. Hsu that has no obvious business purpose and appears to exist only on paper, has paid a total of more than $100,000 to at least nine people who made campaign contributions to Mrs. Clinton and others through Mr. Hsu....
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Friday YouTubes: The Internet in 1993
A CBC Report on "Internet" from 1993, the year I first went online:
Continue readingCongress vs. Hedge Funds
This Bloomberg story that covered how James Simons, the highest-paid hedge-fund manager in the U.S. last year (and one of the Forbes 500 richest Americans), could pay enough in Medicare taxes to provide health insurance for about 4,800 senior citizens is a good story about a policy fight that is about to be engaged. Rep. Sander Levin has proposed requiring that the earnings of such executives to be classified as compensation and subject them to the 2.9 percent Medicare tax.
But as a policy story, there was more I wanted to know, not the least of which was an understanding of the chances of Levin's proposal becoming law.
Continue readingReporters With Their Own YouTubeChannels
Jose Antonio Vargas, politics and technology reporter from the Washington Post has stepped up to the plate. He's created his own YouTubeChannel and he says he's doing it in part to break down the barriers between reporters and his readers just as the Internet has done for candidates and voters. He's asking for story tips and ideas as well as telling us a little bit about what's on his mind. I watched his first installment and really liked what he had to say about how even he feels like an outsider in lobbyist/lawmaker haunts like The Palm (a well-known hang out for lavish dinners and deals).
What a brave new world this is. Candidates are certainly figuring this out and we're lucky that some reporters, like Vargas are there to help us sort through it all.
Continue readingFishy Behavior Catches Ted Stevens No Trouble on Capitol Hill
Quick addition: USA Today reached the same opinion of Stevens today as well.
According to public records and officials in Alaska, The Hill reports that Sen. Ted Stevens (R-AK) "has quietly steered millions of federal dollars to a sportfishing industry group founded by Bob Penney, a longtime friend who helped the Alaska Republican profit from a lucrative land deal." While the FBI, and possibly a jury, will decide if Stevens has abused his official position it is clear enough that the senior Senator has acted in a manner that is unethical for a United States Senator and a powerful committee chairman (yesterday I wrote that Stevens is the Appropriations ranking member, he is actually ranking member on the Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee, the second ranking member on Appropriations, and the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee ranking member).
Despite the mounting evidence against Stevens he continues to have the support of the Republican leadership and has not been stripped of his committee assignments. Sen. Larry Craig was stripped of his committee assignments and forced to resign (although he is now reconsidering) because he engaged in potentially lewd conduct that was not of the party sanctioned variety. What is more important, sexual, or potentially sexual, behavior or the betrayal of trust and abuse of official, elected positions to gain money and aid your rich buddies? I've seen this scale before and I know which way it should be tilting.
Continue readingYour Late Night Reading: CRS reports Courtesy of OpenCRS.com
Poor John. He can't quite get over his late night work habits. (Before he came to Sunlight to direct our Open House Project he worked a day job and indulged his fascination with politics between the hours of 10 PM and 4 AM).
Last night at 2 AM he sent this email:
I just finished reading the latest CRS report from August 26th on Congress and the Internet, linked in the latest Open House Project report, and was delighted to find that Sunlight and the Open House Project are specifically cited by Walter Oleszek (senior government analyst for CRS) for our work in promoting citizen access.
That it was Oleszek's report was particularly satisfying for me, since reading several of his introductory books on Congress (Congressional Procedures and the Policy Process, and Congress and Its Members) is what got me quasi proficient enough to get started.
John has some more extensive thoughts this morning.
Continue readingEthics v. Prudery
Over the past week or two I’ve learned two things: do not tap your foot in the bathroom and that prudery is more prevalent on Capitol Hill than a true ethical fiber. Apparently it is more worrying that a Senator may be a deeply closeted gay man than it is that another Senator is deeply tied into a massive FBI-led corruption investigation or that a senior congressman is being investigated for perhaps the shadiest earmark ever. I read this article by Norm Ornstein today and couldn’t agree more with what he has to say. With so many corruption scandals, not just tawdry sex scandals, “Who believes that the ethics committee will act proactively to investigate allegedly scandalous behavior before stories garner headlines or result in announcements by prosecutors that Senators are targets or subjects of investigations?”
Continue readingCommittees Still Lag in Transparency
At the end of the 109th Congress I wrote a couple of blog posts (1, 2) showing how congressional committees failed to post transcripts and audio or video files of their hearings on their Web sites. After a careful review of the committees at the time it turned out that approximately 50% of both House and Senate committee hearings were available in any of those three formats. Thanks to the new lobbying, ethics, and disclosure bill committees in the Senate will soon be required to post one of these three formats within 21 days of the conclusion of a hearing for every hearing. Currently the committees of the 110th Congress seem to be slacking on online disclosure just as much as their predecessors. Voterwatch has created a list of links to committee Web sites and their hearing transcripts and audio or video files. It looks like committees continue to fail the openness test.
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