It took a little longer than I thought it would (in part because I was also doing other things, in part because I kept letting the full content of the documents disctract me) to create the it, but here, attached, is a log of correspondence from members of Congress to the Office of Administrative Law Judges of the U.S. Department of Labor covering the months of January and February: OALJ Log.
When Anu and I started this project, our sense was and still is that constituents should be aware of what members of Congress do in Washington. In addition ...
Continue readingAmendments Submitted for the Lobbying Reform Bill
The House Rules Committee received today 48 amendments that will be offered during the debate and vote on the much-anticipated lobbying bill. There isn't too much of interest to us at Sunlight but I figured that you might want to check out all of the proposed amendments. The most controversial ones will certainly be Chris Van Hollen's bundling disclosure amendment, Chris Shays' 2-year lobbying cooling off amendment, Marty Meehan's ban on lobbyist thrown parties at national conventions, and the numerous amendments to create outside ethics enforcement bodies. Jeff Flake, notorious for his anti-earmark crusade, has also offered a raft of controversial amendments related to earmarks including an outright ban on lobbying for earmarks. I've put the whole list below the fold. Check it out:
Continue readingCongressional Correspondence Log update
Anupama's on the phone with yet another FOIA officer clarifying the nature of our request for correspondence logs listing letters from and responses to members of Congress, in an electronic format. It's amazing how many responses we've gotten that miss the mark of the request. Agencies send us actual letters rather than logs, or handwritten logs of correspondence, or (in one case) what looks like printouts of some form of spreadsheet scanned into PDF documents (absolutely useless for our attempts to turn what we get from the agencies into a searchable database of correspondence). I'm going ...
Continue readingAttorney Purge E-Mail Database Online
When the House Judiciary Committee put all of the Justice Department e-mails relating to the Attorney purge they received online they started an immense distributed research project that led hundreds of citizens to pour over documents hoping to find the needle in the haystack that would become a story the next day. The only problem with these online document dumps was that they were just that, dumps, as in the pouring of documents online in no particular order and without a search function. Those days are over thanks to a cadre of committed online researchers at Daily Kos. DKos poster drational posted today about the DOJ Documents database created by 20 kossacks and spearheaded by nuketeacher. Check out the database here.
Continue readingN.Z. Bear Opens Immigration Bill to Comments
Via InstaPundit comes word of the latest innovation from N.Z. Bear--an annotatable online presentation of the very controversial Secure Borders, Economic Opportunity and Immigration Reform Act of 2007. Maybe my search skills are slipping, but I couldn't find the text of it on Thomas, Govtrack or Open Congress. Bear not only has the text, he's set it up in a way that users can comment on the text and link to specific passages, plus he's provided a table of contents. He writes,
Continue readingLobbying Bill Markup
The House Judiciary Committee just took a break from the lobbying bill markup session to go vote on the floor of the House so it seems like a good time to give a re-cap. The first action the committee took was to pass HR 2317, the lobbyist bundling disclosure bill, out of committee. There were some questions raised from Rep. John Larson (D-CT) and Rep. Chris Cannon (R-UT) but ultimately the bill was voted out in favor. The bill will be reported as an amendment on the floor to be added to HR 2316, the lobbying and ethics package. In regards to HR 2316 the committee passed a manager's amendment that stripped the increase in the revolving door provision from 1 to 2 years, changed the location of disclosure for Members negotiating for outside employment from the Clerk of the House to the House Ethics Committe, and stripped a provision (Conyers called it a "drafting error") that would have required 501(c)(3)s to disclose all contributions over $500.
Continue readingMAPLight.org’s New Money and Politics Search Engine
One of Sunlight's signature grantees, MAPLight.org, just launched a revolutionary new revolutionary search engine that reveals the connections between money and politics within Congress by effectively and elegantly presenting data from official voting records archived by Library of Congress with campaign contributions tracked and compiled by Sunlight grantee, the Center for Responsive Politics.
MAPLight.org's work truly embodies how to use Web 2.0 technology to shed light on the power campaign contributions have on federal legislation.
House Puts Personal Financial Disclosures Online!
Last night, the House Democrats revealed the much anticipated companion lobbying and ethics bill to the Senate's S.1 (we'll have a more detailed look later). Included in the bill is a provision to put personal financial disclosures and travel reports online for the first time. As you may know, we've been lobbying for this and consider this to be a great victory for transparency in the House of Representatives. We commend the House for continuing to towards a more open and accessible online presence. Thanks to everyone who called or sent a letter to Speaker Pelosi and members of the Judiciary Committee. We've heard that your calls and letters helped push the leadership to include this provision. In the face of newspaper articles doubting the seriousness of the reform effort in the House this provision should indicate that the House is willing to make their own institution more transparent and open to the public at large. Now, for the provision itself. (Clause (a)(2) requires personal financial disclosures be put online.)
Continue readingRep. Gillibrand is Transparency in Action
The Members of Congress that post their schedules online are models of what transparency in Congress should look like. In a system where politicians are careful, to the point of paranoia, about what information is spread about them, the elected officials who are brave enough to post their meetings, to make sure their constituents get as much information as possible, should be seen as pioneers.
In today’s NYT this article about Rep. Gillibrand stated:
Shortly after taking office, Ms. Gillibrand directed her staff to publish the details of her meetings, no matter how sensitive, on her Congressional Web site, calling the listing the Sunlight Report. But Republicans see these reports as a potential trove of damaging information. Examining them, they discovered, for instance, that Ms. Gillibrand, while vacationing with her family in Europe recently, held several fund-raisers for her re-election campaign, including two in London and one in Paris. … (The Gillibrand camp insisted that attendees were required to show American passports before being permitted into the events and that no money was donated by foreign citizens.)Continue reading
A New Spate of Northern Disclosures
Writing in Roll Call, John Stanton reports that staffers of the two Senators and a relative of the lone House member from Alaska's congressional delegation own land in the undeveloped area that, should the Knik Arm "bridge to nowhere" be built, would be poised to become a prime suburb of Anchorage. (The link is subscription only, but TPM Muckraker has some quotes.) Over at RealTime, my colleague Anupama Narayanswamy has an interview with Andrew Halcro, a former Alaskan state representative, a 2006 gubernatorial candidate, and a pretty good blogger. Halcro talked about his experiences with the now former chairman and CEO of the oil services firm Veco Corp., Bill Allen, who along with another company official recently pled guilty to charges of bribing four Alaska state lawmakers.
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