Speaking of the Dubai ports deal in the context of the inadequacy of our current lobbyist disclosure laws, it's probably worth noting that it wasn't just DP World that was hiring lobbyists. The controversy, recall, erupted in the second half of February, as an increasingly large, bipartisan group of lawmakers questioned the sale of a British firm that handled some U.S. port operations to a company owned by the government of Dubai, which is part of the United Arab Emirates. By March 9, DP World announced it would get out of the U.S. ports business.
Continue readingOpen Lobbying Report #4
If you email someone in Congress, and they don't write you back, does it still count as a contact? In an abundance of caution (and hope that my notes will be requited), here is my open lobbying report for the shortest day of the year: Contacted: Ron Weich, Senior Policy Expert, Reid's Office When: December 21 Where: Email About Bills: S Res 21, hoping for a revival of it About topics: Online filing of Congressional Reports Relations: I am not an ex-staffer, neice, mother, sister, or other relation to Ron Weich, or any other Member of Congress. However, Ellen saw him at a meeting Monday, and he sent me an encouraging one line email the day before yesterday. (Is it a contact when they contact you? I suppose so.)
Continue readingWhy We Need Faster Lobbying Disclosure
It's been interesting to hear discussions (and be part of a few) about Sunlight's transparency agenda, particularly from smart lawyer types, policy wonks and activists. For my part, I tend to need concrete examples to prop up my thinking, and thought I'd offer a few examples from how we do things now which I think will make it fairly clear as to why we need to do things differently. Take our current state of lobbying disclosure, and a recent, relatively high profile matter that caused a lot of consternation among Americans: The Dubai ports deal. Under our current lobbying law, the average citizen would have no way of finding out how many lobbyists the company at the heart of the controversy was employing, or how much they were paying them, or who they were lobbying, until long after the matter was resolved.
Continue readingPreventing Last-Minute Lawmaking
Over the weekend the Washington Post reported further on the contents of the omnibus package bill, the Tax Relief and Health Care Act of 2006. The bill, one of the last items passed of the 109th Congress, is representative of much that is wrong with the legislative process and in such serves as a perfect coda for a Congress that will be remembered as one of the worst.
The Post article tackles some last minute lawmaking by both Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and Rep. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.). The two party leaders inserted rejected and opposed initiatives regarding public land sales and Medicare into the bill at the last second despite previously voiced opposition.
Continue readingHey, I’ve Got an Idea — What if the Senate Meets in Secret?
Somewhere, someone got the exact wrong message. Voters do not want bipartisanship at the expense of openness. They want an end to corruption and secret deals. Senator Reid last week announced that he plans to hold a secret, bipartisan meeting on January 4th, so that the Democrats and Republicans could hash out their differences in secret. Voters, allegedly, were tired of "gridlock," and "consensus" could be best "forged" out of the public eye. This means that the first full session of the next Senate will be conducted out of the public eye. The protestations from all involved that no legislative business will be conducted only begs the question -- what exactly will be go on in this 100-person clambake?
Continue readingMore on Tax Earmarks and Reform Loopholes
Yesterday the Washington Post reported on 520 tax earmarks that were inserted into a bill that passed the Congress on the last day they were in session. I posited that the inclusion of these tax earmarks without a list of members who requested them was in violation of the earmark reform rule that passed the House back in September. It appears that this was not in violation because many of the tax earmarks were proposed as separate bills earlier in the session and were wrapped up into the final bill. Thanks to Bill Allison I was able to track these bills down.
Continue readingWhat is a Contact with a Member of Congress?
We are pushing, as you may know, for a requirement that people who are paid to lobby should report all contacts with Members of Congress and their staff. As a person who is paid to lobby, among other things -- and trying to live up to our "report all contacts" proposal -- I am now in the weeds of trying to figure out what a "contact" is. Clearly, if I spend 20 minutes with an old friend gabbing because I am trying to butter him up for some radical Open Government ideas, that needs to be reported. But what if I send a substantive email to an old friend (who happens to be a key staffer for a new Senator) and get no response? The main reason lobbyists would not want to report unreturned phone calls and emails is that they are a little embarrassing, perhaps, but as citizens, do we care? We might -- if five lobbyists are all calling from the gas industry, perhaps the first call is unreturned, but the third call is returned because of the accretion of efforts to make contact. We all know that an unreturned phone call or email does not mean we didn't listen or read. On the other hand, if all emails and phone calls are listed, including those shot off with out punctuation -- "sounds good!" -- we get into the land of the absurd.
Continue readingSunlight Foundation/Berkman Center Conference on Political Information
On January 15th, the Sunlight Foundation and the Berkman Institute will be sponsoring a day long working session titled "Local Political Information in an Internet Era." The meeting will be hosted by the Berkman Institute in Cambridge, MA on the Harvard Law School Campus. We are interested in how the Internet -- through blogs and other tools -- can bring citizens more or better information about their elected officials. We have invited 10 bloggers who are focused on their own states' federal and local elected officials, and about the same number of people who are working on tools that these local bloggers can use -- tools like Congresspedia and Metavid (for getting video of Members of Congress).
Continue readingRep. Gillibrand. You Are Not Alone…
The New York Times editorial that was very supportive of Sunlight's transparency agenda for Congress led with the mention that Representative-elect Kirsten Gillibrand has already decided to post details of her work calendar on the Internet at the end of each day. This afternoon I had a conversation with Matt McKenna, who is working on the transition team of Senator-elect Jon Tester, who told me that Tester has promised to do the same. In addition, Tester will institute a total gift ban for himself and his staffers, will prohibit any staff that leaves to work as a lobbyist from returning to work for him, and will ask a judge to conduct an ethics audit of his office every year. The office is considering other proposals too.
Continue readingTax Break Earmarks Continue
What, you thought that Congress had really frozen out all of its earmarks? The Washington Post reports today that one of the final acts of the 109th Congress was to pass a tax bill -- the Tax Relief and Health Care Act of 2006 -- that included 520 import tariff breaks for select companies. The Post notes, “Corporate lobbyists often craft such suspensions to apply to just one product imported by just one company. Many of those companies and their executives have given millions of dollars to political campaigns.” Of course none of these companies are identified nor do we know who inserted these tax earmarks into the tax bill. All that we have is a very long (and sometimes silly) list that details precisely which items are to be free of import tariffs.
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