A group of bloggers at Daily Kos has started an impressive project involving citizen oversight in the coming Congress. The project, called Committee Transparency, aims to get at least one person to cover the goings-on of each and every committee in Congress and to make recommendations to make committees more transparent. This past weekend blogger greenreflex wrote one of the better blog posts on committee transparency explaining the Rules that govern public access to committee hearings and documents and the continuing lack of transparency in many committees despite public access rules.
Continue readingUnraveling the Dollarocracy
This is my last Dollarocracy blog, at least for a while. It’s the end of my full-time stint at the Sunlight Foundation; I’ll now be pulling back to occasional work on specific projects, like keeping up with the questions on the Watchdogging 101 site.
I confess to thinking of this web space I’ve had not so much as a blog, but more like an old-fashioned newspaper column. My beat has been the intersection of money and politics and I’ve tried to illuminate how the never-ending appetite for campaign cash has profoundly altered the shape of our American democracy.
Continue readingExperiment in a New Kind of Distributed Work — Legislative Drafting
As the Democrats and Republicans are drafting their Open Government Agendas, the people should be, too. We're throwing up a small experiment in engaging people in distributed research around legislative drafting. We have set up a web page with some basic Open Government principles on it, and are asking you to work with us to turn those principles into legislative language: http://www.moreperfect.org/wiki/index.php?title=Open_Government_Agenda This is a small testing of the waters -- I would love it if draft legislation came out of this, but I'm not counting on it. For now, we are not sending this out to our 3,900 person list, but please share it with people who might be interested and have feedback. Mostly, I hope to learn something about how to try this in the future.
Continue readingWebb Hires Lobbyist to Navigate Washington
What caught my eye in this morning's Washington Post puff piece on just how much of a maverick Senator-elect James Webb will be was the tidbit that he's hired Paul J. Reagan, a registered lobbyist and former staffer for Rep. Jim "earmark the s--- out of it" Moran. The McGuire Woods LLP bio of Reagan tells us, "In addition to managing Moran’s staff and offices, Paul also handled press and coordinated appropriations issues." (emphasis added.) Reagan's new job with Webb will be to "help his boss navigate the intricacies of Washington and Capitol Hill without losing the essence of his personality," as the Post's Michael D. Shear effervescently puts it.
Continue readingA Good Model for Lobbying Disclosure
My colleague Zephyr Teachout asks what we as citizens (and more narrowly, those of us at the Sunlight Foundation) should be doing to push for real reform in how Congress goes about its business. There's no shortage of proposals out there, including proposals to establish an independent office of public intregrity for Congress, banning gifts, travel and meals paid for by lobbyists or special interests, and reforming lobbying disclosure. On the latter topic, one suggestion I'd make is to consider using as a model the requirements of the Foreign Agents Registration Act, a piece of legislation that dates back to 1938 and was enacted to "insure that the American public and its law makers know the source of information (propaganda) intended to sway public opinion, policy, and laws."
Continue readingCongress Facts: Everybody Hates Congress
In this second installment of Congress Facts let's take a look at some of the lowlights of Congress' recent history. Fewer days in session, fewer committee hearings, and fewer House members reelected.
Follow below the fold. Continue readingThe Democrats’ Blind Spots
Let’s start with a premise: money buys blind spots.
The money I’m referring to is the mountain of campaign contributions – at last count, nearly $1.3 billion – that flowed this election year to candidates for Congress.
The bulk of that money found its way to winners, and those winners – the members of the incoming 110th Congress – are certainly grateful. More to the point, they’d like to ensure that future donations will continue to flow their way in 2008 and beyond. And every incumbent understands that every vote they take, every amendment they introduce, is duly noted – and scored – by a galaxy of interest groups and PAC directors.
Continue readingWhat Should We Do?
Every day there are new rumors about what Congress will and will not do, but it appears that we have a specific opportunity to open up Congress in the first few months of the next year. The Democratic Leadership has announced that it is going to spend a week of floor time allowing members 15 minutes each to propose parcels of a transparency and reform Agenda.
Continue readingStill Exposing Earmarks
Michael Petrelis may be a little late to the exposing earmarks party that we at Sunlight were part of last summer, but he asks exactly the kinds of thoughtful questions that any constituent, as part of his citizen oversight duties, should get answered from a representative in Congress. Petrelis is asking them of Rep. Nancy Pelosi, the soon-to-be House Speaker--it will be interesting to see how quickly, and thoroughly, she responds.
Continue readingAnnouncing! Sunlight SEEKR
If you're a regular visitor to our site you noticed sometime last week, on the left side of our home page, our latest widget - we've dubbed it Sunlight Seekr. It's the first step to a one click search engine that culls through multiple databases. We put it up last week to play around with it and it appears to be working just fine so today we are going public with it. At the moment it does a simple search of five data sets: our own Sunlight Foundation and Congresspedia sites, The Institute on State Money and Politics and Center for Responsive Politics sites for state and federal campaign contributions, and GovTrack.org. Type in the name of an individual, corporation, and zip code and see what pops up. (To do really in-depth searches of all these sites APIs are inevitable, but not all the sites we wanted to include have APIs yet.)
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