Our friend N.Z. Bear has a new sign up page on the Porkbusters site that allows citizens to volunteer to evaluate some of the 36,000 some earmarks flooding the House--so many that Rep. David Obey, the chair of the House Appropriations Committee, announced a while back that they couldn't possibly publish them all until the absolute end of the process--when it would have been too late to do anything about them--because of the time needed to vet them. It appears Obey is now saying that lists of earmarks will be published "in The Congressional Record a month before they come up for final approval." Of course, there's no reason to wait that long -- lists of earmarks and earmark requests are sitting around the committee offices for months now; why not make the whole process transparent by making the requests publicly available the moment they're sent to the committee?
Continue readingHas Your Member of Congress Taken the Earmark Transparency Pledge?
The Sunlight Foundation has joined with Americans for Prosperity, OMB Watch and Taxpayers for Common Sense to ask you to ask your members of Congress to take the following pledge:
Earmark Transparency Pledge I, __________________________________ (Member of Congress) do hereby pledge in the spirit of transparency and reform that effective immediately I will voluntarily post on my official Congressional website a regularly updated list of every earmark and/or targeted tax benefit that I request. Continue reading
Taxpayers for Common Sense Find $744 Million Worth of Undisclosed Earmarks
When the House Armed Services Committee disclosed earmarks in the 2008 National Defense Authorization Act, it left out 53 of them worth a total of $744 million, according to a new report from our friends at Taxpayers for Common Sense:
When the House of Representatives passed new rules just a few days into the new Congress requiring lawmakers to disclose the earmarks they insert into bills, applause was tempered by Washington concern about whether or not lawmakers would actually do what they say. Continue reading
Rep. Issa Calls on Colleagues to Disclose Earmarks
Rep. Darrell Issa, one of a handful (but a growing handful) of members who post lists of their earmark requests online has sent a "Dear Colleague" letter to fellow House members asking that they do the same (full text, plus a release, is here:
An effort is reportedly underway on the Appropriations Committee to hide Member “earmark” requests from public scrutiny. According to the Associated Press, “Democrats are following an order by the House Appropriations Committee chairman to keep the bills free of such earmarks until it is too late for critics to effectively challenge them.” While the leadership of the Appropriations Committee forges a procedural shield to protect wasteful spending and thwart public scrutiny of projects, I urge you to counter this wrong-headed approach and join the handful of Members who have made a voluntary public disclosure on their websites of all FY 2008 project requests made to the Appropriations Committee. Continue reading
AFP Offers Rep. Obey Citizen Help, Oversight for Earmarks
Via Mark Tapscott comes word of this excellent offer from our friends at Americans for Prosperity: Citizen oversight of the earmarking process. Let's all offer some our time, plus our common sense and good judgment, to Rep. David Obey, his fellow appropriators and the House Democrats so that they don't have to labor in secrecy to evaluate all those earmarks all by themselves. In a June 6, 2007, letter addressed to Obey, AFP president Tim Phillips writes,
Continue readingTell Your Congressman to Support the OTA
In 1995 Congress defunded the Office of Technology Assessment, a nonpartisan scientific and technology research arm of Congress. Today, two congressmen are trying to bring it back. Rep. Rush Holt (D-NJ) and Rep. Michael Castle (R-DE) need your help to reinstate this important institution in Congress. The OTA would provide nonpartisan research on technology issues ranging from energy independence to net neutrality. Here at Sunlight we are especially excited about the reinstatement of OTA as it would provide members of Congress with assessment of the technology infrastructure within Congress itself. The OTA would also put all of its research online for everyone to access.
On Monday, the Legislative Branch Appropriations Subcommittee will hold a markup that will address the OTA. We need you to call your member of Congress and tell them to 1) support the reinstatement of the OTA and 2) to sign the Dear Colleague letter that they received from Reps. Rush Holt and Michael Castle and return it to Reps. Debbie Wasserman-Schultz and Zach Wamp. When Congress defunded the OTA one of its supporters, Rep. Amo Houghton (R-NY), said, "Members of Congress are deluged with advice from many quarters, but it is often tinged with the underlying bias and political agenda of the bearer. ... We are cutting off one of the most important arms of Congress when we cut off unbiased knowledge about science and technology." It's time to bring back the OTA and unbiased research on science and technology. Call your congressman now!
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Help Identify Mystery PACs
Got some spare time? Want to get involved in a little open source watchdogging project? Our friends at the Center for Responsive Politics are asking users to research a list of "mystery PACs," or leadership political action committees that appear to be affiliated with a member of Congress but do not explicitly say so. Leadership PACs do not have to disclose the identity of an affiliated member of Congress. There's a bill in Congress, HR 347, sponsored by Rep. Walter Jones (R-NC), that would end this secretive process. While we wait for this bill to get a hearing in the House you can research these PACs yourself. If you need a little help in getting started, Bill Allison, at the Real Time Investigations blog, writes up a good summary of how he researched one of mystery PACs. And if you're feeling in a good mood and want to contribute your findings to another resource, Congresspedia has a great page on political action committees that lists many of the leadership PACs currently active. Feel free to add your findings to the list. Definitely go and help out CRP uncover the members of Congress behind these mystery PACs.
Continue readingPeople Powered Politics or People Powered Governance?
I’d be remiss to fail to mention Liza Sabater’s pre-PDF Conference blog post, “The Cluetrain Manifesto for People Powered Politics.” In her post Sabater aims to do for politics what the Cluetrain Manifesto did for the business community. Writing, “Gone are the days in which engagement is only mediated by an elite ‘entrusted’ by the masses with every single policy and political decision making that will end up affecting their lives,” Sabater highlights a point that I find to be instrumental in understanding the changes that an Internet-enabled open and transparent government will enable. While Sabater focuses on the realm of elections, I’d like to take a look at her “Manifesto” in terms of governance. “Constituencies are conversations,” and they can be empowered to affect the legislative and governing process as well as direct the political process.
Continue readingFARA Puts Some Records Online
A while back, my colleague Anupama Narayanswamy reported on the RealTime blog that the disclosures filed under the Foreign Agent Registration Act were about to go online. Until now, these detailed disclosures--which require those paid to attempt to influence U.S. policies for foreign governments and some government-controlled entities to list their meetings with government officials, including members of Congress and their staff--were publicly available, but just barely. Only those who visited FARA's New York Ave. office here in Washington, D.C., between 11 a.m. and 3 p.m. Monday through Friday (closed Federal holidays), and looked up the records on balky, user-unfriendly interface, could get them, and only those prepared to pay 50 cents a page to copy them could get them out of that office. Now, some of those records are available online, although a FARA staffer tells us that the site isn't officially public--they haven't formally announced its availability.
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,
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