It would be nice to know why the Government Printing Office takes so long to take a bill and put it online so that I can access it on Thomas. Yesterday, I tried to read the lobbying and ethics reform bill currently being debated on the Senate floor, bill number S. 1, and found that it was not online at Thomas because it takes a day or two for the GPO to print a bill. Of course, S. 1 was introduced last week but the GPO says that it might take longer when a lot of bills are introduced at once (members of the House introduced over 300 bills last week, Senators introduced over 100). Is there some actual explanation for this delay other than aimless bureaucracy and backwards computer technology. If I had just drafted a bill I could post the entire thing on this blog right now, but for some reason Members of Congress cannot post bills immediately online?
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 readingOnline Committee Transparency: Senate Edition
Since determining the online transparency of the committees in the House I figured it would be worthwhile to compile a similar list for the Senate. The Senate committees turned out to be very similar to their counterparts on the House side. Around one-third of the Senate committees provided no access to printed transcripts or audio/video for each committee meeting and only one committee was fully transparent in its access to committee meetings.
Senate Rules (XXVI) require that committee meetings be open to the public and that committees should keep a verbatim account of these meetings:
Continue readingOnline Committee Transparency: House Edition
Following up on the previous post on committee transparency I decided to take a look at the House committee websites to find out how readily available recordings and/or transcripts of committee meetings actually are. Congressional committees are supposed to be transparent and are supposed to make available to the public the full contents of open committee hearings and mark-ups. This, of course, isn’t always the case as we shall see.
Continue readingWeb 2.0 and the future of democracy
Like Ellen and much of the rest of the Sunlight staff, I spent all day last Friday holed up in a corner of the Mitchell Kapor Foundation in San Francisco, mixing it up with the biggest assemblage of brainiacs that I’ve seen in one room since I left grad school.
The purpose, as Ellen has already written, was to bring together some of the sharpest thinkers in the interactive world of Web 2.0 and hook them up with a few of the good-government groups trying to use the internet as a tool for making politics and government more open, accessible and understandable to everyone.
Continue readingAnd the Antidote to Corruption Is….?
A CNN exit poll showed that 42 percent of voters said corruption was an extremely important issue in their choices at the polls yesterday. It led terrorism, economy and Iraq as the national issues that drove voters choices.
Can there be any doubt that more transparency is in order? When we launched the Sunlight Foundation, we found huge support among the public for greater disclosure of the inner workings of what goes on in Congress
The most popular proposals included: requiring public disclosure of all money raised for a campaign by registered lobbyists and creating an independent ethics commission to review complaints, conduct investigations, and report on unethical conduct by lawmakers and their staffs. Just behind were proposals requiring public disclosure of any attempts to secure earmarks in budget bills that directly benefit lobbyists or campaign contributors, requiring lawmakers to file reports on legislation they have introduced that would benefit their campaign contributors, requiring public disclosure of all contacts with regulatory agencies pressing for action that benefits campaign contributors, requiring lawmakers to report publicly all of their contacts with lobbyists, and prohibiting former members of Congress and senior staff from working as lobbyists in Washington for five years after they leave Congress. Every single one of these proposals got support of 59 percent or higher!
Continue readingMore Investigations, Congressmen Aim for Less Transparency
Maybe the HBO show The Wire should have focused on congressional wheeling and dealing in Washington rather than the inner city drug trade in Baltimore. Just after I wrote a post about corruption and scandal tilting over a dozen congressional races yet another congressman, Rep. Curt Weldon, R-Pa., finds himself the subject of an FBI investigation with a grand jury already impaneled, wiretaps monitoring cellphones, and raids on six locations in Pennsylvania and Florida. Bill Allison has already discussed some interesting tidbits of the case and Weldon's page at Congresspedia covers the details and history of the investigation and Weldon's connections to the Russian energy giant Itera and the Serbian brothers who previously were tight with mass murderer Slobodan Milosovic. But just today we got a taste of how Weldon has been trying to suppress discussion of this whole matter by being, um, less than transparent.
Continue readingThe Sun to Shine on Cheney
It looks like judges are getting with the transparency picture. Today, U.S. District Judge Ricardo M. Urbina ruled that by the end of next week, the Secret Service must produce access to records of who visited Vice President in his office and at his personal residence.
The Washington Post asked for two years of White House visitor logs in June but the Secret Service refused to process the request. Government attorneys called it "a fishing expedition into the most sensitive details of the vice presidency."
Continue reading
Congress’s Landed Gentry
So what is it with members of Congress and land deals? Sen. Harry Reid failed to disclose what the Associated Press describes as "a $1.1 million windfall on a Las Vegas land sale" on property he hadn't owned for three years. "The complex dealings allowed Reid to transfer ownership, legal liability and some tax consequences to Brown's company without public knowledge, but still collect a seven-figure payoff nearly three years later," reporters John Solomon and Kathleen Hennessey wrote. Rep. Charles Taylor, meanwhile, "owns at least 14,000 acres of prime land in western North Carolina. He's also the local congressman. So when he steers federal dollars to his district, sometimes he helps himself, too," John Wilkes reported in the Wall Street Journal (the story is available online here). Sen. Bob Menendez has his lease deal with nonprofit for which he's secured federal funds, while House Speaker Dennis Hastert has his own profits from earmarks and land deals. The real estate dealings of Rep. Gary Miller and Rep. Alan Mollohan have also come under scrutiny (as noted in the Journal article).
Continue readingDefeated Earmark Disclosure Puts Sham House Rule to Shame
Robert Novak has more on the backdoor maneuvering and dust-up between Sen. Tom Coburn and Sen. Ted Stevens over the issue of disclosing earmarks that he'd alluded to earlier. Coburn sponsored a measure that would require the Pentagon to issue report cards on the utility and effectiveness of projects earmarked by members of Congress; Stevens didn't care for the scrutiny. The intra-party squabble doesn't interest me so much as the bottom line:
The earmark process enables the congressional-industrial complex to fund projects the military does not want. This year's bill appropriates money to buy 10 unrequested C-17 Globemaster cargo planes from Boeing. It also funds 60 F-22A Raptor stealth fighters, not supported by the Pentagon and opposed by McCain and Sen. John Warner, Senate Armed Services Committee chairman. F-22A appropriations are guaranteed for three years, reducing leverage with contractor Lockheed Martin. Continue reading
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