Going on eight months now the Senate Campaign Disclosure Parity Act, requiring senators to file their campaign finance reports electronically, has been held up by proceedural maneuvers from the Republican side. After a series of secret holds placed on the bill were thwarted once secret holds were banned (Senators with secret holds must reveal their identity after 72 hours) Sen. John Ensign blocked the bill by offering a poison pill amendment that lacked relevance to the bill. Ensign's amendment, revealed on this blog to have originated from the offices of Mitch McConnell, requires outside organizations filing ethics complaints to reveal their donor list. For months now, this irrelevant, poison pill amendment has blocked a simple change in how Senators file their campaign finance reports that would help make the data more readily accessible to the voting public. Now a coalition of groups, including a number of conservative groups, has formed to ask Ensign to drop his amendment and allow the electronic filing bill to pass. The groups include:

Alliance for Justice
Americans for the Preservation of Liberty
The American Conservative Union
James Bopp Jr., General Counsel James Madison Center for Free Speech
Center for Lobbying in the Public Interest
The Free Speech Coalition
Gun Owners of America,
National Center for Public Policy Research
OMB Watch

The full letter is after the jump.