A handful of groups--including some backed by petroleum marketing firms, airlines and unions--were responsible for the great majority of some 13,000 comment letters sent to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission about a single proposed regulation mandated by Dodd-Frank, according to an analysis by the Sunlight Foundation.
The CFTC is expected to issue a final rule, which limits how many futures contracts an investor is allowed to hold in any one security, on Sept. 22, though the agency has yet to confirm that date. The position limits rule received one of the highest number of public comments in the agency ...
Continue readingTop donors to Super Committee House Dems lobby for Defense and Medicare funding
A replacement for the Space Shuttle, tax breaks for personal injury attorneys, two nuclear powered submarines and bigger Medicare reimbursements for some specialists and drugs are among the lobbying wish lists of the top career donors to the three House Democrats on the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction, otherwise known as the super committee.
As we noted in our previous posts on the three House Republicans, the three Senate Democrats and the three Senate Republicans on the super committee, the dozen members all have private interests backing them who are far more concerned with their own bottom lines than ...
Continue readingSunlight Live to cover Super Committee meeting on Tuesday
On Tuesday morning, the Sunlight Live team will cover the second meeting of the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction providing viewers not only with context, fact checking and background but also live updates and pictures from the super committee meeting.
The upcoming meeting is poised to be more significant than the first one, with the Director of the Congressional Budget Office, Doug Elmendorf, testifying. In their statements last week, many legislators urged compromise and bipartisanship. However, one member Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., threatened to abandon his post if more military spending cuts are proposed.
The super committee first met ...
Who’s in the super committee audience?
Yesterday the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction, better known as the "super committee," met publicly for the first time to outline its mission and adopt rules to govern its process. We were on hand and turned our cameras 180 degrees to take pictures of the audience.
With your help, we'd like to identify those watching the committee. So, take a look at the photos below and if you recognize anyone, please send us an email at jhatch@sunlightfoundation.com describing which person you've identified, who he/she is (name, firm, etc.), and how you know who that ...
Continue readingSunlight Live to cover first-ever Tea Party hosted debate in Florida
Republican presidential candidates will face off before some of their fiscally conservative, libertarian Tea Party allies on Monday night during a debate in Florida sponsored by the Tea Party Express and CNN. It's the first time the Tea Party has hosted a presidential debate.
GOP candidates Michele Bachmann, Ron Paul, Rick Perry and Herman Cain, whose messages often align with the goals of the Tea Party, might find themselves in good company Monday evening.
The Sunlight Foundation will stream the debate and cover it live at http://sunlightlive.com to add context, campaign finance and lobbying information, and real-time ...
Continue readingLobbyists golfing with Clyburn have friend on Super Committee
In early August, Jim Clyburn, D-S.C., a member of the newly created congressional super committee, held his annual charity golf tournament, welcoming nearly 600 golfers to spend the weekend in Santee, South Carolina.
Prior to the tournament, the charity’s website posted a list of golfers signed up for the tournament, which raises money for college scholarships for needy students. Among those golfers, we identified 34 lobbyists, many of who represent companies with a stake in the decisions of the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction, a 12-lawmaker body tasked with trimming at least $1.2 trillion from the ...
Continue readingSuper Committee members’ past votes clue to future action
As the Joint Select Committee on Debt Reduction charged with finding $1.5 trillion in savings in the federal budget begins its work in earnest, a look at past votes on money matters by the lawmakers that are part of this powerful group provides clues to how they’ll approach their task.
Many of these lawmakers’ votes on budget resolutions past, bailouts, stimulus, health care, and defense spending are party line, or, in the case of much of the military spending, unanimous.
Sen. Max Baucus, D., Mont., however, has stepped across the aisle on several key occasions. In 2001, when ...
Continue readingSunlight Live to cover the hidden influence in Obama jobs address
This Thursday at 7 p.m. President Barack Obama is set to address Congress and the nation when he’ll unveil his latest plan to create jobs. Already, a preview of the speech shows proposals consistent with the positions of influential groups like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the AFL-CIO. Both groups have spent millions to influence elections and policies. With that in mind, the Sunlight Foundation will cover the speech with live video, data and commentary at sunlightlive.com.
Some of the glimpses into Obama's plan were provided by the president himself during a Labor Day ...
Continue readingSunlight Live to cover first “Supercommittee” hearing
After a quick summer recess, Congress returned this week with the newly formed “Supercommittee” scheduled to hold its first debt reduction meeting this Thursday at 10:30 a.m. EST. Unlike the debt negotiations held earlier this summer, the Supercommittee meetings will be conducted openly and we’ll be there to provide live fact checking, context and analysis so you can better understand the tanlged web of money and politics and how it relates to these meetings.
Although it is not yet known if the first hearing will be televised of livestreamed online, we will have reporters in the room ...
Continue readingDonors to Senate GOP super committee members seek tax cuts, tax breaks
The Club for Growth, which advocates making permanent some tax cuts and eliminating entirely others that, over just two years, would amount to more than $765 billion in lost revenues over two years, is a top donor to two of the three Republican Senators on the Joint Select Committee on Debt Reduction--the super committee. Other top donors include a hedge fund run by a top Republican donor that invests in, among other things, defaulted debt of sovereign nations, corporations trying to shield income earned overseas from U.S. taxes, and utility firms seeking to avoid regulation of greenhouse gases.
As ...
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