Making Government Transparent and Accountable
The Sunlight Foundation uses cutting-edge technology and ideas to make government transparent and accountable. Underlying all of our efforts is a fundamental belief that increased transparency will improve the public's confidence in government
The Sunlight Foundation Blog
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Legislative Safety Valve: Health Care Online for 72 Hours
Now it’s getting down to the wire and debate over the health care bill not only extends to what’s in the final package but how public the final negotiations are going to be. There’s even a public fight about legislative procedure – whether the bills will go to a formal conference committee, whether C-SPAN will be able to broadcast those hearings so the public can see the sausage being made.
But much of this discussion about transparency is partisan driven so it makes me grit my teeth (which my dentist tells me I really shouldn’t do). More importantly it misses the mark. There is much Congress can do to improve transparency in its lawmaking, such as providing better access to legislative data, to committee and floor video, to voting records, ethics filings, and earmark requests, and we and others have called for these and many other changes. A conference committee is hardly the be all and end all of Congressional transparency.
But that is not the end of the matter: we should never allow Congress to pass legislation which has not seen the light of day. After the House and Senate have ironed out the details of this health care legislation – or any bill – a final opportunity for real transparency can be had by posting the full bill online for 72 hours prior to the final debate and vote. (And if major amendments are added during the 72 hours that the bill is available to the public, then those amendments should be made public on the Web for another 72 hours, too.)
Think of posting something on line for 3 days as a ‘safety valve’ – a final chance for citizens, media, lawmakers and lobbyists alike to look at the whole package giving everyone one last opportunity to raise questions and concerns about the bill. If readers are in an advocacy mode they have time to mobilize others in support or opposition, and/or take action in whatever form they see fit.
There is no measure more important to debate in the open than health care, and this is a moment when we all need to be champions for public, online disclosure and engage with our government. With 72 hours, the buck can actually stop with citizens the way our Founders intended. We know that Congress do it because congressional leadership has already done so at other critical points in this debate.
This is what real transparency would look like.
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Don’t Give Grades Till the End of the Class
Kenneth Vogel over at Politico wrote this morning about a report put together by a coalition of watchdog organizations praising the White House for its openness by giving it an “A” grade.
The watchdog report speaks to the positive efforts undertaken by the administration to make the executive branch more open and transparent, and the highlighting of those efforts is all well and good.
But giving openness grades to the White House right now is like giving a grade for an entire class after the first few weeks. A professor wouldn’t give a grade for the whole semester because a student turned in quality homework in September and laid out a plan for how hard she is going to work over the next few months until the final. Encouragement, guidance, oversight… sure. But not a grade.
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Government Transparency and the Supreme Court Case ‘Citizens United’
There is again speculation that the Supreme Court will issue an opinion in a major election and transparency case tomorrow. In one sense, that case, Citizen’s United, concerns whether the FEC can regulate a 90-minute, video-on-demand film, “Hillary: The Movie,” which criticized then-presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. However, the ruling may affect two Court decisions that recognized the constitutionality of laws that require disclosure of persons who made election-related expenditures. In other words, the public’s ability to follow the money. (Continue reading…)
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Lobbyists Help Write Senator’s Amendment
Further dispatches from the Fifth Branch of government provided by the Washington Post:
Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) is likely to postpone offering an amendment (pdf) next week that would bar the Environmental Protection Agency from regulating carbon dioxide as a pollutant under the Clean Air Act, according to sources familiar with the matter.
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The maneuvering comes as The Washington Post has confirmed that two Washington lobbyists, Jeffrey R. Holmstead and Roger R. Martella, Jr., helped craft the original amendment Murkowski planned to offer on the floor last fall. Both Holmstead, who heads the Environmental Strategies Group and Bracewell & Guiliani, and Martella, a partner at Sidley Austin LLP, held senior posts at EPA under the Bush administration and represents multiple clients with an interest in climate legislation pending before Congress.
As reported in McClatchy, the lobbyists are very honest about the whole thing:
“This is what lawyers in Washington do every day of the week, is to take a look,” Holmstead said. “It happens all the time on almost every piece of legislation. Before language is introduced, it is almost always shared with people on all sides of the issue.”
All the more reason for even more transparency in the interaction of lobbyists with our elected officials.
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Book Anticipation: “King of the Lobby: The Life and Times of Sam Ward, Man-About-Washington in the Gilded Age.”
Writing about lobbying and influence has a sort of staring into the abyss quality to it. Sometimes you just admire the absurd levels of corruption that people sink to to accomplish their goals. None is more entertaining in this way than Sam Ward, the real, true King of the Lobby. Kathryn Allamong Jacob has a book out now about Ward that Roll Call reviews. Here’s some nice tidbits:
In one encounter with a lawmaker, Ward recalled in a letter that “I met with him yesterday at the Capitol and had a long intelligent talk. I then perceived that he has a tantalizing way of unbuttoning and buttoning up again the right side pocket of his trousers. Several times I fancied that, like other pilgrims in peril, he hoped open sesame would produce a check or a pungent greenback.”
Jacob also produces page-turning tales of ethically challenged reporters — “so scantily paid by the journals,” an observer stated, “that they are forced to prostitute their pens.” Another observer cited by Jacob chronicles a new breed of lobbyist in Reconstruction-era Washington: the “lobbyess.”
“New in the Gilded Age were the women who came to Washington with the intent to lobby, pure and simple, and not for lofty goals like justice, civil rights, equal rights or any of the other abstract principles like those that had brought women abolitionists and would continue to bring advocates for women’s suffrage to Washington,” Jacob writes.
“These new women were after pensions, contracts, compensation, land, subsidies and patents. Some were advocating for their own claims, but some push the claims of others for money — a commission, a salary, living expenses.”
Should make for a fun read.
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The Nitty Gritty of Calling for 72 Hours for the Final Health Care Bill
As Jake wrote last week, the final version of the health care bill must be made publicly available for 72 hours prior to floor consideration. For us here at Sunlight figuring out what that exactly means has been a moderately arduous task over the past week. The legislative process to be used, “ping-pong,” is fairly confusing and, due to that, pin-pointing the final version is difficult. I’m going to try and unpack this in the best way possible here.
How exactly does this “ping-pong” process work? “Ping-pong,” like the game, envisions the two chambers sending amendments to the bill back and forth with multiple votes on amendments. Ultimately, the chambers will reach agreement and the bill will finally be considered passed.
Below is a quick summation of what that entails (for the full version please read this CRS Report): (Continue reading…)
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Days in Session: House
Following up on Daniel’s post from last week, here’s a chart showing the days in session for the House going back to 1947. I wrote a report about this back in 2006, but it’s been lost in the ether of both my crashed PC (I’m not a PC because my PC crashed and burned) and the various Sunlight site redesigns. (Continue reading…)
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Congress Should Make All Ethics Documents Available Online
An article in today’s Washington Post on the limits of conflict-of-interest rules laments that “the ethics system on Capitol Hill requires little more than annual public disclosure of financial assets and transactions.” When we surveyed the ethics filings required of U.S. Representatives and their staff members, we reached two additional conclusions:
(1) Many ethics filings are required to be publicly reported, but are not available online
(2) Many ethics filings are not publicly reported at all
At a minimum, the House should publish a compilation of reports and statements required by Members of Congress, officers, and employees, like the Senate does [PDF]. (Of course, the Senate should publish their compilation online. See our list of Senate disclosures.) The House and Senate should make all of their reports available online, in real time, and in machine readable format. When there are privacy implications of making information available, such as the inclusion of home addresses and social security numbers, that information should be redacted, of course.
In the Internet age, there’s no good reason to have documents available only in a room at Capitol Hill. The House has made some progress, for example, publishing its Statement of Disbursements of the House online, but there’s more that both chambers should do. (Continue reading…)
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REPOST: Next Banking Committee Chair Has Ties to Financial Sector
Note: I wrote this over the summer when the possibility existed that Sen. Chris Dodd would be moving from the Banking Committee to the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee. With Dodd’s retirement announcement, I figured it would be useful to revisit. I have removed some of the introductory text as it is now irrelevant, but can be viewed at the original posting here.
Sen. Tim Johnson of South Dakota is next in line to replace Sen. Dodd and has similarly close ties to the financial sector.
According to Open Secrets from 2003-2008, Sen. Johnson has pulled in $1,407,958 from the finance, insurance and real estate sector. While this pales in comparison to Sen. Dodd’s $9,097,107 over the same period of time, it accounts for 20% of the South Dakota senator’s campaign haul. Sen. Johnson’s finance contributions are aided by the importance of South Dakota to the finance and credit industries. These companies only need to abide by the regulations of the state within which they are incorporated and South Dakota has some of loosest regulations for bank holding and credit card companies. This has led to a large number of credit and banks companies locating in the small plains state, providing for tens of thousands of jobs. (Continue reading…)
