Regardless of what happens to the Omnibudgetbusterblusterbus bill — sorry, my fingers slipped — the Omnibus spending bill (made searchable by our friends at the Heritage Foundation), it’s fair to say that citizen oversight of Congress (and congressional oversight of Congress, for whatever that’s worth) took a shot to the chin today. The Hill’s Alex Bolton reports that the bill’s 3,565 pages contain somewhere between 8,983 earmarks (according to Taxpayers for Common Sense), 9,200 earmarks (according to a Senate staffer) and 11,402 earmarks (according to Heritage’s excellent Ominibuster blog). There are hundreds of new earmarks previously undisclosed–115 worth $117 million in the previously “earmark free” Homeland Security bill–that have been “airdropped” in at the last minute.

Rep. Marsha Blackburn just noted on C-Span (I’m watching as I type) that the bill weighs in at a hefty 35 pounds when printed. Members have only a few hours to digest all that paper before voting. The bill will appropriate something like hundreds of billions of dollars in funds. In what other arena of life do you make such momentous decisions with so little time to think? “Rush into that subprime mortgage,” “buy that stock of a company you’d never heard of before,” “a week is plenty of time to find out if someone is worth marrying,” — thus does our Congress decide how to spend our money. This is primarily a failure of the majority (regardless of which party is in the majority–the Republicans were equally opaque) and of leadership, which prefers to dump a monstrosity of a bill–stitched together behind closed doors–on their colleagues with no time for debate, and no time for their constituents to make their opinions known.

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Wondering who’s getting all the earmarks? Who’s giving them and why? Do earmarks meet pressing needs or pay off political favors? And which are pure pork? EarmarkWatch.org, an innovative new tool from the Sunlight Foundation and Taxpyers for Common Sense, lets you find out for yourself. Using EarmarkWatch.org, you can exercise citizen oversight of Congress. Dig into the 47 earmarks worth $166,500,000 that Rep. John Murtha inserted (and figure out which benefit campaign contributors). Or take a close look at the $100,000 earmark that Sen. David Vitter secured for an organization that promotes creationism in Louisiana schools. Or the $37 million in earmarks that include defense giant Northrop Grumman as a beneficiary. Right now, you can investigate earmarks from the House Defense Appropriations Bill and the House and Senate versions of the Labor, Health and Human Services Appropriations bills. Using a host of online resources, you can find out whether recipients of earmarks hired lobbyists, made campaign contributions to members of Congress, or won federal contracts and grants. You can also add information to eamarks others have researched, or comment on what others have found. EarmarkWatch.org provides you with powerful tools to scrutinize and evaluate thousands of earmarks. To get started, create an account and pick an earmark.

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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,

Chairman Obey, I share your concern about unworthy projects receiving federal funding due to a lack of careful and thoughtful evaluation, and I agree that one individual working alone would have a very hard time completing this task in a timely manner.

However, I also think that thousands or millions of individual taxpayers working together could greatly aid you in completing your earmark request evaluations before you resort to sticking earmarks into un-amendable final legislation behind the closed doors of a conference committee. That’s why, on behalf of the thousands of Americans for Prosperity members from coast to coast, I’m writing to offer our help to you and your staff in evaluating this year’s earmark requests.

As you know, Internet technology has made research faster and easier than at any previous time in human history. By releasing your 36,000 earmark requests to Americans for Prosperity, our allies in other pro-taxpayer groups and to concerned bloggers, we would be able to unleash taxpayers across the country in a cooperative effort to determine which Members of Congress may have financial conflicts attached to their earmark requests, which local projects may be unworthy of federal funding and which may have value to the taxpayers.

The Sunlight Foundation would be happy to join in that effort.

Actually, now that I think about it, at one time we were kicking around the idea that all requests for earmarks ought to be public, filed electronically with Congress, in a searchable, downloadable database. I can’t believe that organizations request hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars from Congress, and there’s no publicly available paper trail.

Incidentally, there are related posts on this subject at our companion RealTime blog, here and here, including a link to an earmark authorized by remarks Sen. Ted Stevens made on the Senate floor…

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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,

If those who forged this “compromise” have their way, this bill will be voted on as early as Tuesday. That’s a crazily short amount of time for Senators — let alone the American public — to review, understand, and have a voice on the substance of such a complex bill.

My hope, however, is that by presenting the bill in this form, I will help make the bill more accessible to all, and provide a central spot where commentary, criticism, and suggested improvements can be assembled. Who knows — maybe our erstwhile leaders on Capitol Hill will take notice, and take some of our comments to heart.

The Sunlight Foundation takes no position on the merits of the bill, but we do think that the text of all proposed legislation should be readily available to the public online, in an easily searchable form, for exactly the kinds of citizen efforts that N.Z. Bear is leading.

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You’ve passed the half way mark! Only 265 member Web sites left to investigate!

Of those finished, the average score has crept up to 31.3755…

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Roughly 143 hours after releasing our latest citizen journalism project, we’re approaching the half way mark: 265 members have been investigated by citizen journalists, 271 remain to be done. The average score has crept up over to a hair over 31 (the precise figure is 31.0471), while the average time to complete an investigation is remaining steady at seven minutes. Of the various citizen journalism projects we’ve launched, this one seems to require a little more patience and effort on the part of researchers, and I think I can safely say that I speak for all my colleagues here when I thank everyone who’s taken on part of this project. We greatly appreciate your efforts.

I should also thank Pamela Drew at Newsvine, Marty Kearns at Network Centric Advocacy, Ross Karchner at Ross Notes and Craig Newmark for their kind words and pointers to the project.

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