Instead of spending another Friday night surfing the Web for your news, here’s some television you should watch tonight. Bill Moyers Journal will give you the best arguments you’ll ever need to explain why it’s so important for our government to do its work in the open. They have prepared an extensive report on government waste and abuse of power.

Specifically Moyers is going to look at some of the unsolved mysteries under investigation by Congress’s Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, chaired by Rep. Henry Waxman. The program profiles the Committee’s work, including its investigations of the mercenary army of Blackwater; Lurita Doan, who remains head of the GSA despite allegations of questionable no-bid contracts; and Condoleezza Rice’s State Department, which is plagued by fraud and abuse. Waxman’s Committee’s Web site is a treasure trove of information and documents on these issues. (In fact, Sunlight regards it as a model site itself when it comes to revealing the details of the work of a committee of Congress.)

And we’re pleased that their Web page will highlight many of Sunlight’s insanely useful Web sites for people are seeking more information.

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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:

(b) Each meeting of a committee, or any subcommittee thereof, including meetings to conduct hearings, shall be open to the public …

5. (e) Each committee shall prepare and keep a complete transcript or electronic recording adequate to fully record the proceeding of each meeting or conference whether or not such meeting or any part thereof is closed under this paragraph, unless a majority of its members vote to forgo such a record.

In following with these Rules one would hope to find some kind of account, electronic recording or printed transcript, of each committee proceeding on the Internet. As I showed for the House this isn’t the case. The following is a list of Senate committees and their respective transparency in regards to committee meeting proceedings for the 109^th Congress.

Note: According to the General Printing Office (GPO) it takes 30-90 days to create a printed transcript of a committee meeting. The numbers for each committee include both full and subcommittee meetings.

Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry Committee: The Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry Committee put 79% of its committee meetings online. For 2005 the Committee provides audio links for 18 out of 26 meetings and video links for five out of 26 meetings. For 2006 the Committee provides an audio link for 19 out of 27 meetings.

Appropriations Committee: Just like in the House the Senate Appropriations Committee does not provide any kind of transcription or electronic recording of its meetings. Earmarks enter here.

Armed Services Committee: The Senate Armed Services Committee also does not provide any record of its proceedings.

Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee: The Banking, House, and Urban Affairs Committee provides a transcript or electronic recording for 67.5% of its meetings. For 2005 the Committee provides a video link for 37 out of 53 meetings, a printed transcript for 18 out of 53 meetings, and an audio link for 1 out of 53 meetings. For 2006 the Committee provides a video link for 33 out of 55 meetings and a printed transcript for 2 out of 55 meetings.

Budget Committee: The Senate Budget Committee is the only fully transparent committee. For 2005 the Committee provides a video link for all 13 meetings. For 2006 the Committee provides a video link for all 12 meetings.

Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee: The Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee is in the top tier of transparent committees providing a printed transcript or electronic recording for 85% of its meetings. For 2005 the Committee provides a video link for 55 out of 80 meetings and an audio link for 10 out of 80 meetings. For 2006 the Committee provides a video link for 78 out of 88 meetings.

Energy and Natural Resources Committee: The Energy and Natural Resources Committee provides a video link for 71% of its meetings. For 2005 the Committee provided a video link for 52 out of 79 meetings. For 2006 the Committee provides a video link for 52 out of 68 meetings. The Committee website also provides a link to the General Printing Office’s list of Committee meetings.

Environment and Public Works Committee: The Environment and Public Works Committee provides an audio or video link for 78% of its meetings. For 2005 the Committee provides a video link for 34 out of 44 meetings and an audio link for 3 out of 44 meetings. For 2006 the Committee provides a video link for 24 out of 37 meetings and an audio link for 2 out of 37 meetings.

Finance Committee: The Finance Committee provides a printed transcript or electronic recording for 79% of its meetings. For 2005 the Committee provides a printed transcript for 30 out of 44 meetings and a video link for 20 out of 44 meetings. For 2006 the Committee provides a video link for 40 out of 48 meetings and a printed transcript for 3 out of 48 meetings.

Foreign Relations Committee: The Foreign Relations Committee doesn’t provide any transcript or recording of its meetings.

Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee: The Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee provides a printed transcript or electronic recording for 69% of its meetings. For 2005 the Committee provides a printed transcript for 34 out of 45 meetings and a video link for 6 out of 45 meetings. For 2006 the Committee provides a printed transcript for 15 out of 34 meetings, a video link for 8 out of 34 meetings, and an audio link for 2 out of 34 meetings.

Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee: The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee provides an electronic recording for 58% of its meetings. For 2005 the Committee provides a video link for 44 out of 85 meetings. For 2006 the Committee provides a video link for 60 out of 97 meetings and an audio link for 2 out of 97 meetings. There are also a number of broken links on this website.

Judiciary Committee: The Judiciary Committee contains no links to printed transcripts or electronic recordings for each individual meeting. The Committee does however contain one single link to the General Printing Office and its list of Committee transcripts.

Rules and Administration Committee: The Rules and Administration Committee does not provide any transcripts or recording of its meetings nor does it seem that it even lists all of the Committee’s meetings.

Select Committee on Intelligence: Almost all of the meetings held by the Select Committee on Intelligence are not open to the public. Those that are open do not provide any transcript or recording.

Small Business and Entrepreneurship Committee: The Small Business and Entrepreneurship Committee provides accounts of 77% of its meetings. For 2005 the Committee provides a video link to 4 out of 5 of its meetings and a printed transcript for 1 out of its 5 meetings. For 2006 the Committee provides a video link for 6 out of 8 meetings.

Veterans Affairs Committee: The Veterans Affairs Committee provides electronic recordings of its meetings 77% of the time. For 2005 the Committee provides a video link for 20 out of 28 meetings. For 2006 the Committee provides a video links for 20 out of 24 meetings. The Committee also provides one link to the General Printing Offices list of printed transcript for Committee meetings. The most recent meeting on this list a February 2, 2006 Committee meeting.

The total percentage for meetings to include a printed transcript or an electronic recording in Senate Committees is identical to the total percentage in the House: 49%.

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Today the Washington Post reports that incoming Majority Leader Steny Hoyer plans on making the 110^th Congress, y’know, actually work. The 109^th Congress, if it finishes up business this week, will have spent the fewest days in session — the House of Representatives only — of any other Congress in at least the past 60 years. Now some congressmen are complaining that they might have to — gasp — work a five day week.

Congressman Jack Kingston (R-Ga.) apparently is an advocate of a 3-day work week. This is his comment in the Post article, “Keeping us up here eats away at families. Marriages suffer. The Democrats could care less about families — that's what this says.” This comment ought to be a nominee for the silliest and most embarrassing comment by a professional politician in the past year. (Another comment in this category should be “Dollar Bill” Jefferson’s declaration that he will one day offer an honest excuse for keeping $90,000 in cash in his freezer.)

As detailed in the Sunlight Report on the “Do Nothing 109^th Congress” the House only scheduled 88 days in session in 2006; scheduled votes on Mondays and Tuesdays at 5:30 pm or 6:30 pm at least 23 times; and ultimately will meet for only 101 days, the lowest number since God knows when.

The Congress this year not only didn’t meet in session, they also have not met in the committees, and have failed to pass anything of substance or necessity. In 2006 the House of Representatives held 1,204 committee meetings the third lowest number in at least the last 20 years. The Congress is also punting on seven appropriations bills because, as Rep. Mike Pence says, “Contrary to popular belief, members of Congress are human beings. They have a certain shelf life and a certain amount of energy to be drawn on. We're tired.”

Yes, working 101 days a year is exhausting. Thomas Mann notes that “Harry Truman's 'do-nothing' Congress passed the Marshall Plan.” In a total of 241 days for the entire 109^th Congress (2005-2006) what did these guys do?

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A group of bloggers at Daily Kos has started an impressive project involving citizen oversight in the coming Congress. The project, called Committee Transparency, aims to get at least one person to cover the goings-on of each and every committee in Congress and to make recommendations to make committees more transparent. This past weekend blogger greenreflex wrote one of the better blog posts on committee transparency explaining the Rules that govern public access to committee hearings and documents and the continuing lack of transparency in many committees despite public access rules.

You should really read greenreflex’ whole post about the structure of the House and Senate Rules and what they say must be made available for public consumption. The gist of it is that House and Senate Committees must “be open to the public” and “prepare and keep a complete transcript or electronic recording adequate to fully record the proceeding of each meeting or conference”. Of course, this doesn’t always happen as greenreflex shows in their post.

In the search for committee transparency and providing citizen oversight is the need to look at the recent history of the committees in Congress. The oft cited quote by Woodrow Wilson, “Congress in session is Congress on public exhibition, whilst Congress in its committee rooms is Congress at work,” provides us with a reason to be concerned about what has been transpiring behind supposedly open doors. Or in the case of the recent committees, what hasn’t been transpiring.

For right now let’s just stick to committees in the House of Representatives, the Senate can come later. Over the past two decades committee hearings and meetings have seen a fairly dramatic drop-off. Just take a look at this chart:

Since 2001 no session of Congress has held 1500 or more committee meetings. This year of 2006 House committees held 1204 meetings, the third lowest in the past twenty years. But it doesn’t really matter how many committee meetings are held so long as their substance is greatly important. It’s not the quantity, it’s the quality.

This story doesn’t turn out so well either. The minority office of the House Government Reform Committee issued a report in January of this year highlighting the lack of Congressional oversight of the Executive branch. The report shows some of the past Congresses lowlights including Judiciary Committee Chairman James Sensenbrenner and Government Reform Chairman Tom Davis refusing to hold hearings into the detainee abuses at Abu Ghraib; Rep. Davis and Rep. Sensenbrenner refusing to investigate the leaking of undercover CIA agent Valerie Plame’s name; Rep. Davis’ refusal to subpoena “emails between [Michael] Brown and top White House officials” during hearings into the failures surrounding Hurricane Katrina; and that no committee has held hearings into procurement problems at the Department of Homeland Security.

This report only covers Congress up until 2005. So it’s about time to take a look at 2006. If there was one dominant issue in the country this year it has been the war in Iraq. You would expect Congress to hold hearings over the problems that the country is facing over there; you might even expect some committees to discuss other regional issues. (By the way, the following is only a review of Full Committee hearings and does not include Subcommittee information.) This is unfortunately not the case.

The House Armed Services Committee has held two hearings about Iraq this year. One of those hearings, held at the behest of Rep. Curt Weldon, was to determine if weapons of mass destruction still existed or not. The second hearing was held on November 15th in the wake of the Republican’s electoral defeat and the resignation of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.

The House International Relations Committee held the same number of hearings on Iraq this year: two. The hearings included a review of Iraq reconstruction and an update on U.S.-Iraq policy. The House Government Reform Committee also held one hearing into “the process, the progress and the problems of reconstruction contracting activities in Iraq.”

The most pressing problem of the year warranted only 5 full committee hearings, none lasting more than a day, in the House of Representatives.

On other issues, the House Resources Committee, under the Chairmanship of Rep. Richard Pombo, held no hearings into Jack Abramoff’s abuse of Indian tribes despite tribal matters being under its purview (the full committee did hold four oversight hearings on off-reservation Indian casinos, but nothing related to Abramoff’s lobbying). The Resources Committee and the Energy & Commerce Committee both failed to hold hearings into the issues of climate change and global warming. The only hearings into climate change were held by the Government Reform Committee, which held two hearings this year. The Financial Services Committee has held no hearings into backdating, the new corporate scandal.

The only top tier issue that did get a serious amount of committee attention was illegal immigration. The Judiciary Committee led the way holding five oversight hearings into the negative effects of both illegal immigration and the Senate immigration reform bill.

The full committees in the House have failed to truly examine and probe the issues of the day. They have failed to meet enough and have failed to provide the oversight, not only of the Administration, that is necessary for the American people to the heart of important issues and topics. If we are to take Wilson’s aphorism to heart than the fall in quantity and quality of committee work indicates — combined with the shortened Congressional calendar — that Congress has not been working.

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In this second installment of Congress Facts let's take a look at some of the lowlights of Congress' recent history. Fewer days in session, fewer committee hearings, and fewer House members reelected.

Follow below the fold.

• Number of Days the House has been in session this year: 96[1]

• Number of Days less than the 80^th “Do-Nothing” Congress the House has been in Session: 12

• Number of Committee Meetings in the House of Representatives in 1985: 2657

• Number of Committee Meetings in the House of Representatives in 1995: 2017

• Number of Committee Meetings in the House of Representatives in 2005: 1451

• Number of Subpoenas Issued by the House Government Reform Committee to Baseball Players in 2005: 7

• Number of Subpoenas Issued by the House Government Reform Committee to the Bush Administration since 2001: 3

• Number of committee hearings classified as “oversight” from 1993-94: 135[2]

• Number of committee hearings classified as “oversight” from 2003-4: 37[3]

• Cost to Run a House Campaign in 1976 (in 2004 dollars): $239,019[4]

• Cost to Run a House Campaign in 2006: $966,000[5]

• Reelection Rate in the 2004 House Elections: 98%[6]

• Reelection Rate in the 2006 House Elections: 94%[7]

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