I’ve spent a lot of time on this blog deriding the Senate Ethics Committee - and the frivolous complaints leveled by Sen. John Ensign against the current ethics process - for failing to investigate Senators who have allegedly violated the trust of their office (or the law, in the case of Sen. Ted Stevens). Thanks to the recently passed ethics bill, S.1, we finally get some transparency in the Ethics Committee and some statistical information about the committee’s activities. The Committee is now required to issue an annual report of activity. Here are some highlights:

Number of alleged violations received in 2007 (from any source): 95 (not including the 16 carried over from 2006)

Number of alleged violations dismissed in 2007 (including 7 cases carried over from 2006): 86 (71 for lack of jurisdiction; 15 for failure to provide sufficient facts)

Number of alleged violations which resulted in a preliminary hearing: 16 (includes 9 matters carried over from 2006 and 5 matters that have carried into 2008)

Number of alleged violations that resulted in adjudicatory review: 0

Number of alleged violations dismissed for lack of substantial merit: 11 (includes 7 matters carried over from 2006)

Number of matters resulting in disciplinary action: 0

Looking at those numbers I can reach a few conclusions. The first thing people will jump to is that the Ethics Committee is still conducting 5 investigations that have carried over from either 2006 or 2007. We know that retiring Sen. Pete Domenici is under investigation for his role in the Attorney purge scandal and that the committee may be investigating Sen. Larry Craig, also retiring, for his role in a Minneapolis airport bathroom (although I don’t understand what Senate Rule he violated). We can determine that 2 of these cases have carried over from 2006 by doing the math. We know that 16 cases were carried over from 2006 and that 14 of these were dismissed - 7 dismissed out of hand and 7 dismissed after a preliminary hearing - leaving us with 2 cases carried from 2006 that are still proceeding into 2008. (If you want to speculate as to who these Senators - or Senate aides - are please do so in the comments.)

The next thing to take from this report is that the Ethics Committee is very careful about which alleged violations it moves forward with. Despite the claims by Sen. Ensign that the Ethics Committee receives complaints on napkins and written in crayon and that this is damaging to Senators, we know now that of the 111 alleged violations received in 2007 and carried over from 2006, 86 were dismissed out of hand for lack of jurisdiction and for failure to provide sufficient facts. The Committee is only carrying over 5 cases from 2007, 2 of which we have determined are from 2006. Thus we can state that of the 111 alleged violations received or carried over, 5 have led to on-going investigations, a rate of 4.5%. It doesn’t sound like the Committee is having difficulty sifting through these complaints and it certainly doesn’t mean that every allegation submitted amounts to anything substantive.

I’ve included the most relevant information from the Committee’s first annual report on their activity in this post, but check the rest out for your self.

Despite the clear loopholes in the ethics bill’s lobbying and gift restrictions, the transparency provisions are beginning to funnel more information into the arms of the public. As more committees update their rules to comply with S.1, and we begin to receive the new reports and visit the Web site mandated under S.1, we will realize that the true legacy of the ethics bill will be the greater public access to information, allowing better citizen oversight and informed decision making, granted by the bill’s transparency provisions.

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At the end of the 109th Congress I wrote a couple of blog posts (1, 2) showing how congressional committees failed to post transcripts and audio or video files of their hearings on their Web sites. After a careful review of the committees at the time it turned out that approximately 50% of both House and Senate committee hearings were available in any of those three formats. Thanks to the new lobbying, ethics, and disclosure bill committees in the Senate will soon be required to post one of these three formats within 21 days of the conclusion of a hearing for every hearing. Currently the committees of the 110th Congress seem to be slacking on online disclosure just as much as their predecessors. Voterwatch has created a list of links to committee Web sites and their hearing transcripts and audio or video files. It looks like committees continue to fail the openness test.

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In a first for Congress, Rep. Ed Markey (D-MA) took a video camera and filmed the first user created video from the perspective of a Congressional Committee Chairman. This is an amazing step in the right direction for Congress as they grapple with adopting to new mediums of communication and new technology. Also, I’m glad that Rep. Markey has decided to embed his YouTube video on his member web site and push the envelope as David All and I suggest in the Open House Project section on Member Web Use Restrictions.

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Is Virginia the epicenter of the use of digital video in politics? First we have S.R. Sidarth’s YouTube video of then-Sen. George Allen (R-Va.) calling the University of Virginia student a “macaca” (which we all now know to be a racist term). Now the Democrats in the state legislature have gone to videotaping committee hearings that have been scheduled during off-hours — early in the morning and late at night — and therefore do not have to be recorded. Call it DIY transparency.

The videotaping effort, called Assembly Access, began after the Republican majority changed the rules to allow bills to be killed in subcommittees without recorded votes. After a minimum wage increase bill — the top bill on Democrats’ agenda — was killed in a subcommittee without ever receiving a vote the minority went to the videotaping tactic to show the public what was going on behind the scenes.

Personally, I could care less how committee hearings come about being videotaped whether it’s out of a desire for civic engagement in the political process or an angry political party upset over the use of secrecy by their opponents to stifle a political agenda. This is a truly innovative communications strategy by the Democrats, but it also gives the promise of a legislative agreement to open up the political process.

The Republican majority however is calling foul. They see videotaped committee hearings as a means to more “gotcha politics” and have vowed to fight back in kind with their own digital camera wielders following Democratic legislators around. It would be nice if, instead of acting like children, a compromise could be reached through the legislative process (these guys should know something about legislating, that is their job right?) that would allow all committee hearings to be videotaped in a dignified manner and promptly posted to a government website.

Across the river in Congress, the Senate recently agreed to post a video, audio, or printed transcript of every committee and subcommittee hearing to each committee’s website. The House should do the same when it considers their lobbying and ethics reform legislation. It’s past time for Congress and state legislatures to open up their doors and committee rooms to the public.

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Yesterday during the debate on the Senate ethics legislation Sen. Ken Salazar (D-Co.), along with cosponsor Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.), introduced an amendment to require that each Senate committee and subcommittee post to their website “a video recording, audio recording, or transcript of any meeting not later than 14 business days after the meeting occurs.” Salazar’s amendment (SA 15), which modifies Majority Leader Harry Reid’s (D-Nevada) substitute amendment SA 3, was agreed to by a voice vote yesterday.

Since only 49% of committee and subcommittee meetings in the 109^th Congress were placed on their respective committee websites the above mentioned formats this amendment would go a long way to expanding public access to the committee process. Here’s a bit of what Salazar said on the floor yesterday when he introduced his amendment:

While Senate rules require that committee meetings be open to the public and that each committee prepare and keep a complete transcript or electronic recording of all of its meetings, it still remains very difficult for citizens to figure out what actually goes on in our committee rooms. According to one estimate, a transcript or electronic recording is available online for only about one-half of all Senate committee and subcommittee hearings. Only for one-half of those hearings is there made available a transcript that the public can actually access. That number is far too low. There is no reason why, in this day of modern technology and communications, we should not be able to achieve a goal of 100 percent.

I know we often refer to Justice Brandeis because he was one of those great jurists who really illuminated our times with some of his wisdom, his jewels that have become almost cliches that captured the moment. I remember Justice Brandeis's famous line where he said, “Sunshine is said to be the best of disinfectants.”

He almost got the Brandeis quote right; it’s a catchy phrase nonetheless. Soon all the politicians will be saying it.

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