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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Senate E-Filing in Politico
The campaign to pass S. 482, the Senate e-filing bill, continues apace with a great mention in the Politico today. If you want to us pass this commonsense bill, go to the Pass 482 site and ask your senators to cosponsor the bill. The Politico article hits some great points and features Sunlight’s Lisa Rosenberg:You can learn instantly via Twitter that Claire McCaskill needs an iPhone repair or that Chuck Grassley burned his leg on his Iowa farm.
But if you want to comb through the details of a senator’s quarterly campaign finance reports online, it’s going to take a month to get the information — and a boatload of government money to make it available.
While presidential candidates and members of the House of Representatives file their financial disclosures electronically, the Senate still does it the old-fashioned way.
Senate campaign committees print out thousands of pages of forms and hand them over to the secretary of the Senate, who delivers them to the Federal Election Commission, which pays people to key in the information so that, at some point down the line, you can search the data online.
The result: Senate campaign finance data costs more to produce but takes longer to get and is ultimately less accurate than the same information presidential and House candidates submit electronically.
Go to Pass 482 and help us pass this bill!
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Wash. Times Supports S. 482
The Washington Times editorialized in favor of S. 482, the Senate e-filing bill, in today’s paper. Below is a section from the editorial. Don’t forget to help us pass S. 482 by going to the Pass 482 site and calling your senators to get their support:
Sen. Russell Feingold, Wisconsin Democrat, has once again reintroduced legislation requiring electronic fillings by senators. Such efforts over the last six years have never reached the Senate floor. The bill has 32 co-sponsors, including conservative Thad Cochran, Mississippi Republican. This is not a partisan or ideological issue. But John Ensign, Nevada Republican, has led the strongest public effort in recent years to kill the move by insisting on the addition of a poison pill amendment requiring groups filing ethics complaints against senators to disclose their donors. While a worthwhile effort, Mr. Ensign’s amendment is best left to other legislation. A similar effort is said to be contemplated by Pat Roberts, Kansas Republican, in this session.
The Senate moves slowly, a fact inherent in the deliberative nature of its design and further enhanced by the body’s rules. But that does not mean those same rules should be used to avoid inconvenient scrutiny.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is said to be looking to bring the measure to the floor without additions, an unlikely event. In the absence of that move, Mr. Reid should put senators on the record with a vote. If senators from either party have any honest interest in being good stewards of the public trust, they will not continue accepting efforts to protect themselves from timely public attention.
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Sunshine Week Editorials on S. 482
Happy Sunshine Week everyone! I’m happy to share some editorials from around the country in support of Sunlight’s efforts to get the Senate to electronically file their campaign finance reports by passing S. 482.
The Knoxville News Sentinel writes in support of S. 482 stating, “although a former senator from Tennessee really didn’t invent the Internet, we urge members of the U.S. Senate to make better use of it anyway.”
The Salt Lake City Tribune pens an article about the Pass 482 campaign including a look at Sen. Orrin Hatch’s position. “Hatch, too, says there is merit to the bill and that it enjoys widespread support.” Sen. Hatch says he supports the bill but is yet to sign on as a co-sponsor. You can call his office here to ask him to sign on.
The Birmingham News and The Patriot Ledger both published op-eds by Sunlight’s Ellen Miller calling for the Senate to pass S. 482.
The effort to Pass 482 is only just underway. You can still help out by calling your senators and asking them to support the bill at our Pass 482 site.
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NYT Supports Electronic Filing
The New York Times editorialized today in support of the Senate passing the Senate Campaign Disclosure Parity Act, S. 482, which would require senators to file their campaign finance reports electronically. The Times gets it. Hopefully, Congress will get it this year and pass this commonsense bill:
Timely electronic filing of donations is required of all House and presidential candidates. But not in the Senate. There, members apparently find it too onerous to hit the send button. Instead, their own computerized information is first printed out onto paper, which is then sent in sheaves to clerks to be re-entered ever so slowly into a different computer system.
It is a Dickensian act of redundancy that costs hundreds of thousands of dollars. By the time the full money trail is published, Election Day has often come and gone.
A bill to end the foolscap evasion is ready for the Senate floor. The measure from Russ Feingold, Democrat of Wisconsin, has considerable support from Democrats. But the last time the electronic filing measure came up, Republicans — still smarting from the Jack Abramoff scandal — pushed a poison pill amendment requiring that any good government group that dares to file complaints about members with the Senate Ethics Committee disclose its donors to the Senate.
These groups are already required to file that information with the I.R.S., but not to any other agency under protections dating back to the civil rights era when segregationist lawmakers tried to obtain the N.A.A.C.P.’s membership lists. It’s time for the Senate to get past such pettiness. Hit the enter key; step into the sunshine.
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Senate E-Filing Bill Reintroduced, Pass S. 482
Here we go again! Just today, Sen. Russ Feingold introduced a bill, S. 482, to require senators to file their campaign finance reports electronically, rather than in paper format. The Senate is the only body that does not require the electronic filing of these reports, causing delays in disclosure and a general loss of transparency for the public. Feingold has introduced a version of this bill in each of the last three Congresses. We hope that this is the last year that Sen. Feingold has to introduce this bill.
Sen. Chuck Schumer, a co-sponsor, explained the bill as “a no-brainer. It should be approved expeditiously to increase disclosure and move the Senate’s reporting system into the 21st century.” Also, Sen. Thad Cochran, the lead Republican co-sponsor, hopes that “the Senate will consider the bill in a timely manner and approve it so that we can begin to operate under a modern filing system.”
The Sunlight Foundation has actively pressed for the passage of this commonsense bill for over two years now. Last year, the previous version of the bill, S. 223, was blocked by Sen. John Ensign after he attempted to attach a poison pill amendment to the bill. This year, we hope that the Senate will consider this bill on its own merits and not try and block it or weigh it down. As has been stated in previous sessions of Congress, there is no public opposition to the bill itself. If you want to see our previous coverage of the bill please follow the tags “Electronic Filing” and “S. 223“.
The bill as introduced has 25 co-sponsors hailing from both parties. They are: Sens. Akaka, Alexander, Bennett, Bingaman, Brown, Cardin, Chambliss, Cochran, Dodd, Durbin, Feinstein, Grassley, Harkin, Isakson, Kerry, Leahy, Levin, Lieberman, Lugar, McCain, Nelson (NE), Reed, Reid, Rockefeller, and Schumer. We hope that more join on to support transparency and Pass S. 482.
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Electronic Filing Finally Coming to the Senate?
The Hill reported yesterday some great news. Sen. Russ Feingold is preparing to re-introduce the Senate Campaign Disclosure Parity Act, and unlike the past six years since it was first introduced, it appears to have a clear path to passage. (Please let it be so!)
Sunlight allies and regular readers of the blog will no doubt know about the work we and our allies have invested to pass a bill to require senators to file their quarterly campaign finance reports electronically. This included last year’s Pass S. 223 campaign that many of you had a hand in. But a small number of senators have held it up via secret holds and poison pill amendments. However, a more robust Democratic majority and the support of upwards of 17 or so Republican senators had given the bill’s sponsors and transparency advocates heart that this might be the year we succeed in passing it. It’s expected that Feingold will re-introduce the bill in the next few weeks.
As a reminder, the legislation would require senators to match the practice of the House, which file their quarterly disclosure reports electronically and directly to the Federal Election Commission. This speeds up dramatically the time the FEC takes to post the information online. Currently, senators file paper copies of their reports with the Secretary of the Senate, who transcribes them electronically and then sends the data to the FEC.
We promised to keep watching the bill and looking for ways to promote it. And we’ll keep you updated and let you know when its sponsors re-introduce it. Let’s get this important transparency victory right away. It’s been long enough coming.
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Feingold Earmark Amendment Fails
Yesterday, an earmark reform amendment to the stimulus bill introduced by Sen. Russ Feingold was defeated 32-65. The amendment was largely opposed by the majority Democrats and members of the Appropriations Committee.
Senate Appropriations Chair Daniel Inouye, in opposition to the amendment, stated that it represented a shift in power to the executive branch by requiring congressional approved, but not authorized, projects to be subject to supermajority votes.
“This amendment is an attempt to undermine Congress’s power of the purse,” Inouye said, “Under this amendment, congressionally directed spending items that are not specifically authorized could be stripped from legislation.”
Inouye also expressed his belief that the Senate enacted tough earmark transparency rules in the last Congress, despite objections from many observers in the Senate and outside.
Sen. Feingold responded by noting that only those directed spending items that were defined as “earmarks” in the Senate Rules could be subject to the amendment’s point of order rules, “few if any of the programs under those measures would be considered ‘congressionally directed spending,’ and thus they could be funded without this point of order applying. … in order to be subject to our point of order, the program must be an earmark; that is, ‘congressionally directed spending’ as defined in Senate rules, and it must not be authorized or included in the President’s budget request.”
While the vote fell mostly along party lines, Appropriations Committee members of both parties largely voted against the amendment. All Democrats on the committee and all but three Republicans voted against the amendment. Sens. George Voinovich and Kay Bailey Hutchison voted for the Feingold amendment, while Sen. Judd Gregg, who has recused himself from voting while under consideration to be Commerce Secretary, did not vote.
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Senate to Consider Feingold Earmark Amendment
Sen. Russ Feingold will offer an amendment to the stimulus bill today that would enact most of the earmark reforms embodied in his recently introduced bill, the Fiscal Discipline, Earmark Reform and Accountability Act (S. 162). The legislation, in this case the amendment, would create a 60 vote point of order against earmarks in legislation and conference reports and require all firms receiving federal money through awards, grants, or loans to disclose how much they have spent on lobbyists.
After the jump I’ve included the text of the amendment: (Continue reading…)
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No E-Filing Fix in the Senate, Yet
National Journal’s Eliza Krigman reminds us all of the United States Senate’s failure to catch up with modern times and file their campaign finance reports in electronic format. Sunlight’s spent the past three years trying to get this legislation passed. The 110th Congress finally let the bill out of committee, only to see Republican senator after Republican senator hold, block, and delay the bill. Here’s what Krigman has to say:
Believe it or not, the Senate is dragging its feet into the modern era of information-sharing and is still using a hard copy system for filing campaign finance reports. With paper filing, final disclosure reports of senatorial candidates are not available to the public until after the election due to the time it takes the Federal Election Commission to process the paperwork.
What’s stopping senators from e-filing when campaigns have all the information available electronically? That’s exactly the question Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wis., has been asking. He is the author of the Senate Campaign Disclosure Parity Act, which would require reports filed with the Secretary of the Senate to be filed electronically and forwarded to the FEC within 24 hours. In the past, Feingold has signed up 47 cosponsors from both sides of the aisle; his bill failed to pass in the last Congress but his office tells National Journal the senator plans to re-introduce the legislation in the 111th Congress.
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But Sen. John Ensign, R-Nev., effectively put the kibosh on the e-filing legislation by insisting on an unrelated and controversial amendment to require groups that file ethics complaints to disclose their donors. Contrary to his past legislative position, Ensign went on the record this past October saying that he is “100 percent for electronic filing.”
In regards to Sen. Ensign, I’ll believe it when I see it. We’ll keep you informed as to when Sen. Feingold introduces a new version of the e-filing legislation for the 11th Congress.
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New Earmark Reform Push in the Senate
John McCain and Russ Feingold are putting the old team back together to push for earmark reform in the Senate. Joining the old reformers are young guns Claire McCaskill, Tom Coburn, and Lindsey Graham. CongressDaily (subscription required) details what the reform package will look like:
[T]he measure would allow individual senators to raise points of order against unauthorized earmarks in appropriations bills. Earmark backers would need 60 votes to overcome the objection and the cost of the bill would be reduced by the amount of the earmark.
The measure also requires appropriations and authorizing conference reports to be electronically searchable for 48 hours before the Senate considers the conference reports and requires that recipients of federal funds disclose payments to registered lobbyists.
This is a big improvement over the current earmark process. While the Sunlight Foundation believes that all legislation should be available online for at least 72 hours before a vote, the 48-hour proposal is a step in the right direction. Making the bills searchable is an incredibly important step as thumbing through appropriations legislation is cumbersome.
Still to be determined is what would be disclosed for each individual earmark. Are recipients included? What else must be listed? Also, will the new reform team try to extend their reform package to cover the newly released rules for earmark request disclosure?
