Earlier this month, The Washington Post reported how targets of a Senate investigation have showered Washington with campaign contributions, in an apparent attempt to buy some love and avoid sanctions. In July, the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations issued a report alleging that two European-based banks, USB of Switzerland and LGT of Liechtenstein, served as tax havens for wealthy Americans, costing the federal treasury up to $100 billion a year.

The Post article states that officials with the banks have given more than $2 million this year, $98,000 in June alone, to congressional and presidential campaigns. USB spends close to $1 million a year on lobbying and is traditionally a big campaign giver. But so far this cycle the Swiss bank’s contributions have surpassed what it gave in the whole 2006 election cycle. The Post quotes a bank spokesperson as saying the bank’s giving is in no way related to the Senate investigation. The article didn’t say, however, whether it was said with a straight face.

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Last week, we launched the web site - Pass223.com - to get support in the Senate for S. 223, a bill to require electronic filing of campaign finance reports. So far, there have been 338 calls to Senate offices asking senators to both support the bill and oppose the poison pill Ensign amendment. The comments coming back from our callers have been very helpful including some information on new support for the bill that we will be double checking soon. We still need your help in identifying supporters of the bill and opponents of the Ensign amendment. Please go to Pass223.com and call your senators.

One comment I’d like to pass on came from multiple callers to the office of Sen. Barbara Mikulski of Maryland. According to Mikulski’s legislative aide, the senator is opposed to the Ensign amendment and would not vote for S. 223 were the amendment attached. From the comments:

He said she would oppose (vote against) the Ensign amendment, since it is an obvious poison pill effort to derail the bill, and that she would not vote for the bill if the Ensign amendment survived as part of the bill. Better to try again than allow gutted legislation to pass. - Andrew May, 08.06.08 @ 11:29 AM

I pressed and he said she was councerned about the “poison pill” amendment and wouldn’t vote for it were that amendment a part of it. - 08.06.08 @ 01:08 PM

These comments clearly show that the Ensign amendment is a poison pill designed to hurt the chances of passing S. 223. We need to identify more senators like Sen. Mikulski.

We still need your help in calling Senate offices. There are over 20 offices for which we have no comments. Please take the time to give your senator a call today. Go to Pass223.com.

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Tomorrow morning, the Senate Constitution Subcommittee of the Judiciary Committee will hold a hearing on Secret Law and the Threat to Democratic and Accountable Government. In Chairman Feingold’s words:



Senator Feingold is talking about memos put out by the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC), a part of the Department of Justice. The executive branch needs guidance on how the law affects its actions, and the OLC exists to provide legal interpretations for rest of the executive branch. These opinions strongly determine the nature of executive branch activities, and therefore have an undeniable bearing on the public interest. (more)

While, like most government information, some OLC memos contain sensitive information, most of them fall squarely within those things that the public has a right to understand, and should certainly be within the reach of congressional oversight committees. As the Bush Administration has treated even this agency-wide legal counsel as secretively as possible, most notably in the case of the John Yoo memo on so-called interrogation (released only thanks to an ACLU lawsuit ), Congress is beginning to redraw lines about what should be subject to classification, and what should lie plainly in the view of the public.

The expectation that executive legal opinions should generally be public isn’t new; this paper from the American Constitution Society, written by a team of former OLC lawyers and published in December 2004, lays out guidelines for the Office of Legal Counsel. Number six is on public memos:

It goes on, reading the entire paper is worthwhile (pdf, online version, more ACS resources).

Sunlight is happy to see Congress addressing legal secrecy, and agrees that public transparency is absolutely necessary for government accountability.

(via the AALL blog, Senator Feingold’s podcast feed, and ACS blog)

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We’ve expended enormous energy and blog space to advocate for the Senate to file their campaign finance reports electronically, something that probably shouldn’t take that much effort, but it does. If you need a primer on the issue you can watch this video we made. One thing of note in this whole saga is that Congress, in 1999, mandated electronic filing for all campaign committees, but somehow the Senate doesn’t have to comply. Why is this?

In December of 1995, Congress passed a bill to amend the Federal Election Campaign Act to allow the FEC to accept electronic filing, a legislative recommendation previously made by the FEC to give them a statutory requirement and funding to create an e-filing system. The bill, which became Public Law 104-79, also changed the filing location for members of the House from the Clerk of the House to the FEC. This seems innocuous, but it is important.

In 1999, the FY2000 appropriations bill for the Treasury Department, the Executive Office of the President, and other agencies included campaign financing amendments, the 1999 FECA amendments. The 1999 FECA amendments mandated electronic filing of campaign finance reports for all campaign committees who raise a certain amount of money to be determined by the FEC. How did the Senate avoid e-filing? With this sneaky exemption provision defining the meaning of the word "report":

"(D) As used in this paragraph, the ‘term’ report means, with respect to the Commission, a report, designation, or statement required by this Act to be filed with the Commission."

The key words here are "to be filed with the Commission". Due to the 1995 bill (Public Law 104-79) the House was required to file with the Commission. The Senate, however, still files with the Secretary of the Senate who then proceeds to file them on behalf of Senators with the Commission. Thus, according to the statutory basis for e-filing, Senators do not file "reports" because they do not file with the Commission. Hopefully, they decide to change this silliness.

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“We can never understand [a House member’s] Washington activity without also understating his perception of his various constituencies and the home style he uses to cultivate their support…” states Richard Fenno in Home Style: House Members in Their Districts. Fenno understands that the work of members of Congress is more than committee meetings and votes but is also people they meet with from the district. The work in the district builds trust constituents need to send them to Washington and to accept the decisions they make there. Fenno’s makes the point that the work of lawmakers done in the district is not an exhibition but the yang to Washington’s Ying.

This trust that lawmakers create in the district extends to who they meet with in Washington. The Punch Clock motto has always been “Members of Congress work for us, and we should know what they do every day.” Fenno made this point a different way, “Trust is, however, a fragile relationship. It is not an overnight or one-time thing. It is hard to win; and it must be constantly renewed and rewon. “

In this spirit, Sunlight has decided to help out by creating a trust-building tool. This tool, the Punch Clock Map, is a Google map mashup with corresponding RSS feeds that lets citizens see for themselves just how elected officials spend their time and how they serve their district’s needs.

The Punch Clock Map provides a visual representation of the meetings detailed by the eight members of Congress who post their daily schedules online. Currently, that includes: Sen. Max Baucus, Rep. Kathy Castor, Rep. John Doolittle, Rep. Kirsten Gillibrand, Sen. Bill Nelson, Rep. Denny Rehberg, Rep. Jan Schakowsky and Sen. Jon Tester. (As Rep. Alcee Hastings posts an abridged weekly schedule, his is not included.)

To let citizens monitor how their elected officials address their district’s needs, the maps mark the home-base location of the organization or individual who met with the lawmaker, not where the meeting occurred. If the lawmaker’s schedule provides a location, organization or individual (who can be easily identified), those meetings are plotted on the map. (The map does not include internal business meetings, committee hearings, meetings with constituents without easily identifiable addresses or location and meetings with other current members of Congress.)

The Punch Clock Map is an extension of the Punch Clock Campaign, an initiative the Sunlight Foundation began in 2006, which asked all candidates for congressional office – challengers and incumbents – to promise, if elected, to post their daily schedules on the Internet. Inspired by the 60 percent of Americans who ‘punch a clock’ to account for their time at work, Sunlight asked why members of Congress should not also account for their time to their employers: the citizens they represent.

Building trust is an essential part of the representative - constituent relationship. Posting a schedule helps maintain the trust that lawmakers go through such efforts to maintain and it also helps instill trust in the constituents who are always looking for ways to not trust their lawmakers.

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I’m about to head to a hearing from the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee, which, as we learned yesterday amidst a flurry of activity on the Open House Project Google Group, will be viewable, both live and archived, from the Senate committee’s website.

This is exciting also because of the content of the hearing, where we’ll be hearing from a panel of e-government and technology experts, including CDT’s Ari Schwartz, Jimmy Wales of Wikia, JL Needham of Google, and Karen Evans of the Office of Management and Budget.

We expect the hearing to deal with both executive branch e-government implementation, and to also touch on some degree of legislative branch transparency issues, as a committee staffer stopped by yesterday to explain.  We’ll likely be hearing more about CRS reports, and an initiative regarding THOMAS upgrades, both priorities from the Open House Project report.

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The House and Senate have agreed on a version of S. 2590, the Coburn-Obama database bill. The press release indicates that the publicly available database that the legislation will create will include both federal contracts and grants (an earlier House bill, Blunt-Davis, would have disclosed grants but not contracts). The bill still has to pass the House, but it looks like it’s moving forward. Here’s the release:

WASHINGTON—House Majority Whip Roy Blunt (Mo.), U.S. Senators Tom Coburn (Okla.), Barack Obama (Ill.), and Tom Carper (Del.), and Government Reform Chairman Tom Davis (Va.) today announced that they have reached agreement on legislation to increase accountability and transparency by establishing a public database to track federal grants and contracts.

House Majority Leader John Boehner (Ohio) announced he plans to schedule the agreed-upon language for House floor consideration next week.

“This process has focused on enhancing the accountability and transparency in the federal budget process,” Blunt, Boehner, and Davis said. “The federal government awards approximately $300 billion in grants to roughly 30,000 different organizations. Each year, roughly one million contracts exceed the $25,000 reporting threshold. We need to be sure that money is spent wisely. Our legislation creates a transparent system for reviewing these expenditures so that Congress, the press, and the American public have the information they need to conduct proper oversight of the use of our tax dollars. The package we’ve agreed to move requires the Administration to establish searchable databases for both grants and contracts.”

“I’m pleased that the House leadership agreed with us that all federal spending should be accessible through this website. It doesn’t matter if it’s a grant, an earmark, or a contract, this legislation will allow the public to know how their tax dollars are being spent,” said Sen. Obama

“This bill is a small but significant step toward changing the culture in Washington. Only by fostering a culture of openness, transparency and accountability will Congress come together to address the mounting fiscal challenges that threaten our future prosperity. The group that deserves credit for passing this bill, however, is not Congress, but the army of bloggers and concerned citizens who told Congress that transparency is a just demand for all citizens, not a special privilege for political insiders. Their remarkable effort demonstrates that our system of government does work when the people take the reins of government and demand change,” Dr. Coburn said.

“I’m pleased that we’ve been able to work out an agreement to let this important legislation move to a vote in the House,” said Sen. Carper. “If we’re going to hold the federal government accountable for its performance, then we need to empower the public with basic information about who’s receiving federal dollars and what’s being done with them. This bill will shed some much-needed light on the activities of most federal agencies, allowing the public to decide for themselves whether their tax dollars are well spent.”

On June 21, the House unanimously passed HR 5060, the Blunt-Davis grants database bill. The Senate unanimously passed S 2590, the Coburn-Obama grants and contracts database bill, yesterday.

We may well get to see the receipts from the government’s shopping sprees — just as the Founders intended. This from a post by Larry Kudlow at the Corner:

“We might hope to see the finances of the Union as clear and intelligible as a merchant’s books, so that every member of Congress and every man of any mind in the Union should be able to comprehend them, to investigate abuses, and consequently to control them.” -Thomas Jefferson

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