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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Apples and Oranges: Campaign Finance Transparency Laws Should Remain Untouched By The Supreme Court
Should a court case on whether Washington state must disclose the identities of people calling for a referendum affect the kinds of disclosure required under campaign finance law? We say no. The explanation of our answer is the focus of an amicus brief filed before the U.S. Supreme Court by the Sunlight Foundation, the Brennan Center, and the Center for Responsive Politics in Doe v. Reed.
We believe that, regardless of whether the names of people who signed a petition calling for a referendum must be disclosed, the question of money in politics is different from other election regulation issues, and must be treated differently. “Where money is spent to influence the outcome of elections, vigilance is required to ensure that influence-peddling does not corrupt our democracy and that voters are empowered to make informed decisions about how such spending may have influenced their candidates and laws.”
As a matter of procedure, the Court should never reach the question of how transparency and campaign finance laws intersect. But if it does, the Court should conclude “the curtain of privacy that is appropriate to the voting booth should not be drawn to hide the workings of money in politics from public scrutiny and from political accountability.”
Read the brief below.
Doe v Reed Amicus Brief before Supreme Court joined by Sunlight Foundation
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Sunlight Live vs. TV Media, Ctd: David Foster Wallace, Transparency, C-SPAN, Health Care Reform and Data Jamming
There’s a been a bunch of writing around the Internet about the success/failure of last week’s Blair House health care summit. A lot of the focus has been on the illusion of transparency provided by televising this type of meeting. Now, I don’t completely agree with the analysis Igor Volsky makes here–televising events does not make it transparent, but it does provide opportunities to make events more transparent and interactive. What his colleague Matt Yglesias writes, however, is certainly true: “When you put politicians in a room full of cameras they just posture for the cameras and it’s not possible to get anything done.” And that is simply because of the nature of television. David Foster Wallace probably explained this best in his essay, “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction“:
…TV-watching is different from classic Peeping-Tomism. Because the people we’re watching through TV’s framed-glass screen are not really ignorant of the fact that somebody is watching them. In fact a whole lot of sombodies. In fact the people on television kow that it is by virtue of this truly huge crowd of ogling somebodies that they are on the screen engaging in broad non-mundane gestures at all. Television does not afford true espial because television is performance, spectacle, which by definition requires watchers. We’re not voyeurs here at all. We’re just viewers. We are the Audience, megametrically many, though most often we watch alone: E Unibus Pluram.
Television requires performance. Throwing a bunch of people–politicians–who obtain and keep their jobs at the whim of these “ogling somebodies” judging their performance ensures that the viewer will be entertained with canned dialogue and poor acting. (Not to mention the lack of imagination from wardrobe.) The great irony in all of this is the role that C-SPAN plays. Consider this key moment in the evolutionary thought process that led Brian Lamb to found C-SPAN: (Continue reading…)
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Sunlight Live vs. TV Media
There are a lot of reasons that I never watch television news, particularly cable news. This “CNN analysis” of the Blair House health care summit is an example of why I choose not to get my information from any of the major TV news providers like CNN, MSNBC or Fox News.
We are told by a bunch of experts that yesterday’s live-broadcast health care summit was a “spectacle” or a “stunt” and then given a patchwork copy-and-paste job of polls and rehashed explanations for how the summit won’t help improve the perception that Washington is broken. The “analysis” goes so far as to be self-referentially critical in quoting historian Douglas Brinkley as saying, ” [all] everybody will see tonight on news broadcasts are the sparks of tension between [President] Obama and [Sen. John] McCain. It’s like the 2008 election never ended.” And yet this “analysis” does exactly what Brinkley worries about in his quote. To CNN, it is like the election never ended. It’s a partisan, campaign-style reporting piece with little actual information — kind of like the “analysis” you see on cable news for these events.
In a recent MSNBC advertising spot Chuck Todd is quoted as saying something to the effect of “I wish everyday were election day.” Which he probably does, but everyday isn’t election day. For coverage of something like the Blair House health care summit, news consumers aren’t looking for a bunch of talking points from Alex Castellanos matched by a bunch of talking points from Donna Brazille. They’re looking for information that helps expand and enhance their understanding of what summit participants are discussing.
Yesterday, when Sunlight was covering the summit live, we repeatedly heard from people who were annoyed at the CNN “analysts” for talking over the summit. People wanted to pay attention, receive factual supplements to the punditry, and stay informed about what they didn’t know–at the same time.That’s where Sunlight Live filled in the gap. We provided people who wanted to watch the health care summit with crucial information throughout the seven-hour event with no partisan analysis and no opinions. This included influence data–campaign contributions, personal finances, connections to lobbyists–on the members as they were talking along with previous statements made by participants and related biographical information. Along with this, we provided links to CBO reports, CRS reports, the various plans and bills under debate and various of health care statistics as they were mentioned and answered questions from our audience about their contents. All of this was done in real-time–with a lot of research preparation. If you didn’t want to hear a bunch of people talking about politics on CNN you could turn to Sunlight Live to talk to a bunch of people discussing the information being discussed at the summit. In fact, one of the best aspects of our coverage is that viewer comments helped drive a lot of the coverage and live research that we were doing. As someone who can’t stand the one-way communication nature of television and the constant barrage of campaign-centric focused coverage of politics you find there, I’d say that the perspective Sunlight Live helped to create was refreshing. (I might be a little biased here.)
The actual summit itself should not simply be referred to as a “political spectacle.” While the event may not have provided the kind of transparency some seek in televised forums, the event did provide for opportunities to make the event transparent by adding context and data. That CNN or the other cable channels chose not to do this is to their own detriment.
I can also assure you that none of our researchers and reporters providing information work for outside consulting firms or health care companies like the talking heads you’ll find on television. We don’t have conflicts of interest, just an interest in talking with you about the conflicts lawmakers may have.
So, the next time that Sunlight Live is covering a major policy event I want you to get up out of your chair and walk over to your television. And then I want you to turn off your television and tell it, “You’re not interesting and I’m not going to take it anymore.” Then walk over to your computer and get online and help us cover the event by participating in the conversation.
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Post-Citizens United, Lobbying Firm Helps Explain How To Avoid Disclosure Rules
According to Talking Points Memo, the lobbying firm K&L Gates posted a “Policy and Law Alert” on the web site describing the impact of the Citizens United decision. Here’s the key passage pulled out by TPM:
[G]roups of corporations within an industry may form coalitions or use existing trade associations to support candidates favorable to policy positions that affect the group as a whole. While corporations that contribute to these expenditures might still be disclosed, this indirect approach can provide sufficient cover such that no single contributing entity receives the bulk of public scrutiny.
Ah, “sufficient cover.” Since 80% of Americans are opposed to the Citizen United ruling, this may be a great way for corporations to avoid having their names attached to electoral ads. It’s just great that K&L Gates is out there helping independent actors hide the vast sums of money they plan to spend on electoral advertising from the American people’s eyes.
(Continue reading…)
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Researching and Writing the White House-PhRMA Deal
At the end of last year, the White House dropped a new pile of visitor log records into the public, online record. Upon returning in January from a near month long vacation I decided to take a look at these new records. One story that I wanted some more information on was the oft-reported on deal between the White House and the pharmaceutical companies. I started looking up meetings for pharmaceutical executives, PhRMA lobbyist Billy Tauzin and so on. After a bit of searching and reading some articles from last summer two things dawned on me: 1) There was no singular resource that brought together all of the reporting and all of the data in one place and 2) No one reporting on this deal seemed to know that Sen. Max Baucus posts his schedule online.
The second point is what really crystallized the need to write this piece for me. Last summer, I dug into Baucus’ publicly available schedule (which wouldn’t be available if it weren’t for Sunlight’s efforts) examining his meetings with leaders in the health care industry. When I was looking at the White House Visitor Logs, a lot of the dates looked familiar. That’s because they matched up precisely with dates in Baucus’ schedule with the same actors meeting at the White House and with Baucus. Data that was available online all this time showed how closely the White House and pharmaceutical companies were coordinating with Baucus’ office in crafting a health care reform bill. (Continue reading…)
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Open Government: Collaboration, Transparency, and Participation in Practice
A new book from O’Reilly media, entitled Open Government: Collaboration, Transparency, and Participation in Practice, discusses the possible ways government can utilize the power of citizen engagement to become more efficient and transparent. The collection of essays features well-known visionaries such as Carl Malamud, Beth Noveck and Tim O’Reilly.
Open Government includes chapters by Sunlight’s Ellen Miller, Bill Allison and Micah Sifry. Their chapters deal with everything from the role of transparency in countering the weight of monied interests to the need for useful and open government data. The forces of co-innovation and transparency must be in government moving forward and this book brings together some illustrative case studies about how to proceed. Follow this link for a sample of the first eight chapters.
Here’s a nice excerpt from the preface:
What is open government? In the most basic sense, it’s the notion that the people have the right to access the documents and proceedings of government. The idea that the public has a right to scrutinize and participate in government dates at least to the Enlightenment, and is enshrined in both the U.S. Declaration of Independence and U.S. Constitution. Its principles are recognized in virtually every democratic country on the planet.
But the very meaning of the term continues to evolve. The concept of open government has been influenced—for the better—by the open source software movement, and taken on a greater focus for allowing participation in the procedures of government. Just as open source software allows users to change and contribute to the source code of their software, open government now means government where citizens not only have access to information, documents, and proceedings, but can also become participants in a meaningful way. Open government also means improved communication and operations within the various branches and levels of government. More sharing internally can lead to greater efficiency and accountability.
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New Batch of White House Visitor Logs Released
Last Friday, the White House released a new batch of visitor logs covering last October, fulfilling a pledge they made last month. Over here at the Sunlight Labs, we took the logs and added them to the handy online, searchable database we created last month, so that you can see for yourself who is coming to the White House and why.
This is the first full month that has been release by the administration and adds almost 100,000 new records for October. As we mentioned back in January, this is a positive step by the Obama administration, and we are happy to see that they are committed to releasing this data in a timely basis.
We still don’t know how many records are being withheld, and for what purposes. It would be nice for the White House to release at least a number, and ultimately a justification (read: national security) for why those names have been redacted. None the less, this is still part of a much larger, unprecedented level of transparency on behalf of the administration.
One of the other problems with the White House visitor logs is that there is no real accurate way to ensure that if you see a “Samuel L. Jackson” in the logs, it’s actually the actor. It could just be another Sam. That’s why we caution you, when you are reading through the records and doing your own independent research not to jump to conclusions. Otherwise, happy hunting!
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A New Regime Required For Disclosure
As most of you know I have a long history in the campaign finance field as a founder of two organizations – one which is the nation’s première money and politics data crunching organization and a nonprofit that pioneered the concept of a system of full public financing. So it was with some substantial interest that I reviewed (and yes, I admit with horror) the results of the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United v. the Federal Election Commission, which opened the floodgate for corporate and union spending in elections. If the sheer size of corporate bank accounts is any indicator, we will soon see just how much money can buy in the political arena.
Or will we? That is the critical question that must be addressed. Without an immediate update to the disclosure laws — covering everything from who has to disclose, what is required to be disclosed, how often, and in what form — the public will be unable to see this new spending as it occurs, nor how corporations and unions pour money into the many other pockets of a politician’s coat. Without vastly improved disclosure, we won’t be able to understand the new play of forces in Washington. Lobbyists, as well as top officials for corporations and unions, will have a new kind of leverage over politicians. The only deterrent to widespread arm-twisting of public representatives by private interests—short of a constitutional amendment reversing the Court’s ruling, or major changes in how campaigns are financed—may well be the requirement that such arm-twisting be disclosed in a timely manner. Clearly, now more than ever, our entire system of public disclosure of election-related contributions and expenditures needs to be upgraded to keep pace with the influences it is designed to track. And in the 21st century this means that everything must be filed online, in real time.
(Continue reading…)
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Justice Thomas Says No to Disclosure, Blames Internet
Noted without response. From Justice Thomas’ dissent wherein he states that the court should eliminate all campaign finance disclosure requirements:
…Disclaimer and disclosure requirements enable private citizens and elected officials to implement political strategies specifically calculated to curtail campaign-related activity and prevent the lawful, peaceful exercise of First Amendment rights.
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Now more than ever, §§201 and 311 will chill protected speech because—as California voters can attest—“the advent of the Internet” enables “prompt disclosure of expenditures,” which “provide[s]” political opponents “with the information needed” to intimidate and retaliate against their foes. Ante , at 55. Thus, “disclosure permits citizens … to react to the speech of [their political opponents] in a proper”—or undeniably improper —“way” long before a plaintiff could prevail on an as-applied challenge.
Please let Justice Thomas know what you think about his opinion on disclosure, transparency and the Internet in the comments.
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How the Citizens United Case Affects Money & Politics and Transparency As We Know it
The ramifications of today’s Supreme Court decision in Citizens United v. FEC are breathtaking – opening the floodgates of political money such as we have never seen before. If you thought Congress was ‘for sale’ to the highest bidder, you ain’t seen nothing yet. Nothing less than a fundamental rethinking of our campaign finance laws is demanded as a result of today’s decision.
But one thing becomes immediately clear: Transparency about the flow of campaign cash – online and in real time – became more important. While we do not think that transparency is a panacea for the horrific consequences of today’s decision, it is critically important as the shredded system is rebuilt.
Today’s decision underscores the necessity of creating comprehensive real-time disclosure for all election spending – across the board — from when and how often candidates, individuals and PACs report their contributions and expenditures to those involved in independent expenditures, issue ads or direct election advocacy.
Others will opine about what the Court wrote about lifting the limits and other related matters that were at the heart of this case, but we want to focus on the disclosure aspects of this case.
The Majority wrote:
With the advent of the Internet, prompt disclosure of expenditures can provide shareholders and citizens with the information needed to hold corporations and elected officials accountable for their positions and supporters. Shareholders can determine whether their corporation’s political speech advances the corporation’s interest in making profits, and citizens can see whether elected officials are ‘in the pocket’ of so-called moneyed interests…This transparency enables the electorate to make informed decisions and give proper weight to different speakers and messages.
The Court goes on to note the Internet’s importance when it comes to meaningful disclosure, saying that “modern technology makes disclosures rapid and informative…A campaign finance system that pairs corporate independent expenditures with effective disclosure has not existed before today.”
True enough, but the disclosure system they describe doesn’t yet exist. The current disclosure system is insufficiently “rapid and informative” and does not make effective use of modern technology.
As a result of this decision, there will be tidal wave of corporate campaign expenditures. The systems for disclosure will have to come into the 21st century. Everything has to be reported online. All related campaign expenditures, including the new wave of issue ads, and independent expenditures and direct electioneering must be disclosed within 24 hours, with the names and addresses of anyone who has given more than $200 in support of the ad disclosed online. In fact, there should be 24-hour online reporting of all contributions of more than $200. The quarterly reporting system now in place is outdated and ineffective—ridiculous, in a word.
There is more to this case that deserves analysis, and more will come from Sunlight. We could go on and on about how wrong-headed Justice Thomas’ no-disclosure dissent is. We need to watch out that the court doesn’t use the guise of “protecting donors from harassment” as an excuse to limit disclosure.
But in the meantime, this decision should trigger momentum toward ensuring that all election-related information is available online in real-time. Disclosure remains a crucial antiseptic to the corrupting influence of money in politics. We should ensure our system is as transparent as possible.
We’ll have more to say, later today.
