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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Paranormal Legislative Activity
Some really weird stuff went down when Sunlight gave a Congressional bill and a camera to a local couple. Please watch this and share. Totally unexplainable.
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Help Get More Read the Bill Discharge Petition Signatures
Yesterday, Lisa Rosenberg wrote about the discharge petition for H. Res. 554, the Read the Bill Bill. Already the petition has had an effect. Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced that she would not bring the health care reform bill to the floor until it had been online for 72 hours. The discharge petition would allow the bill to be brought to a vote without committee consideration. This could be the only way to get a vote on the bill this year. Currently, there are 173 signers of the discharge petition — all of those signatures came in two days! The petition needs 218 signatures to force the bill to the floor.At this moment there are only three Democrats who have signed onto the petition. They are Reps. Brian Baird, Walt Minnick and Parker Griffith. There are 32 Democratic cosponsors of H. Res. 554 who have yet to sign the petition. If you care to call them and let them know that they should sign the petition, please do. You can see the list below and find their contact information at Open Congress. (Continue reading…)
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Read the Bill Has 98 Cosponsors
The Read the Bill bill (H. Res. 554) continues to gain support in Congress and has nearly reached 100 cosponsors in the House. The cosponsors in the House fall across all ideological lines from liberal Democrat to conservative Republican. The cross-partisan support for this bill demonstrates the wide appeal that legislative transparency is garnering. When you can have Jeff Flake and Jesse Jackson, Jr. support the same bill, you know you’re doing something right.You can help increase the number of cosponsors for the bill by going to ReadTheBill.org and calling your congressman to tell them to support the bill.
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This Week in Transparency – July 2, 2009
Here are a few of the more interesting media mentions of Sunlight and our friends and allies from the week:
Last Friday evening’s June 26th program, CNN’s Lou Dobbs broadcasted a piece by correspondent Louise Schiavone about the Cap and Trade Energy Bill that the House of Representatives was to vote on and pass later that evening. Schiavone interviewed Jake Brewer, Sunlight’s engagement director, who said, “This is the kind of bill that’s going to affect our economy on a massive scale, our climate, our national security, and is not the kind of thing to be taken lightly. The opacity of this process is — to be perfectly honest, it’s infuriating.” Schiavone then stated erroneously that Sunlight opposed the bill. For the record, Sunlight has no position on the content of the bill itself, but advocates for the Congress to put all non-emergency legislation online for 72 hours before voting on it. The transcript can be read here, and the video is below.
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Ignore the 5-Day Pledge, Organize Around 72-Hour Rule
The New York Times has a story today on President Obama’s 5 day bill posting pledge and how this transparency promise has both not happened as promised and evolved. Quoted in the piece is Sunlight’s Executive Director Ellen Miller noting the overall lack of utility in the President’s promise.
“There isn’t anybody in this town who doesn’t know that commenting after a bill has been passed is meaningless.”
While I’ve rightly criticized (as has Jim Harper) the breaking of the promise to post bills for comment five days before signing them, the reality is that no organizing can be done in comments that would make a difference after the bill is out of Congress.
The White House is now saying that they will start the five day count before the bill has made it out of Congress, stating that this makes for a more transparent process. This is relative nonsense as the White House is a part of different branch of government and the comments they receive on an unfinished bill won’t make it to the 535 lawmakers in the Legislative Branch.
What needs to happen is for Congress to require both bills and conference reports to be posted online for at least 72 hours before consideration begins. Right now there is a resolution in the House to do exactly that, H. Res. 554. If you thought that President Obama’s (now-broken) promise to post bills online for five days was a good idea, this is a far superior alternative. Since bills get written in Congress, not the Executive Branch, the provision of time prior to consideration allows citizens to voice their concerns directly to their representatives, whether over the phone, the internet, fax, or direct contact, during a legislative time frame that could actually effect the final product.
You can tell your congressman to support H. Res. 554 (the “Read the Bill” bill) here and you can sign our petition to Congress telling them to pass H. Res. 554 and give us all a chance to read the bills they consider.
(Update: The New York Times is asking if you support the 72 hour rule for Congress or Obama’s five day bill posting pledge. Go tell them what you think.)
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New Financial Regulations and Read the Bill
Two days ago, President Obama announced his plan for new regulations to police the financial industry in the wake of last year’s global financial meltdown. One of those proposals would require oversight of financial derivatives for the first time. The oversight of financial derivatives — the trading of which is commonly thought to have led to the high risk behavior of AIG and other companies that collapsed last year — was considered back in the 1990s, but was stopped when Congress inserted the Commodity Futures Modernization Act (CFMA) into an 11,000 page conference report the day before a vote took place.
For the full story on the passage of the CFMA, read the case study I wrote a few months back. And if you find it outrageous that Congress passes bills like the CFMA without giving anyone, including themselves, time to read the bill, proceed to ReadTheBill.org to help us pass H. Res. 554, which would require bills to be posted online for 72 hours prior to consideration.
