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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If Senators Can’t Get a Vote on Electronic Filing, they should File Electronically Anyway
Come Christmas Eve, when the Senate is likely to wrap up its work for the year, one piece of legislation they will have failed to enact is a bill to mandate that Senators file their campaign finance reports electronically. Majority Leader Reid has neither found a way around Republican obstruction of the noncontroversial measure, nor has he committed to holding a vote to defeat a promised Republican poison pill amendment and once and for all complete work on the measure. By failing to get this bill enacted this year, it is almost certain that there will be no mandatory electronic filing system in place for the 2010 elections.
But even without a mandate, Senate candidates can assure their campaign finance information is online, in real time, by simply voluntarily filing their campaign finance reports electronically with the FEC. Unfortunately, of sitting Senators, only Senators Feingold, Feinstein and Wicker have taken this simple step to make their campaign finance reports available to the public as soon as they are filed. As Senator Reid is up for re-election in 2010, we strongly urge him to demonstrate his commitment to public access to campaign finance information and file his reports electronically. Hopefully, others will follow.
We’ll keep working to get an electronic filing bill passed by urging Republicans to stop needlessly blocking the bill and, if that fails, convincing the Democrats to make this bill a priority and hold a vote. Until that happens, we’d like to see every candidate running for Senate in 2010 to pledge to make his or her campaign finance reports transparent.
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When will Senate FEC (paper) filings available online?
The deadline for federal campaign committees to disclose third quarter 2009 contributions and expenditures was Thursday, Oct. 15. We’re still waiting for the Senate forms to be posted online (Senators don’t file electronically, so the Federal Election Commission’s army of elves, gnomes and oompa loompas must make image files of all the reports) and it looks like we’ll be waiting a while longer.
This is why we need electronic filing of Senate reports — see here for more details — and why I need stronger lenses.
Cross-posted from Real Time Investigations.
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Ensign Tried to Stymie Ethics Committee, Calls Come for Committee to Investigate
Since Wednesday, when the sex scandal engulfing Sen. John Ensign morphed into a public expense scandal, we’ve learned quite a few new details. Ensign was not blackmailed by Douglas Hampton. Cynthia Hampton’s salary at Ensign’s campaign doubled during the time of their affair. Ensign helped get jobs for Douglas Hampton and his son after they left Ensign’s Senate office and the NRSC, respectively.
What we still don’t know is whether Douglas Hampton was handsomely paid with taxpayer money when he left Ensign’s Senate office and whether this could constitute as hush money. There are beginning to be calls for a Senate Ethics Committee investigation with Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) asking for the committee to investigate and require disclosure from Ensign. This is just such an awesome idea and here’s why:
Back in 2007, around the time that Ensign was pursuing his close friend’s wife, Ensign was leading a crusade to derail a bill that would require electronic filing of Senate campaign finance reports. (Yes, this bill, the one Sunlight has been advocating for since 2006.) How was Ensign trying to derail the bill? By offering an amendment that would require any group filing an ethics complaint with the Senate Ethics Committee against a senator to disclose all of their donors (pretty much any lawyer will tell you that this is unconstitutional). This would, in effect, stymie the open process by which the Senate Ethics Committee accepts complaints and would likely stop the committee from pursuing investigations. The Senate Ethics Committee is currently far more active than the House Ethics Committee, which does not accept outside complaints.
(Currently, Sen. Pat Roberts is trying to block the same electronic filing bill with Ensign’s anti-investigation amendment. If you want to get rid of this Ensign protecting amendment, you can help out here.)
Now, I don’t know if Sen. Ensign was trying to make the ethics process difficult to protect his own hide, but give a listen to how important he takes this issue.
He even states that ethics complaints could be written on a bar napkin. I’d gander that writing on bar napkins is something that Ensign is more used to than the Senate Ethics Committee.
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Will Electronic Filing Finally Happen in the Senate?
The Senate Campaign Disclosure Parity Act, S. 482, may have a new lease on life. We learned that Majority Leader Reid has “hotlined” the bill. That’s a procedure used to pass noncontroversial bills quickly–basically by agreement of all senators. Once a bill is hotlined, every senator has a chance to object to the bill moving forward. If no one objects, the bill is on its way to becoming law.The Campaign Disclosure Parity Act is a perfect candidate for legislation that should move by agreement. No senator has publicly opposed the legislation that would require simply that candidates for the Senate file their campaign finance reports electronically, the way House candidates, presidential candidates and political parties have filed their reports for nearly a decade.
Unfortunately, we’ve been down this road with this legislation before. In its previous incarnation in the 110th Congress, the bill’s progress was blocked by Senator John Ensign. He held up the bill because he wanted to try to add an unrelated and controversial amendment to it. Now we hear that Senator Pat Roberts may be taking over the obstructionist role from Ensign, possibly blocking the bill so that he can try to add a provision to it that would require nonprofit organizations to disclose their donors anytime they file an ethics complaint. We think the amendment is antithetical to disclosure and has no place in S. 482.
We hope Senator Roberts decides against impeding the progress of S. 482. Sunlight and many other groups have supported this bill for a long time and its passage is long overdue.
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Sen. Klobuchar Supports S. 482!
As a commenter noted in a post yesterday, Sen. Amy Klobuchar is the 37th senator to cosponsor S. 482, the Senate e-filing bill. We’re glad that Minnesota’s one senator has signed on to support transparency for Senate campaign finance filings. If your senator hasn’t cosponsored yet, go to the Pass 482 site and urge them to do so.
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Senate Obstinacy on Electronic Filing
David Waldman (aka Kagro X) posted a very good piece on Congress Matters regarding congressional transparency and the bureaucratic arguments by institutionalists that often prevent positive action. Waldman’s piece focuses on the priority of technology-enabled transparency in voting records and how the members of Congress may simply say, “Gather the info and do it yourself. We don’t want to spend the money to do it.” He also touches on one area that we focus on a lot here, the lack of electronic filing for Senate campaign finance forms. Waldman draws an analogy between the institutional arguments for not releasing voting records with Senate obstinacy on electronic filing of campaign forms:
A similar issue arises, it turns out, with the drive to get the Senate to file its campaign finance forms electronically, too. I haven’t had any particular need to comb through that information (though it wouldn’t be hard to imagine needing it), but in my discussions with people in the transparency biz, that’s clearly been a big sticking point. Again, though, I could see the institutionalists saying, “You want campaign finance forms? Go ask the [FEC]. We’re the Senate. We’re what happens after all that stuff.” That’s a gross oversimplification, of course, since everyone knows that the general public at least considers it important to know where incumbent Senators have raised and are raising their money from.
If the Senate wants to make an institutional argument about whether it is on them to properly file their campaign finance forms or whether this is an FEC issue, that is perfectly fine. That’s because the problem lies solely with the institution of the Senate and cannot be deferred as an issue with the FEC.
You see, senators do not file with the FEC directly. Instead, they file, on paper, with the Secretary of the Senate’s office, which then passes the documents onto the FEC (where they are copied and housed in a series of file cabinets). Thus, the Senate insists on making its bureaucratic inefficiency a problem for both the information provider and the information seeker. They can’t possibly say, “You want campaign finance forms? Go ask the [FEC]. We’re the Senate. We’re what happens after all that stuff,” because they have made themselves file with the Senate, not the FEC.
When Congress mandated electronic filing of campaign finance forms in 1999, the Senate exempted themselves by carving out a loophole that requires only those filing directly with the FEC to file electronically. Since senators file with the Secretary of the Senate, they became exempt, thus they can’t push this issue off to the FEC or any other information providing body.
If you think this is absurd and want transparency from the Senate, you can help us pass S. 482, a bill that would require senators to file directly with the FEC, thus ending the Senate exemption. Go to the Pass 482 site and tell your senator(s) to cosponsor the bill.
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Sen. Merkley Endorses S. 482!
Sen. Jeff Merkley recently signed up as the 36th cosponsor of S. 482, the Senate e-filing bill. We’re excited that he is supporting Senate campaign finance transparency and if you want to let him know you can hit him up on Twitter at @senjeffmerkley. If your senator(s) hasn’t yet signed on as cosponsor you can head to the Pass 482 site and let me know that they should support transparency.
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Weekly Media Roundup – April 24, 2009
Here are a few of the more interesting media mentions of Sunlight and our friends and grantees from this week:
Sunday evening, BlogTalkRadio posted an episode of “Talking Gov2.0,” where Clay Johnson, Sunlight Lab’s director, discussed Sunlight, Sunlight Labs and the Apps for America contest. Speaking of Apps for America, Clay announced the winners on Monday. And Marshall Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb wrote about the contest, and included a screencast of the winners.
Victoria McGrane with the Politico wrote about the lack of online disclosure of campaign finance data by candidates for the U.S. Senate, and the efforts to rectify this through S. 482, the Senate Campaign Disclosure Parity Act. She mention’s Sunlight’s Pass S. 482, and extensively quotes Lisa Ronsenberg, Sunlight’s government affairs consultant, about the need for the Senate to join the 21st Century.
The National Journal reported on data from the Center for Responsive Politics (CRP) that shows last year’s top 20 Political Action Committee contributors to federal candidates poured a combined $22 million into lobbying efforts from January through March — an increase of nearly 20 percent over the same period in 2008.
Anne C. Mulkern with Greenwire (subscription required) used Capitol Words to look at the use of energy- and environment-related words by congressional lawmakers. The New York Times re-posted Mulkern’s piece.
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Another Cosponsor for S. 482!
A good week for electronic filing in the Senate. Sen. Claire McCaskill becomes the second senator to cosponsor S. 482 this week. We are up to 35 cosponsors! If you want to help move the Senate into the 21st century, go to the Pass 482 site and call your senators.If you’re on Twitter, feel free to thank Sen. McCaskill (@clairecmc) for cosponsoring this important bill.
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New Cosponsor for S. 482!
Thanks to Sen. Olympia Snowe, we are up to 34 cosponsors on S. 482, the Senate e-filing bill! If you want to help us pass this bill, go here and call your senators to tell them to cosponsor S. 482.
