Those of you with long memories or wonky fixations will recall our years-long push to force Senate candidates to file their FEC disclosure reports electronically and bring them into the 21st century. It's beyond ridiculous that we haven't eliminated this convoluted mess, as I explained last September:
Let's remember what it's all about: it costs taxpayers about $250,000 a year for a private Virginia contractor to convert the Senate paper filings -- which are created by the campaigns using computers and software -- back into electronic format for the FEC to post on its Web site. The conversions take anywhere from 18 to 27 days to complete, which means that most of the last campaign filings for the Senate do not become electronically available on the FEC website until after the election.
So the Republican Leader in the Senate and the head of the Senate Republicans' campaign committee are conspiring to not only block more timely disclosure in campaign finance, but also to try and stymie the ethics woes that they face. Indeed, as Dennis Green said, they are who we thought they were.
Sen. Feingold has more to say.
As mentioned above, it's NRSC chairman Sen. John Ensign (R-NV) who was gumming the works with procedural nonsense. It's time to route around him.
Our friends at the Sunlight Foundation, Change Congress, Public Campaign and other pro-technology, pro-transparency reform organizations have launched a new wikified tool to make it happen: Pass223.com.
The website is simple -- it tells you where your Senators stand on the bill and on Sen. Ensign's opposition, and how many calls have been made to each Senator. Click on your Senators' names, and it will pull up a phone script tailored to where s/he stands on both the underlying bill and Sen. Ensign's attempts to derail it. Make the call, report the response on the website, repeat with your other Senator.
It should just take a few hours for the readers of this site to steamroll through this electronic whip sheet and obtain the information needed on all 100 Senators. Then, we can start applying pressure where needed.
Can you make two calls today to bring greater transparency to the Senate?