Sunlight Foundation policy counsel Daniel Schuman has a thoughtful post explaining that Members of Congress have a long way to go toward making their legislative process transparent. Perhaps they should get their own house in order before they remake the campaign finance system near an election:
The House version (HR 5175) was available on Friday from THOMAS, the online repository of Congressional legislative information, one day after it was introduced. The Senate version (S. 3295) is still unavailable from THOMAS, as of 10:50am on Monday, 4 days after introduction. When you click on the link for the legislation, you get the following note:
Bills are generally sent to the Library of Congress from the Government Printing Office a day or two after they are introduced on the floor of the House or Senate. Delays can occur when there are a large number of bills to prepare or when a very large bill has to be printed.
PDF versions of the House and Senate bills became available elsewhere on the web within 24 hours (see, e.g., ElectionLawBlog). The legislation is prepared in XML, so it’s unclear what has caused the delay of the official release on THOMAS of the Senate version. (These kinds of delays are, alas, common on THOMAS.)
More details about how the bill was drafted are not pretty from a “transparency” standpoint… This bill-drafting effort was announced Feb. 11 by Sen. Chuck Schumer, the past chair of the DSCC and Rep. Chris Van Hollen, the DCCC chair. It was not only authored in secret, with the consultation of the White House and Democratic party lawyers, but Democrats publicly rejected an offer from committee Republicans on the House Administration Committee-the committee of jurisdiction-to meet to negotiate legislative text, which was only released on April 29. This has been reported by The Hill, among others. It has not been disavowed or challenged by Van Hollen or Chairman Robert Brady (D-Pa.).
How ironic that The DISCLOSE Act, a bill that would fundamentally alter the political system months before a major election, is supported in large part by transparency groups despite being written not with open debate and candor but in the cloakrooms of Capitol Hill. Do we really trust incumbents to grandstand on the morals of disclosure—especially when they insist these complicated bills must be passed ASAP?