President Bush meets with presidential candidates and congressional leaders in the Cabinet
Room of the White House on Thursday to discuss the proposed bailout of the financial industry. [Left to right: McCain, Minority Leader John A. Boehner (R-Ohio), Speaker of the House
Nancy Pelosi (D-California), Bush, Senate Majority Leader Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nevada),
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky), Obama] Photo: Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP
The prospect of a gargantuan $700 billion Wall Street bailout agreement presents a prime opportunity for Congress, and in particular the presidential candidates, to live up to their promises of using the internet to free themselves of undue influence.
When Congress rushes through important legislation such as this upcoming bill, extraneous items of questionable merit are usually thrown in during the final stretch of the haggling process among key staff members behind closed doors.
That's what happened in the process of the reauthorization of the USA Patriot Act, for example. After passage of the controversial legislation, lawmakers discovered that they had approved an obscure provision that allowed the Bush Administration to appoint replacements for U.S. attorneys without Senate confirmation. That enabled Alberto Gonzales, then the Attorney General, to install U.S. attorneys whom many Democratic members of Congress charged were political henchmen.
"What we know is that lobbyists have flooded the offices of Capitol Hill all of last week, and all last weekend after the Paulson bill was announced, and it's a lobbying frenzy," says Ellen Miller, co-founder of the Sunlight Foundation. "Without full transparency for what's in the legislation, we won't find out who got what until after the bill has been passed, and after it's too late for anybody to react to it."
Ellen Miller, co-founder of the Sunlight Foundation, is requesting copies of the emerging bailout bill to post online for the public to view. She has already posted proposals by Sen. Chris Dodd and the Treasury Department online. Photo: Bruce Gilden
Miller wants legislators to make any and all of the iterations of the legislation available electronically – all the way until it is ready to be voted on on the floor of both congressional chambers.
"It is an outrage that what Congress clearly plans to do is to drop this bill, minutes before they call for a vote on it, neither allowing those who get to vote on it, nor the public, to view it," she says.
Miller is one of the 15 people on Wired magazine's Smart List, all experts we've recommended that the next president pay attention to. A long-time Washingtonian, she says that she knows both Barack Obama and John McCain.
Miller's staff was planning to contact legislators Thursday afternoon to ask for copies of any emerging bailout bill. The group maintains a site called PublicMarkup.org that transforms PDFs into a document that the public can examine, comment on and rewrite themselves online.
The proposals from both Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Connecticut) and the Treasury Department are up on the site.
"The ideal situation is to have the legislation published online immediately." Miller says. "Our position is that every piece of legislation should have a minimal online-public-availability time of 72 hours, which would give citizens and lawmakers a chance to read, digest, think about and comment. There's no better place to start with than with this bill that involves hundreds of billions of dollars and affects the lives of everyone."
During his comments Thursday morning at the Clinton Global Initiative in New York City, McCain called for any proposed legislation to be published online so that taxpayers could view it.
"There must be complete transparency in the review of this legislation, and in the implementation of any legislation," his prepared remarks said. "This cannot be thrown together behind closed doors. The
American people have the right to know which businesses will be helped, what that selection will be based on, and how much that help will cost.
All the details should all be made available online and elsewhere for open public scrutiny."
Obama has been a vocal supporter of internet-enhanced government transparency and has made it a part of his technology agenda, but queries to his press staff were not returned by the time of this posting.
Open-government advocates worry that banking-industry lobbyists may get in a provision that they've been pushing for the past few months, for example. A new rule mandating that they make explicit the bad debts on their books went into effect last November. Banks want it repealed.
"There is a feeding frenzy of lobbying involved, and regulated industry is interested in ensuring that the final legislation benefits them to the maximum," says Gary Bass, founder and executive director of the government-accountability research-and-advocacy group OMB Watch. "One has to worry over whether true transparency will occur."
He's quick to add that so far he's reassured by the noises on the subject made by Dodd and Rep. Barney Frank, (D-Massachusetts), respectively chairmen of the Senate and House banking committees.
"Senator Dodd and congressman Frank have been way on top of this – they've been arguing for accountability and transparency," he notes. "My biggest concern is the content of the legislation. I want to make darn sure that the content of the legislation – even if it's not reviewed in some formal manner – has some transparency and accountability built into it. That's one of the key issues and principles."
He says he doesn't hold out much hope for public review of the legislation, because members of Congress are keen to adjourn and return to their districts to campaign for re-election.
But the process may take longer than anyone might expect. Lawmakers emerged from the White House late Thursday after thinking they had a deal in hand, with no consensus on how to move forward.
Update: W. David Stephenson writes in to note that the banks should be required to publish automated reporting information through RSS feeds. He's got a HuffPost post on it here. Nut grafs:
