Blog - Articles Tagged 'Congress'

Congress will investigate a controversial intelligence-gathering program after officials within the National Security Agency said it may have overstepped its bounds in conducting electronic surveillance on Americans. According to a story first reported in the New York Times, officials with the Justice Department, along with NSA personnel, discovered the irregular activity during a regular review of the program.

DOJ staff discovered NSA had eavesdropped on domestic e-mails and telephone calls of Americans, though the surveillance is believed to have been done unintentionally. An example of the “overcollection” of information was the revelation that a member of Congress was spied on while overseas.

The problems, according to an NSA spokesman, are related to implementation of a new intelligence law passed last year. The FISA Amendments Act of 2008 set new guidelines for electronic surveillance within the United States. The bill had three main provisions:

• It made the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (of 1978) the exclusive standard for authorizing electronic surveillance.


• It required a court order for the surveillance of any American who became a target for electronic surveillance, regardless of whether the person is in the U.S.


• It required the FISA Court, a secret court established to conduct FISA oversight, to approve the removal of any American’s name that is inadvertently captured during electronic surveillance.

Personnel with the NSA and Justice said the program has been revised to comply with the law; they delayed a renewal of the program until those corrective steps were taken.

The RaceTracker project on OpenCongress — a non-partisan, fully-referenced, open-source and crowd-sourced wiki project — now lists every candidate running in every U.S. Senate, House and governor’s race!

The folks over at the Swing State Project, the coordinators of this wiki community project, have completed a nationwide survey of the candidates in each race and will be using crowd-sourced participation to keep it current as we move towards 2010. You can now check on the status of each of the seven candidates considering a run for the seat of Illinois’ Sen. Roland Burris (D) or the eight who are eyeing Rep. Betsy Markey (D-Colo.). We’ll even tell you who’s a confirmed candidate versus who’s merely considering or rumored to be a candidate, how much money they’ve raised, the district boundaries and the district-specific electoral trends in the last three presidential elections.

(Developers, you can access the all the data via API and other methods for use in your own Web site or app, so come make an awesome mash-up or visualization!)

RaceTracker is the next-generation version of the SwingStateProject’s 2008 RaceTracker and Congresspedia’s WikiTheVote project. We’re taking a cue from Joe Friday and keeping it a “just the facts” operation so its non-partisan nature is clear, regardless of the partisan motivations a participant might have in watching any particular race. Besides, we’re practicing transparency at home by requiring each piece of information to be referenced to an outside source, so there’s no need to take the word of “some guy on the Internet;” anyone can join the wiki community in checking the facts of each submission.

(Host your own project on the OpenCongress Wiki!)

Here at OpenCongress, we are most interested in how a lawmaker’s election status (Are they running? Do they have a challenger?) affects how they vote and how Congress works.

For example, when Arlen Specter switched to the Democratic Party, which he himself admitted was a reelection decision, it threw the Democratic Caucus seniority and committee assignments into disarray.

It also placed the substantially more conservative Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) in the top spot on the Senate Judiciary Committee, opening the door to an unlikely-but-possible method for Republicans to block judicial nominees using the committee’s requirement that each nominee receive at least one vote from the minority party.

Election pressures also clearly affect individual member’s voting behavior. In the 2008 bank bailout bill, Nate Silver used analysis by RaceTracker’s own Swing State Project to show that:

Among 38 incumbent congressmen in races rated as “toss-up” or “lean” by Swing State Project, just 8 voted for the bailout as opposed to 30 against: a batting average of .211. By comparison, the vote among congressmen who don’t have as much to worry about was essentially even: 197 for, 198 against.

Simply knowing whether a member is retiring can also be the critical piece of information in understanding a vote. On that same bailout vote, retiring representatives not facing a reelection voted overwhelmingly and disproportionally for the bailout, according to the Cook Political Report’s David Wasserman:

26 of the 31 members of both parties leaving next year supported it. And 21 House Republicans who aren’t returning next term voted for the bill, making up nearly a third of the 65 GOP votes supporting the legislation.

“The telling statistic on the political side is the votes of those who were retiring versus the votes of those who are in tough races,” Wasserman said. “Retiring members feel strongly that this bill is necessary to stabilize markets, and they know they will not be receiving any political repercussion for voting their conscience."

Primary challenges are also critical to understanding votes, as they often drive the incumbent away from the middle ground. According to Jane Hamsher at FireDogLake:

We learned in 2006 how the very idea of a primary challenge could immediately change behavior. When blue dog Ellen Tauscher started complaining about the “liberal” committee chairmen who were going to be problematic, people on the blogs and in her community started talking about a primary challenge. Tauscher moved immediately to the left, joined the Out of Iraq caucus, and stopped having her picture taken with George Bush. Jane Harman had a similar conversion after a tough primary race against Marcy Winograd.

Go over to RaceTracker and check out the candidates for your own senators and representative. Know something we don’t? Add it yourself.

Regular site users know that we lag a bit (about 24 hours) behind THOMAS, the official site of the Library of Congress, when we put bill information and roll call votes on OpenCongress. This is a result of several factors, but put simply, we have to wait for the information to be online before our servers can collect it for publication. For the vast majority of users, this system works: Congress usually moves so slowly that waiting 24 hours to read the bill text or review a roll-call vote is not much of a problem.

We do run into trouble, however, when legislation being debated in Congress is not made available online.

On Friday, my colleague John Wonderlich and I made a field trip to Capitol Hill. Our destination: the House Committee on Appropriations Subcommittee on the Legislative Branch. Our goal: pick up a copy of the FY 2010 Legislative Branch Appropriations Bill (and an accompanying committee report), which had been marked up that morning.

The U.S. Federal Budget is comprised of 13 major pieces of legislation. The first is a resolution approved by the House and Senate, which serves as a blueprint for Congress as it debates the budget. The remaining twelve appropriations bills fund a specific department or group of departments (for more on the budget process, check out this introduction by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities).

The Legislative Branch Appropriations Bill is the one that funds Congress: it provides money for lawmakers’ salaries and those of their staff; funding for the Government Printing Office, Library of Congress, and Congressional Budget Office; and funds to operate the U.S. Capitol and maintain the Capitol Grounds. This year, according to a release issued by Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.), the subcommittee is recommending $3.68 billion in the bill, “an increase of $237 million over the level provided for 2009.”

Moving forward, we can expect greater transparency from Congress in regard to its expenditures. Wonderlich highlighted this a couple of weeks ago on the Sunlight Foundation Blog, discussing new requirements in the House to file online disclosures of expense reports. In addition, the Legislative Branch Appropriations Bill will likely be available on THOMAS this afternoon (and OpenCongress tomorrow). That said, if you knew what you were doing and you lived in Washington D.C., you could get a copy three days before anybody else.

Finally, since I went through all the trouble of going to pick it up, I thought I would share some highlights from the committee report that I found interesting:

• A slight call out of the Congressional Budget Office: “The CBO plays a critical role in support of Congress through its production of cost estimates. The timely production of these estimates and scorekeeping reports is essential if Congress is to move forward on its legislative agenda. The Committee notes that it has increased CBO’s FTE level by 10 percent since FY 2007. It expects CBO to use these additional funds to continue to improve the speed at which it produces cost estimates for Congress.”


• Is the House running out of room? “There are currently significant limitations on the amount of space available for Members, committees and staff to do their work. Given the size of this project, it is an appropriate time to consider the steps that might be taken to address the House of Representatives’ long-term space needs.”


• Finally, a disconnect between lawmakers and the Congressional Research Service: “Its staff provides high quality research to Members and Committees and functions in many cases essentially as extensions of the legislative staff of the House and Senate. Notwithstanding this record of accomplishment, the Committee is concerned that the CRS, partially because of the increased use of electronic communications and the adoption of new staff structures, may have become less connected to Committees and Member Offices it serves.”

Image (used under a Creative Commons license) by me.

In the first weekend since its debut last Thursday, the RaceTracker project on OpenCongress had 21 volunteer editors update 61 House, Senate and governor races across the country and visitors viewed pages more than 15,000 times. We were also very pleased to have DailyKos implement automatic links to RaceTracker from all posts tagged with a congressional district, senate seat or governor’s election.

The first few days also showed how the safeguards of the system — principally the requirement that every addition be linked to an outside, verifiable source — worked to maintain the integrity of the information on the wiki.

For example, a new editor updated the page on the Michigan 9th Congressional District, home of incumbent Rep. Gary Peters (D), to downgrade candidate Michael Bouchard® from a “potential” to “rumored” candidate since he was now running for governor and to add Andrew “Rocky” Raczkowski® as a “confirmed candidate.” The editor said that Raczkowski campaign literature had been distributed in Michigan but failed to provide a source, setting off a red flag and falling short of our standard of a source for every entry.

The best information we could find was that Raczkowski was said to be a candidate, but that local press was unable to reach him for confirmation (probably because he’s currently serving in Iraq). So, until someone can provide a better source, Raczkowski has been downgraded to “rumored.” On the plus side, we now have a more candidates on the Michigan governor page!

Among the races updated over the last few days:

AK-AL , AR-01, AR-02, AR-03, AZ-05, CA-03, CA-06, CA-10, CA-32, CA-46, CO-03, CT-04, FL-04, FL-05, FL-16, FL-24, HI-01, IA-03, IL-08, IL-09, IL-14, IL-18, IN-08, KY-01, MD-01, MD-06 , ME-02, MI-02, MI-09, NC-04, NE-02, NH-02, NV-03, NY-23, NY-29, OR-01, PA-07, PA-10, PA-16 , SC-01, SC-04,TN-07, TN-08, TN-09, TX-23, TX-26 , TX-32, VA-07

AR-Sen, CA-Sen, CO-Sen, CT-Sen, DE-Sen, FL-Sen, IL-Sen, NY-Sen (both seats), OR-Sen, UT-Sen,

CT-Gov, MD-Gov, MI-Gov, NJ-Gov, NM-Gov, VA-Gov

We’re still in the early stages of the project and we’d love to get any feedback or suggestions you may have. Email us directly.

Over the summer quite a number of people have raised hackles about the length of legislation, particularly the House health care bill (H.R. 3200). Recently, Sen. David Vitter declared his “fundamental” opposition to “any 1,000 page bill.” While this appears to be a new found opposition — Vitter voted in favor of the 1,000 page Medicare Modernization Act of 2003 — the trend of lengthy legislation is not new.

Chris Beam at Slate looked at the outrage over the Proustian length of bills and exposed the real reasons why legislation has requires multiple loads of paper to print.

Bills are getting longer because they’re getting harder to pass. Increased partisanship over the years has meant that the minority party is willing to do anything it can to block legislation—adding amendments, filibustering, or otherwise stalling the lawmaking process. As a result, the majority party feels the need to pack as much meat into a bill as it can—otherwise, the provisions might never get through. Another factor is that the federal government keeps expanding. Federal spending was about $2.7 trillion in 2007. That’s up from $92 billion 50 years ago. And as new legislation is introduced, past laws need to be updated. The result: more pages.

In the case of the health care bill there is so much past legislation to cover — Medicare, Medicaid, insurance regulations — and the industry is so large (1/5 of the economy) that a shorter bill might be more confusing. This type of major reform bill is also so rare that it is not nearly the most offensive in terms of length.

The biggest problem that Congress faces with super-sized bills comes from the appropriations process. Too often partisan warfare leads to a pile-up of appropriations bills at the end of Congress. These are often mashed together into a massive omnibus bill with tons of hidden goodies slipped in. This problem goes back to the 1980s and has been a regular feature of the legislative process since the 1990s.

The 1,000 page bill phenomenon is likely here to stay during this era of Congress. For those concerned with this, focusing on the worst distortions, omnibus appropriations bills, is likely the only area where a reduction in bill length can be achieved. Those who want to read the bills should find the permalinked sections of every bill here at Open Congress very useful for research and easy commenting.

With the introduction of the Baucus bill yesterday, I wanted to wait a bit before getting Congress Links up. Space flight, the Patriot Act, and DoMA were in the news today:

• Obama backs extending the Patriot Act’s domestic spying provisions (Threat Level).
• House Republicans want czar vetting info revealed (The Hill).
• Will Congress extend home-buyers’ tax credit past December 1 deadline (New York Times)?
• Greenspan worries Congress will hamper Fed (Bloomberg).
• Panel says $3 billion necessary to continue manned-space flight (Christian Science Monitor).
• Democrats lost leverage from the start in the health care debate (Washington Independent).
• Brad Friedman on action in Congress to require hand-marked, hand-counted paper ballots (Brad Blog).
• House liberals introduce law to repeal Defense of Marraige Act (San Francisco Chronicle).

For nearly 100 years the House of Representatives has remained the same size. 435 lawamakers. There have been two expansions of staff for lawmakers, in 1946 and 1970, but no expansion of lawmakers for citizens. That may change as a federal lawsuit has been filed charging that the current seat apportionment system disenfranchises smaller states.

Quoted in the New York Times, the leader of the court challenge Scott Scharpen says, "As an American looking at it objectively, how can we continue with a system where certain voters’ voting power is substantially smaller than others’?”

This is a pretty interesting question and could get to the problem that most Americans have with Congress. Just from casual conversations I’ve had I gather that most people have a pretty low opinion of Congress. These conversations have been supported by many polls showing sky-high disapproval ratings for the People’s House. Perhaps, the problem people have with Congress is that congressmen represent far too many people.

Peter Baker in the New York Times explains:

The issue traces back to the founding of the country. The Constitution stipulated that every 10 years, the House should be reapportioned so that each state had at lease one representative and that no Congressional district contained fewer than 30,000 people. But it was left to Congress to decide how many total House seats there should be.

The original House had 65 representatives, one for every 33,000 people. As the country’s population grew over the next century, so did the size of the House, until it reached 435 in 1911, when each member at that time representing an average of 212,000 people.

But Congress refused to reapportion after the 1920 Census, as a wave of immigration threatened to shift voting power from the South and Midwest to the urban Northeast. Eventually, Congress voted to keep the House at 435 seats regardless of rising population. Except for a brief period when it enlarged to 437 because Alaska and Hawaii had joined the union with one seat each, the House has remained at 435 ever since.

Today, congressmen represent 700,000 people, on average. It’s no wonder that people feel like their congressman is out of touch. To the congressman, there’s just too many of you.

As the population keeps expanding this problem will only grow. It will be very interesting to see how this lawsuit plays out.

One year after the biggest economic collapse since the Great Depression, Congress is still debating new financial regulations to protect consumers and prevent risk-taking in the financial sector. The House Committee on Financial Services is currently undertaking the important first step of writing, amending and voting on some of the pieces of the long-proposed financial regulatory reform. While debating these issues top committee members have been the recipients of disproportionate campaign contributions from the very industry that they are tasked with regulating.

Twenty-seven committee members have so far received over one-quarter of their contributions from the finance, insurance and real estate (FIRE) sector. This includes Chair Barney Frank, Ranking Member Spencer Bachus, four subcommittee chairs and four subcommittee ranking members. Of the twenty-seven, twelve committee members received over 35% of their contributions in 2009 from the FIRE sector.

Ranking Member Bachus, a crucial decision maker on the committee, received 71% of his campaign contributions from the finance, insurance and real estate (FIRE) sector so far this year. (These numbers run from January 1-June 30.) For his career, the Alabama congressman receives 45% of his contributions from the FIRE sector. Bachus leads the committee in his reliance on FIRE sector campaign contributions. Bachus has taking a position in opposition to most of the regulatory reforms. Bachus recently stated in a hearing, “this is absolutely the wrong time to be creating a new government agency empowered not only to ration credit, but to design the financial products offered to consumers.”

Pennsylvania Rep. Paul Kanjorski is the Chair of the Subcommittee on Capital Markets, Insurance, and Government Sponsored Enterprises and is tasked with crafting many of the initial bills for the proposed financial regulatory reform. While undertaking this important work Kanjorski has had enough time to raise large sums for his reelection. Of the $397,215 that Kanjorski has raised in 2009, 54% of it comes from the FIRE sector. For his career, Kanjorski received 44% of his contributions from the FIRE sector. Of all Financial Services Committee members, only Kanjorski and Bachus receive over 40% of their career campaign contributions from the FIRE sector.

Kanjorski has stated that he will be watchful of the influence the finance and insurance companies hold in the committee, “"We must ensure that special interests do not weaken particular solutions to the point of becoming toothless.” Earlier this year, however, Kanjorski held a fundraiser that was thrown by lobbyists for financial services organizations. Kanjorski refused to release a list of attendees to the fundraiser.

Recently, Kanjorski has introduced a series of bills to reform the regulatory structure for the SEC, hedge funds and insurance. Many trade groups and companies that have donated to Kanjorski and other committee members are organizing to oppose large sections of the bills.

The industry has already had successes this year. Committee consideration of a bill to create a proposed Consumer Financial Protection Agency was delayed after industry trade groups sent a letter to the committee demanding they delay consideration. The bill was later changed to be narrower in focus than the original language.

A Bloomberg report also notes that the derivatives lobby, headed by large banks JPMorganChase, Goldman Sachs and Credit Suisse, worked the New Democrats, including Rep. Melissa Bean, to get changes made to a bill aimed at filling holes in derivative regulation. Officials in the Obama administration stated that the resulting bill, released as a discussion draft, “created too many loopholes and had the potential to exclude all hedge funds and corporate end-users from oversight.” Bean received 42% of her $634,535 in campaign contributions in 2009 from the FIRE sector.

While top committee committee members are seeing the FIRE sector make it rain on their campaign committees, a number of less senior members are pulling in more modest sums. Thirty-five committee members receive 20% or less of their 2009 contributions from the FIRE sector. Ten of these thirty-five members received 12% or less from the FIRE sector so far in 2009, half of the 24% committee average.

These bottom twelve include Rep. Maxine Waters, who has received no money from the sector, and Rep. Ron Paul who has pulled in only $1,000 or 3% of his 2009 campaign haul. The other members in the bottom ten are Reps. Steve Driehaus (8%), Keith Ellison (8%), Mary Jo Kilroy (8%), Frank Lucas (9%), Carolyn McCarthy (11%), Alan Grayson (12%), Adam Putnam (12%) and Al Green (12%).

All campaign contributions come courtesy of the Center for Responsive Politics (OpenSecrets.org) A CSV of the research is available. Feel free to use, but please cite Sunlight and CRP.

See also:

House to Begin Work on Consumer Financial Protections by Donny Shaw