Open Congress : Blog

OC at Transparency Camp 2013

2013-05-01T13:56:00Z

This weekend in D.C. – it’s the “un-conference” of the year for #opengov heads & civic engagement developers. That would be Transparency Camp, organized by the Sunlight Foundation. By “un-conference”, it’s a straightforward-yet-refreshing take on usual conference get-togethers – panels are generally organized bottom-up, so actual tech developers can get-together in the same room and look at actual code & actual features & actual data & actual UIs & actual needs & actual opportunities. Well maybe not as much as would be ideal, but it’s still rather refreshing if you’ve spent months looking at a project management system like Pivotal Tracker or whatever & writing grant proposals in Google Docs.

David from OC & PPF will be there to demo our new major project:

OpenGovernment.org – for city- and state-level government engagement. It’s like a version of “We The People” for elected officials in state legislatures, city councils, the U.S. Congress and more. Free & open-source & not-for-profit as always.

… this re-launch of OG is being developed with James of Open North as technical lead, and the nice fellas at Dobot LLC as front-end developers, with generous support from the Knight Foundation’s tech 4 engagement initiative. Though we need continued support to roll out OG to more cities … be in touch, email david at ppolitics.org, we’re easy to reach & eager to chat about where we’re headed.

Other sessions that should be of interest:

James is doing stellar work, as part of OG, on open gov’t data standards – such as Popolo, which will power OG-cities. More info by James back in late Feb.

Good Question Project w/ Micah

Another James joint: electoral district APIs, shouts to Phil Ashlock & DemocracyMap (in-development and in the Knight #NewsChallenge) – which we’ll be using for this new OG.

Real Transparency – what activists & advocates really actually need from #opengov & #opendata – by Reinvent Albany, friends of PPF’s in NY at the Open Plans offices.

More big ups NYC – the legendary Noel (“noneck”, of CfA NYC) & Ashley of #BetaNYC (formerly Open NY Forum) approach big picture, what is to be done?

Also looking forward to seeing: Mjumbe et al, projects from this last round of #opengov #Newschallenge submissions, Philly & Chicago agile dev crews, Code For America allies, more. Thank you to Sunlight Foundation folks for organizing, as always.

Follow along on micropublishing, you know how we do, see you this weekend in D.C.

OpenGovernment.org at National Conference on Media Reform

2013-04-04T19:03:00Z

Writing from the plane headed to the National Conference on Media Reform in Denver, CO, organized by the terrific folks at PPF’s longtime friends at Free Press. My first time in Denver, look forward to seeing the mountains.

I’m taking the trip to preview our soon-to-be-relaunched website for engagement with state & city elected officials, OpenGovernment.org. Angling to catch a few minutes with the outstanding lineup of presenters – shouts to Prof. Susan Crawford, shouts Josh Silver, shouts to Dan Gillmor, Amy Goodman, Eli Parisier & David Sirota & others. For more about what we’re building for public Q&A with city & local government, check my OG Blog post from last month at SxSW Interactive conference. For more, there’s also our NewsChallenge proposal from last month, though unfortunately OG didn’t make it to the semi-finalists. But a lot of exciting projects did, and we’re excited to work in the open-source, open-data, #opengov landscape.

At the conference (micropublishing hashtag #NCMR13, I believe) – on Saturday at 2pm MT in the room Governors Square 9, I’ll do a demo of our redesigned OG and ask attendees what questions they would ask their city councilmembers & mayors’ offices. We hope that OG will become a useful tool for media reform activists to raise their issues in municipal government and create a positive feedback loop for better public policy outcomes and greater accountability. We should have “We The People” style petitions and Q&A with every elected official, in every city & state, all the time. Free and open-source and open to everyone.

Also excited to see friends & colleagues from our sibling non-profit, Fight For the Future (I see you Holmes) and the inspirational Free Press folks: Josh Levy, Tim Karr, Josh Stern & others. Hi also to Catherine Bracy, Rainey Reitman, Elizabeth Stark & Matt Stempeck – see you soon. I can’t load links reliably here on the plane – are the Nuggets in town this weekend? That would be awesome, though I’m not primarily a Nuggets fan and the conference schedule will surely be jam-packed as always.

To stay in touch with our ongoing OpenGovernment development & rollout, join our low-traffic OG Google Group – there you can manage your delivery settings to get every update, or 25 at a time, or daily digest. So it’s not necessarily a distraction during the workday. Look forward to getting OG back up and out into the wild. OG development is generously supported by the Knight Foundation’s tech 4 engagement initiative, with tech lead by James McKinney of Open North and front-end development by Steve Trevathan of Dobot LLC.

Follow my micropublshing for updates while I’m in Denver and drop me a line, david at ppolitics.org. For more about how our work overlaps with that of Free Press, see our wrapup blog post from last year on the stop-SOPA battle (our biggest day of traffic ever on OC) and our ongoing CISPA coverage. Mitigating corporate media consolidation and ensuring open access & net neutrality (see: Captive Audience by Prof. Crawford) are vital to ensuring a more participatory democratic process through technology and civic engagement initiatives. While I’m typing, don’t miss Prof. Lessig’s recently-published TED talk on #systemiccorruption. More links on “Republic, Lost”.

Help OpenGovernment.org - Before 5pm ET Today

2013-03-21T15:07:00Z

Update, Friday March 29th: This “feedback” phase of the Knight NewsChallenge ends at 5pm ET today, so please help now. Let’s bring We The People style petitions to every U.S. city government for accountability and engagement.

The OpenCongress team has submitted a proposal to the Knight Foundation NewsChallenge for open-government projects:

OpenGovernment.org – a version of “We The People” for state, city, and local governments

… thanks to mentions from friends-of-PPF like Chris Hayes, Zephyr Teachout, Reihan Salam, and others, as of this writing we’ve risen in the ranks to the bottom of the first page of most-viewed projects overall. Currently ranked 20th (Monday 3/25/13 update: 16th!) most-viewed of 825 proposals, not too shabby – and we’re sixth most-applauded overall, which is awesome popular support. Lots of great #opengov submissions, more on that below. (Right: a sample of our new, clean design for Q&A on OG.)

But while we’re only about 25 votes behind the two projects ahead of us, we’re only about 25 votes ahead of the two projects directly behind us, which would bump us off the first page. Our goal is to remain in the top half of the most-viewed projects page, or top-10 overall — we’re only approx. 500 views behind that, which is approximately what we got yesterday, so it’s eminently possible.

We’re a tiny non-profit team without any paid marketing or dedicated fundraising staff, unlike some of the leading projects in the NewsChallenge – OpenCongress is maintained by the equivalent of just one staff-person. We’ve received an average of four million visits & 11 million pageviews over the past six-plus years for Congressional info on OC, with just one staffer to keep things running. (On that front, please help us keep OC alive!) This NewsChallenge is a major funding competition for us and we really need your help.

You can support our #opengov work by the following:

1. Publishing an update on FB or Twtr to encourage more views & applause of our proposal, suggestions below:

Just gave applause to OpenGovernment.org in the #NewsChallenge – “We The People” for every level of government: http://kng.ht/13XMh02

Click “applaud this” for @open_gov in the #NewsChallenge – “We The People” for every level of government: http://kng.ht/13XMh02

… a new visitor first clicks “applaud” and then either registers a free OpenIdeo account or signs-in via Facebook Connect; once confirmed in his or her email, the user can then return to our proposal page and applause & views will count immediately. It’s not too onerous.

2. Commenting on our proposal in the NewsChallenge contest, to elucidate the use cases of open Q&A w/ city government. After all, haven’t we all seen a We The People petition receive a positive response (e.g. with reducing gun violence), or tie-in to a national news issue (like the #CISPA spying bill), or go (forgive me) viral on social media? We’re building the open-source code for the same healthier relationships in city & state government.

3. Forwarding this blog post over email to your wider networks, to encourage more views of our proposal. I’m still doing outreach… I’ll emphasize that our code will remain open-source and open-data, and we’re coordinating our development of OG for cities with several other #opengov non-profits, so it’s all for the public benefit. More background on the niche we’re seeking to fill – and how this model has been proven popular & effective over the past five years in other countries – on my OC Blog post from last week.

… also, we’re not the only proposal for big-time work in open-gov & open-data – while you’re logged-in, please also applaud these NewsChallenge proposals that will be mutually-beneficial for OpenCongress & OpenGovernment ::

Legislative Open Gov’t Data Standards – by OG Technical Lead James McKinney of Open North. PPF is proud to support the open Popolo Project – you’re invited to join the discussion. Really clutch for rolling out OG for Q&A with thousands more U.S. municipalities.

Democracy Map API – by our friend Phil Ashlock, one of the five most-viewed projects – another vital piece of infrastructure for finding & contacting everyone who represents you in government, as we were hoping to build with our original OpenGovernment.org back in 2010-2011 (as a version of OpenCongress for all 50 U.S. state legislatures, in partnership with the Open States project). His fourth time submitting, this time I think you got the pitch down, buddy, haha. We’ll aim to move forward together and hopefully use a robustly-supported Democracy Map API on the new version of OpenGovernment at local levels.

eCitizens – a commercial startup led by Jerry Hall, looks cool, their legislative alert features could be useful (hopefully they remain open-source) for OG’s planned features to offer public discussion forums & Q&A surrounding city council agendas.

Making Meetings Matter – from my friend Frank of the non-profit OpenPlans, where I am glad to rent workspace in NYC. The OpenPlans team does self-evidently high-quality work and has truly admirable wide networks among open-data, civic engagement practitioners in cities across the country. Widgets for displaying agenda info would go far towards making city-level deliberation more widely accessible, among other features of their proposal.

We look forward to showing previews as we build towards re-launch this May, and hopefully with NewsChallenge support we can scale up to offer Q&A on OG in hundreds more U.S. cities. Follow @open_gov on micropublishing for updates, if you’re into that service & the Twtr lifestyle. Let me know what you think – david at ppolitics.org, I’m easy to reach and eager to chat over our plans for user-friendly government accountability.

Vote for our Knight NewsChallenge proposal: OpenGovernment.org

2013-03-15T17:15:00Z

Our tiny non-profit team was plainly excited when we heard that the Knight Foundation NewsChallenge had an #opengov theme, viz.: How might we improve the way citizens and governments interact? Good Q!

After all, not only is our non-profit PPF developing a new version of OpenGovernment.org for engagement with state & city government; and not only are we building it as part of the Knight Foundation’s Tech For Engagement initiative, in free & open-source code as always… but also, it’s exactly in-line with our public-benefit mission. We’ve been proposing this since ’09 and before! Using technology for a more continual, reciprocal relationship with government. Elections every couple of years between the two major parties (both saturated with corporate cash) are necessary but not sufficient for a functional representative democracy, one with widespread trust in the politcal process, mitigated systemic corruption, and public accountability “with teeth”.

On OpenCongress, we’ve succeeded in facilitating engagement with the arcane, despised, gridlocked U.S. Congress through free participation tools (to track & share bill info), public comment forums (for peer-to-peer social sharing of the best info), and open-source features to email your members of Congress (with our homebrew, unique Contact-Congress message builder). We’ve demonstrated a significant impact: an average of four million site visits per year over the past six-plus years, a user community of almost 300,000 people, and thousands of emails-to-Congress delivered on a shoestring budget (just one full-time equivalent staffperson for OC in 2013!). For well over half a decade, our site pages have been used extensively in the networked public sphere for organizing by unemployed families, immigrant communities, and at its peak, in the stop-SOPA movement last Janaury for net freedom. We’ve supported an average of 11 million pageviews per year – not too shabby for a not-for-profit project. I’ll note we urgently seek additional charitable funding support – foundations and philanthropists, please circulate our non-profit funding prospectus, and get in touch anytime to hear more about our plans to expand the possibilities of grassroots engagement with legislative business in the U.S. Congress.

Unfortunately, since we launched OC in Feb. 2007, we have yet to succeed in securing charitable funding support to really tackle the development of a two-way platform for constituent communication. Our OC version 3 pages featuring email responses from Congress displayed publicly (see examples on the assualt weapons bill), from back in summer 2011, represent a start of what’s possible given the data we bring together on OC and the community of watchdogs & wiki contributors we’ve hosted. But though #opengov awarenss is growing in the foundation space, many traditional government transparency funders don’t provide startup support for building open-source engagement tools with the people who represent us in government and their offices. To be sure, there exists a landscape of commercial solutions with varying degrees of open data offerings (i.e. commercial CRMs & proprietary services & startups), but nothing truly open-source and user-focused and used far & wide in contemporary online activism. Put another way, there’s still no open-source equivalent of the Facebook (ugh – or, say, Netflix-y) user experience for following & sharing with everyone who represents you in government, despite our best efforts. We have big plans in this area, but in the shorter term, towards a healthier relationship of continual grassroots “touches” with government in cities where we live our lives, we’ve submitted the following for consideration & discussion in the Knight Foundation NewsChallenge ::

OpenGovernment.org – a version of “We The People” for state, city, and local governments

Our proposal seeks support to roll-out OpenGovernment.org nationally as a free & open-source website for question-and-answer with elected officials and petitions in state & city governments. Please support our pitch – give the page a view, give it some some applause by signing-up to a free IdeaScale account, give it a comment. I’ll pull some quotes ::

“WeThePeople” has demonstrated a significant public demand for open platforms & social sharing of petitions…

And yet, there exists no comparable question-and-answer site for other levels of U.S. government – state, city, and local. In fact, other countries have successful versions of bottom-up, community-moderated question-and-answer sites: ParliamentWatch in Germany, WriteToThem from MySociety in the U.K., and others…

Our new version of OpenGovernment.org will launch publicly in May 2013. With NewsChallenge support, we seek to expand OG’s question-and-answer and petition service, WeThePeople-style, to the following ::

All 50 U.S. state governments – legislative branches, via Open States API; executive branches, i.e. governors, via other data sources.

Hundreds of U.S. city governments – scraped by OpenGovernment.org where needed and newly standardized; using open data offerings where possible; and in partnership with the in-development Democracy Map API.

… and to cover all the bases, federal legislative branch (U.S. House & Senate) via our own OpenCongress.org API & other data sources. But OG’s emphasis will be on Q&A with city government elected officials, for more-local impact.

… the primary work to be performed is open-source programming & web development time, bringing OpenGovernment.org to more municipalities in coordination with the ecosystem of open-data & open-gov app providers. With Open North continuing as technical leads, and contracting with more programming time, PPF will coordinate with Democracy Map API (which submitted its own NewsChallenge app) and on the open Popolo data standard for city government data, which may be adopted by several other #opengov non-profits…

… this year, OpenGovernment.org is poised to bring question-and-answer forums to the state, city and local levels. Questions & feedback welcome, email me anytime, david at ppolitics.org or davidmooreppf on AIM/Skype, I’m easy to reach & eager to talk.

… hope you’ll support our NewsChallenge proposal and share it widely. And check the sneak previews of our clean new site design in this post. Thanks for using OC…. and coming soon, OG, to effectively communicate ideas to people in power.

… here’s a sample Facebook or Twitter update you can share ::

Vote for OpenGovernment.org in the #NewsChallenge – “We The People” petitions for every level of government: http://kng.ht/13XMh02

… to stay up-to-date with OG and the Knight NewsChallenge for #opengov, follow us on social media ::

https://www.facebook.com/pages/OpenGovernment/165122773534162

https://twitter.com/open_gov

PPF at SxSW Interactive - come say hi

2013-03-08T12:06:00Z

Two of the PPF team will be at SxSW Interactive this week.

I’ll be there to sneak-preview the recently re-designed OpenGovernment.org, for engagement with state & city government. I’m attending with James McKinney, the E.D. of the Canadian non-profit Open North, who is working as OpenGovernment’s technical lead. Here’s my draft pubilc schedule, feel free to suggest events. Ping me anytime to meet up to see the new OG user interface & give your feedback, we’re easy to reach & happy to chat. AIM / Skype: davidmooreppf, #opengovernment in Freenode on IRC, david at ppolitics.org over email.

Andy Ross, OpenCongress’ lead programmer since 2006, will be down in Austin to discuss building online movements on Tuesday March 12th at 3:30 pm CT – along with Eli from MoveOn & Upworthy, DJ Spooky, and others. Don’t miss his thoughts on the state of the art in online organizing & crowdsourced campaigns. I’ll be there, wouldn’t miss it. It’s going to be fire.

… last, good friend-of-PPF Chris Hayes is doing a book signing for his important work Twilight of the Elites on Tuesday morning at 11am – can’t say enough about how crucial his analysis is towards achieving stability in our financial markets, comprehensive electoral reforms, reality-based public policy discourse, and accountable political media. Not to mention health care, education, and mitigating income inequality for greater national happiness. Swing through if you’re in AUS.

OpenCongress is a tiny non-profit project (the equivalent of just one full-time employee!) – we urgently seek additional charitable funding support of our public-benefit mission to make government more transparent & accountable. Please read & circulate our funding prospectus to see what we could build, in free & open-source code, towards meaningful engagement with the systemically-corrupt, widely-despised, historically-gridlocked U.S. Congress. One example could be more stop-SOPA style activism in the networked public sphere, through MyOC Whip Counts of Congress. And that’s just the start – we have lots of ideas for innovative features, but our limiting factor is funding for open-source, open-data development time. Email me, david at ppolitics.org, and ping me : davidmooreppf on Skype. Thanks for using OC.

(Image, right: Occupy Wall St. linked from SxSWi site on Andy’s panel re: movement-building.)

CISPA is Back; All Your Data Are Belong to Us

2013-02-14T00:49:00Z

Barely a year after the defeat of SOPA, Congress is back to testing the waters for legislation that many internet users believe to be in violation of their fundamental rights to privacy and free expression.

CISPA, a bill that would make it easier for corporations and the government to share internet users’ personal data, was officially re-introduced in the House on Wednesday. It’s already being rushed forward in the legislative process. The House Intelligence Committee is holding a full hearing on the bill today at 10 am. They will hear from four witnesses — all from the business sector and all known supporters of CISPA. No experts with concerns about privacy issues in the bill were invited to address the committee.

According to its sponsors, the goal of CISPA is to update how “cyber threat intelligence” information is shared between private entities and the federal government. In order to accomplish this, many long-standing laws that were designed to protect the privacy of individuals would be explicitly voided. With those laws out of the way, companies would be encouraged (but not required) to share information about their users with the government without a warrant and without disclosure, and they would be rewarded with legal impunity for doing so. The government would then be able to use the information that is shared with them for preventing cyber attacks or for any other law enforcement action.

Unlike SOPA, which divided the business community, CISPA enjoys overwhelming support from corporations. The bill’s broad and clear immunity protections appeal to companies that are already involved in the sharing of personal information in a vague, extra-legal setting. And there would be very little risk of public backlash for companies that share user information under CISPA since that would not have to disclose their participation to the public.

According to data compiled by Maplight.org on last year’s version of CISPA, interest groups that have publicly expressed support for CISPA spent 3.6 times more on congressional campaigns of House members in 2012 than interest groups that have come out against the bill. Many of the biggest investors in American politics have expressed support for CISPA, including the Chamber of Commerce, the American Bankers Association, several major defense contractors, and all the big telecom companies. The list of organizations opposing CISPA is also extensive, but it’s made up mainly of public-interest groups that have far less money to invest in persuading politicians.

The re-introduction of CISPA comes less than 24 hours after President Obama announced his executive order on cybersecurity. The executive order compels the government to share cyber threat information with web companies, but it does nothing to increase sharing from companies to the government. From a privacy standpoint, the executive order is neutral. But during the State of the Union address, Obama called on Congress to pass legislation to “give our government a greater capacity to secure our networks and deter attacks.” That’s an implicit request to pass CISPA, and a sign to Congress that the Administration needs the laws changed in order to get the rest of the information sharing program — from web companies to the government — flowing.

Ed. note: the Contact-Congress features in the right-hand sidebar of the CISPA bill page on OC are not working quite yet for known data reasons. In short, we don’t have the full data on the bill from the Library of Congress, so our features to email Congress can’t be hooked up at the moment. We’ll update when they are expected to work. But for now, please do share the bill page and visit CISPAisback from our friends at Fight For the Future to register your opposition. 2:30 pm ET, Thurs. Feb. 14th, 2013. -David

#SoTU 2013

2013-02-12T19:53:00Z

For updates on the State of the Union tonight, probably best-practice is to follow along with our lists on the micropublishing service ::

Congress-Watchers on @opencongress

Political science by @ppolitics

#opengov & civic engagement & open-data leaders

Federal Budget & Econ. – #realitybased economics

For video background see last Sunday’s edition of ‘Up with Chris Hayes’, the most substantive & empirically-accountable news show on cable TV. A lot of people prefer the popular social networking service, we keep a beachhead there too.

My thoughts: so much time will be spent live-updating the #SoTU tonight over social media. Sharing jokes & links & info is admirable. But it’s fundamentally, frustratingly impotent – the financial services lobbyists aren’t changing their behavior because of any of our Facebook networks. Corporate campaign contributions still influence elections, districting, and governing at the state and federal levels.

It’s 2013 and the American public at large still lacks powerful, widespread tools for accountability in #Congress – and the comprehensive electoral reforms that would make the political rhetoric from an event like the #SoTU more actionable. There’s so much technology & infrastructure to build, and I’m optimistic it will get built eventually, but it’s important – in my opinion – is to build momentum soon on The American Anti-Corruption Act, a first-steps initiative to get money out of the federal legislative process.

It’s not full public financing of elections, which is badly needed, and it’s not independent redistricting and right-to-vote laws, but it’s at least a well-calibrated campaign of first steps against systemic corruption in Congress – please sign on & share, Represent.us. More background last month on PPF Blog, ‘Kickstarting the 113th U.S. Congress’. Previous OC blog post welcoming this historically-gridlocked, incredibly unpopular, systemically corrupt legislative body. Research on corruption by Prof. Lessig and on OC Blog.

More info on our non-profit projects for continual, reciprocal engagement with elected officials at the city, state & federal levels – where we’re headed with OpenGovernment.org for cities & states, and our public-benefit vision for OpenCongress in 2013 and beyond. Get in touch, david at ppolitics.org. Please donate if you can to our tiny non-profit project.

Pot Legalization Bills Introduced, and Why Congress Will Not Legalize Pot

2013-02-05T11:45:00Z

Public polling shows that a majority of Americans now support legalizing marijuana, but will Congress even consider taking pot off the banned substances list?

Today, two members of the House — Rep. Jared Polis [D, CO] and Rep. Earl Blumenauer [D, OR] — are introducing legislation to change the federal marijuana laws. Polis’ “Ending Federal Marijuana Prohibition Act” would regulate marijuana like alcohol, and Blumenauer’s “Marijuana Tax Equity Act” would establish a federal marijuana taxation structure. The introduction of the bills is a first step, but it doesn’t mean that there is broader institutional interest in Congress for taking up the issue of legalizing pot.

There is one big reason why Congress is not likely to take this issue up: they don’t want to bother the corporations that they rely on for funding.

Marijuana is good medicine, which means that one of the biggest funders of both political parties — the pharmaceutical industry — wants to make sure the public does not have easy access to it. Drug companies could take a significant hit in profit if it was legal for people to grow their own natural alternatives to many of their pricey, habit-forming pills. Their plan to profit from the medicinal qualities of marijuana involves capturing regulators at the DEA and FDA, and winning special approval for selling drugs made from marijuana byproducts while keeping marijuana itself illegal for everyone else.

Drug companies like Pfizer and Merck spend millions each election to boost the campaigns of candidates that support their interests. The pharmaceutical industry is so powerful in Washington D.C. that they consistently manage to get their way even if it means that Congress has to abandon major pieces of its stated policy goals. For example, during the 2009 health care reform debate, which was ostensibly about lowering the cost of health care, Democrats stripped several provisions from their bill that would have helped to lower pharmaceutical costs by allowing Medicare to negotiate drug prices, legalizing drug re-importation, and streamlining the process for bringing generic drugs to the market. The pharmaceutical companies saw this is a hit to their business, and they struck a backroom deal with the Obama Administration to get it removed.

The Polis and Blumenauer marijuana bills will be referred to the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, where they will almost certainly be ignored and left to die. Rep. Fred Upton [R, MI] is the chairman of the committee, and he controls what bills receive hearings and/or mark-ups. According to OpenSecrets, Upton received more money from the pharmaceutical industry in 2012 than any other member of the House, and he ranks sixth on the list of pharmaceutical money recipients for all members of the House ever.

There are industries that are supportive of marijuana legalization. Agriculture and tobacco, both major donors to both parties, reportedly have plans in place for making money if marijuana became legal. But Congress rarely takes up issues that pit one big funder against another. Generally, the issues that get broad support in Congress have universal support among the impacted industries that are major investors in politics, or the major-investor industries are indifferent or are willing to strategically concede on the issue. In matters where there is division among major investors, Congress tends to side with the status quo. The money is already pouring in, so why shake things up?

So, right now, just about everyone in Congress is saying that priority number one is reducing the deficit, and legalizing marijuana would bring in billions of new revenue (Blumenauer’s office estimates $20 billion annually) while eliminating a dangerous black market and improving public health. But it won’t happen — and the reason is that Congress’s real top priority is keeping the corporations that fund their campaigns happy.

Endless Blockade for the Senate Pussyfooters

2013-01-25T16:20:00Z

Led by Harry Reid, Senate Democrats have officially squandered their best chance to bring more democracy to the Senate in years.

By a vote of 78-16 , the Senate last night approved a new rules package that keeps in place the procedural loopholes have turned the Senate into a brick wall for sensible legislation. Under the new rules it will still be possible for a single senator to halt progress on a bill, or even on a motion to proceed to a bill, simply by stating that they intend to filibuster. In recent years, this procedure, commonly known as the “silent filibuster,” has prevented the Senate from passing even the most routine, non-controversial legislation.

Last night’s vote ends a weeks-long debate over reforming the filibuster in which a vast majority of the Democrats expressed support for ending the silent filibuster and requiring that any senator who wants to filibuster must do so by standing up in front of the Senate and speaking. The basic idea of the pro-reform Democrats was that the standard Senate rules should allow for bills to be passed by the affirmative votes of a majority of those elected and serving in the Senate. They didn’t want to end the minority party’s ability to filibuster, rather they wanted to put the onus of the filibuster on the senator(s) who want to obstruct.

In the end, Majority Leader Harry Reid, Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, and a handful of senior senators from both parties (most notably, McCain and Levin), struck a backroom deal to preserve the silent filibuster and make a few small changes to other areas of Senate procedure.

Reid’s stated reasoning for keeping the silent filibuster in tact: “I’m not personally, at this stage, ready to get rid of the 60-vote threshold.”

In other words, Reid doesn’t want too much democracy in the decision-making process. And why would he, or any of the other senators he worked with to kill the reform? They’ve all managed to be continually re-elected and have risen the ranks of power under the current rules. On average, Reid, McConnell, McCain, and Levin have managed to keep their jobs in the Senate for more than a quarter of a century, and they are among the most powerful members of the chamber. They’re not exactly a crew you would expect to really shake things up.

The silent filibuster is an ideal tool for special interests and their allies in the Senate to promote their agendas. If it takes a supermajority to pass legislation, then a majority of the senators can tell their constituents they voted against the special interests, but the special interests still win. On a structural level, it’s an ideal mechanism for a small minority with loads of money and influence to quietly game the democratic system. And more concretely, a recent study from CampaignMoney.org found a number of instances in which Mitch McConnell used the silent filibuster to kill legislation and then received big cash infusions to his campaign account from interests that opposed the legislation within a few days of the filibuster.

(Btw, title reference to this rippin’ punk classic.)

One Year Ago We Killed SOPA -- Happy Internet Freedom Day!

2013-01-18T10:09:00Z

One year ago today, thousands of websites and millions of internet users took action to stop major internet censorship bills in Congress, SOPA and PIPA. The protests changed the way many people think about politics by proving that bringing together an educated public to take action, online, can defaet the corrupt agendas of the most powerful interest groups and members of Congress. To celebrate this enormous, ground-shaking victory, we (PPF) are joining a bunch of the other groups that were involved in the SOPA fight in declaring today, January 18th, a new holiday — “Internet Freedom Day.”

From our perspective at OpenCogress, the SOPA protest was our biggest day ever. We saw a new high in site traffic, with over 250,000 unique visitors and more than half a million page views (more than double the traffic from our previous high during the health care debate). More importantly, people engaged with our action tools on a deeper level than ever before. Our crowd-sourced “Stop SOPA and PIPA” whip count became the internet’s unofficial scoreboard for watching senators withdraw support for the bill in real time. Thousands of people, including people in every state, used the tool to call their senators and record what their offices were saying about their position on the bill. As the day progressed, you could refresh the page and every 15 minutes see another senator withdraw their co-sponsorship or switch from “on the fence” to “no.” It was an unprecedented reversal from Congress, and the community whip count gave the public a unique way to watch it unfold. Beyond the whip count, hundreds of people participated in our public mark-up of the legislative text and our extensive “money trail” page was linked to around th einternet, revealing which corporations were funding the bill, and who in Congress was taking the money.

So today we celebrate the day the internet officially became a political force to be reckoned with. It’s been one year since we shook up Congress and the political establishment, and since then the internet has continued to win. The anti-privacy bill in Congress, CISPA, was left to die in committee. The SOPA-like Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) was rejected by the European Union. The ITU voted against new global internet regulations that would have been sympathetic to political censorship. And Hollywood has said they have no plans to pursue more bills like SOPA in Congress any time soon. Of course, the fight for internet freedom is not over. Right now, Hollywood and the anti-competitive telecom industry are working together to develop their own censorship rules, outside the scope of law but with no way for most internet users, who have no choice in service provider, to opt out.

Today’s call to action for Internet Freedom Day is to share something that represents to you why the internet must not be censored. It can be anything — a video, article, photograph, website — that you feel should be shared far and wide on the open internet, without government or corporate interference. Obviously, there’s an endless amount of data about Congress that’s worth sharing (that’s why we built OpenCongress), but for now we’ll go with Rep. Alan Grayson [D, FL] grilling Federal Reserve Vice Chairman Donald Kohn on why the Fed refuses to disclose the recipients of some $1.2 trillion in taxpayer money it spent on rescuing failed banks. Watch below, and Happy Internet Freedom Day! Follow along on micropublishing: @ppolitics & #opengov list.