The Advisory Committee on Transparency event originally scheduled for March 12th has been postponed until further notice due to last minute scheduling difficulties. Updates will be posted here as soon as they become available. You may also email act (at) sunlightfoundation.com if you would like to receive email updates about upcoming events.
The Advisory Committee on Transparency will host an event on legislative transparency and legislative branch appropriations on Monday, March 12th at 2:00 p.m. in the Rayburn House Office Building, room 2203. This event is particular timely as the House and Senate consider how much money to appropriate for important transparency programs.
The panel of experts will focus on rules changes that impact the level of transparency in the appropriations process. The discussion will also emphasize changes in funding for legislative branch support agencies and internal congressional processes that have implications for congressional transparency and legislative capacity.
We hope you can join us. Please RSVP to http://snlg.ht/LegBranch
Want to receive notices of future Advisory Committee on Transparency events or get involved? Email ACT@SunlightFoundation.com. Archives and more information about the Advisory Committee is available at http://transparencycaucus.org/
The Advisory Committee on Transparency educates policymakers on transparency-related issues, problems, and solutions and shares ideas with members of the Congressional Transparency Caucus. It hosts events to discuss important and wide-ranging transparency policy issues with experts from a variety of backgrounds and develops educational publications and provides timely information to the public and members of Congress. Learn more at http://transparencycaucus.org.
Policy Fellow Matt Rumsey wrote this post.
Super PACs were the subject of an event hosted by the Advisory Committee on Transparency in January 2012. The event addressed the history of super PACs, legal issues surrounding them, and their potential effect on elections.
Eliza Newlin Carney, a staff writer for CQ Roll Call and the journalist who coined the term super PAC, got the discussion started. She argued that campaign finance transparency has been eroding for some time, sparked by increased activism from non-profit organizations that don't have to disclose their donors. She outlined three specific issues that have emerged with the rise of super PACs: FEC disclosure regulations are incomplete, super PACs can delay reporting their donors, and super PACs can use affiliated non-profits to obscure the identity of their donors.
Mimi Marziani, Counsel for the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice at the NYU School of Law, explained how super PACs came to be. She detailed how the Supreme Court's 2010 Citizens United decision set the stage for non-coordinated independent expenditures by lifting the ban on direct corporate and union participation in elections. The subsequent Court of Appeals' Speech Now decision found that the government cannot restrict unlimited business and labor contributions for these expenditures. Together, the two decisions led to the creation of super PACs. Marziani highlighted three assumptions included in these decisions that she found troubling. First, that independent expenditures are non-corrupting. Second, that anti-coordination rules are sufficient to prevent actual coordination. Finally, that current disclosure requirements are sufficient to shine light on these new avenues for political spending.
Paul Ryan, FEC Program Director and Associate Legal Counsel at the Campaign Legal Center, picked up some of the threads started by Marziani. According to Ryan, 8 of 9 Supreme Court justices endorsed the central role of disclosure for the campaign finance system. But, he argued that some significant deficits in current disclosure rules exist. It is easy for super PACs to obscure the corporate role in elections by accepting donations from non-profits that are not required to disclose their donors. Additionally, Ryan blamed dysfunction among FEC commissioners for preventing needed regulations from being instituted. He pointed out legislation, the DISCLOSE Act, which narrowly failed to pass through congress in 2010, and the SUPERPAC Act proposed by the Sunlight Foundation, that could solve some of these problems.
Allen Dickerson, Legal Director and Interim Executive Director of the Center for Competitive Politics, approached the topic with a different perspective. He argued that since super PACs already have to follow the same reporting rules as traditional PACs, more disclosure is not necessary. He then suggested that smaller donations are not particularly noteworthy and do not need to be subject to disclosure. Dickerson also took time to push against Paul Ryan's suggestion that super PACs would use non-profits to obscure their donors, calling the required process “inefficient”.
The event ended with a question and answer section that sparked an engaging discussion and pushed the panelists on a number of issues. They talked about the possibility that non-profits will be used to obscure donors, the level of coordination that is actually allowed between super PACs and candidates, and the practical effect that super PACs may have on the 2012 elections.
The event was moderated by Daniel Schuman, director of the Advisory Committee on Transparency. See the Sunlight Foundation's page on Disclosing Money in Elections or the Sunlight Foundation Reporting Group's super PAC resource page for more information.
The Advisory Committee on Transparency will present a discussion on super PAC transparency as we move toward the 2012 elections on Monday, January 23 at 2:15 p.m. in Rayburn 2203.
Update: C-SPAN's live video of the event is available here
Super PACs have fundamentally changed the relationship between money and politics, and all too often are misunderstood. These new vehicles for political advocacy have upended traditional political alliances, infused tremendous amounts of undisclosed (or partially disclosed) money into the political system, and kicked off controversies over what our 21st century democracy should look like.
We are pleased to present the preeminent experts who will discuss what the public knows -- and should know -- about Super PACs, including the reporter who coined the term “Super PAC” and leading advocates on both sides of the transparency question. We will explore the legal limits of what can be disclosed about Super PACs, and the policy questions around what the public has a right to know.
Panelists:
Eliza Newlin Carney: Staff Writer for CQ Roll Call covering the issues of lobbying and influence
Allen Dickerson: Legal Director and Interim Executive Director of the Center for Competitive Politics
Mimi Marziani: Counsel for the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law
Paul Ryan: FEC Program Director and Associate Legal Counsel at the Campaign Legal Center
Daniel Schuman: Policy Counsel at the Sunlight Foundation and Director of the Advisory Committee on Transparency
For the full biographies of our speakers, please click here. You may also visit the event page for additional information about this event.
We hope you can join us. Please RSVP to http://snlg.ht/RSVPSuperPAC
Last Thursday the Congessional Transparency Caucus, co-chaired by Reps. Darrell Issa (R-CA) and Mike Quigley (D-IL), held a roundtable conversation to discuss important transparency initiatives. Topics included lobbying oversight, access to Congressional documents and CRS reports, the DATA Act, the debt and deficit, the Super Committee, among other things. While the event was cut short by floor votes, it still covered a lot of ground, including an opportunity for the public to ask questions of the Representatives.
You can view video of the event below.
We're pleased to announce our next event, on Whistleblowing, is set for Friday, July 29 at 10:30 am in Rayburn 2247. Please note that we're at a different time, on a different day of the week, and in a different room.
Federal whistleblowers report lawbreaking and taxpayer rip-offs—often at great personal and professional risk. Does the law protect them sufficiently from retaliation? How does blowing the whistle on waste, fraud, and abuse in the government work? What is the balance between disclosure and the government’s legitimate need for confidentiality? What distinctions should we draw between reporting wrongdoing to employers, to Congress, to reporters, and online? Is WikiLeaks fundamentally different from what’s come before?
Last month the Advisory Committee on Transparency hosted a panel discussion entitled “The Hidden Budget: Tax Expenditures,” where a panel of experts explored how tax subsidies fit into the federal budget. Tax expenditures are much harder to define and monitor than traditional government spending such as contracts and grants, and the panelists discussed ways to make this form of spending a more transparent part of the budget process...
Here is a look at what happened recently on the Sunlight network.
No scheduled events.