New JK Blog post:

[ProSense]

Supporting A 21st Century Senate

Today the DailyKos community re-issued its call to support S.1508, the “Senate Campaign Disclosure Parity Act” which was originally introduced during the 108th Congress and was re-introduced on July 27, 2005.

JK is a co-sponsor of this legislation along with Senators Feingold, Cochran, Durbin, McCain, as well as Senators Landrieu, Lugar, Dodd, McConnell, Salazar, Graham, Isakson, Cornyn, Murkowski, Hutchison, Lieberman, Allard, Grassley and Chafee.

It provides for:

• Mandatory electronic filing for designations, statements or reports pertaining to Senate elections by persons or committees having or expecting to have aggregate contributions or expenditures in excess of $50,000 a year; and

• Forwarding to the Federal Election Commission of electronic designations, statements or reports filed with the Secretary of the Senate within 24 hours of receipt, and for accessibility of such reports to the public on the Internet.

For those who aren't sure why S.1508 is necessary, the Campaign Finance Institute has prepared some background info:

- Under current law which has applied to all federal House and Presidential candidates, Political Action Committees (including Senate leadership PACs), and party committees (except the national Senate ones) since 2001, searchable information on all contributions and expenditures is available to the public via the FEC website within 24 hours. Since the law does not apply to Senate candidates and party committees, the same information on their finances is conveniently available only after long delays (up to a month for all contributions) or never (for expenditures). Citizens are forced to go page by page through thousands of pages of filings to uncover information relevant to voting decisions, ensuring democratic accountability and confidence in government.

- As late as October 30, just three days before the November 2004 election, the public was unable to search for FEC-reported contributions information on 85% of the individual contributions to Senate campaigns from July 1 through September 30. Nor could it search for any of the contributions received in September by the Democratic and Republican Senatorial committees.

- Senate paper reports have to be hand entered into FEC electronic databases, largely by a paid contractor. This process is not only time consuming but replete with human error. For example, in the 2004 FEC database, Sen. Ron Wyden is shown as contributing $2.3 million to the Democratic Senatorial Committee whereas inspection of his paper report reveals that he donated only $200,000.

John Kerry has been a leader in campaign finance reform. In his first Senate race in 1984, he persuaded all the primary challengers to run the first PAC-donation-free senate race in the country's history.

[Firespirit]

1. I do a lot of opposition research

I have to go through these atrocious things. They are scanned images of the physical pages and cannot be searched in any way whatsoever. This is a small bill in the grand scheme of things, only of interest to political junkies, but it does a LOT towards accountability.

[ProSense]

2. Thanks for the insight!

One day soon: The Senate should pass this bill for comprehensive campaign finance reform

[dwahzon]

3. Just a thought

The posting of JK blog posts here in their entirety for people to read and comment on, deprives the JK blog itself of traffic and comments which it could use at this point. Perhaps a note encouraging readers to leave their comments there as well as at DU might be appropriate.

[karynnj]

4. This sounds like an excellent idea - especially in DU-P