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After moving earlier this year to make the federal budget
process more transparent to the public, Congress is falling short of its goal
of full and timely disclosure of lawmakers' pet projects, or earmarks.
Despite lawmakers' promises to slash earmarks by half, the spending bills for
this fiscal year – now wending their way through the appropriations process –
include at least 12,000 earmarks totaling more than $24.7 billion, according to
the White House Office of Management and Budget. See story from
Christian Science Monitor
The Federal Election Commission violated the free-speech
rights of a Wisconsin advocacy group when the commission censored election-eve
issue advertisements under the 2002 McCain-Feingold campaign-finance law. In
an important decision upholding First Amendment protections of corporations and
unions to engage in certain kinds of political activity, the US Supreme Court
ruled 5 to 4 that a key portion of the McCain-Feingold law had been
unconstitutionally applied to the group, Wisconsin Right to Life Inc. See story from
Christian Science Monitor Dissenting Justices: Breyer, Ginsburg, Souter,
Stevens
The House affirmed a pay increase for members of Congress
set for January 2008. The vote cleared the way for an approximately 2.7 percent
raise that will hike rank-and-file salaries to nearly $170,000.
The House passed a bill to increase regulation and public
scrutiny of the thousands of registered lobbyists on Capitol Hill. The bill
requires lobbyists to publish detailed reports of their activities on the
Internet and imposing jail time for violations. The House also passed a bill requiring lobbyists to file quarterly
Internet disclosures of their "bundling" activities. Bundling is
combining scores or hundreds of small individual donations into large campaign
contributions to members of Congress. See
vote
The House passed, 241-177, and sent to the Senate a bill to
expand the House from 435 to 437 seats by declaring the District of Columbia a
congressional district and awarding Utah another House seat. See vote
The Senate overwhelmingly approved far-reaching ethics and
lobbying reform legislation. Under the bill, passed 96-2, senators will give
up gifts and free travel from lobbyists, pay more for travel on corporate jets
and make themselves more accountable for the pet projects they insert into
bills. See vote The Senate did
reject the idea of setting up an independent office to investigate the ethical
breaches of members (see vote) and
stripped the bill of a provision requiring reporting of "grass-roots"
lobbying (see vote). See story
from Associated Press
The use of a paperless voting system is causing significant
controversy in resolving a close election in Sarasota, Florida. See story from
Christian Science Monitor
Software-dependent electronic voting machines, "are not
viable for future voting systems" and "in practical terms cannot be
made secure," according to a draft report prepared by the US National
Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the Election Assistance
Commission (EAC). The NIST report instead strongly favored what they called
software-independent systems. Those systems do not rely on software alone for
vote-tallying and often have a paper back-up system. See
story from Jurist
Despite voter concerns, experts report the voting system is
improving overall. See story from
Christian Science Monitor
This election year, amid concern that special-interest money
and deep-pocketed corporations are unduly influencing statewide initiative
campaigns, a new ballot measure comes before California voters which would,
among other reforms, limit the amount companies and organizations can
contribute to such measures. See story from
Christian Science Monitor
A new study raises serious questions about whether Diebold
touch-screen voting devices used in more than half of Ohio's counties produce
accurate results, but Diebold insists the machines can be trusted and that the
study is flawed. See story
from Columbus Dispatch See
study
As election season nears, efforts to upgrade voting machines have bogged down. About half the states missed a deadline to replace old apparatus. California is one racing to comply. See story from Christian Science Monitor
The US Supreme Court has stepped smack into the middle of a highly contentious political battle in Texas over redrawn congressional election districts. In a surprise move Monday, the justices announced that they would examine the constitutionality of a Republican effort in 2003 to redraw voting districts in a way that heavily favored Republican candidates. See story from Christian Science Monitor
With a flurry of corruption indictments and related plea agreements threatening to become a storm, Congress is feeling the heat on ethics reform. Criminal investigations in Texas, California, and Florida are shining a bright light on standards of conduct in Congress, helping sink public confidence in the institution to its lowest point in more than a decade. See story from Christian Science Monitor
Big money is buying influence in Washington these days on a scale seen rarely, if ever, before. After the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, big-ticket defense contracts doubled, federal spending on those contracts jumped by $100 billion - and the number of lobbyists signed up to represent defense-industry clients spiked from 900 to more than 1,650. While California Congressman Randall Cunningham clearly crossed a legal line by trading legislative favors for personal gain, his case spotlights the intersection of money and politics in Washington, where most lawmakers dance along a vaguer line that divides political donations from less-explicit paybacks. See story from Knight Ridder
The House of Representatives narrowly turned back an effort to exempt all Internet communication from campaign-finance regulations, dealing at least a temporary defeat to a bill that would allow unfettered political advertising -- and unlimited spending -- in the vast frontier of cyberspace. See story from Boston Globe
A bipartisan commission headed by former President Carter, a Democrat, and former Secretary of State James Baker, a Republican, has recommended additional changes - including a call for all voters to show photo IDs, paper trails for electronic voting machines, and a shift toward nonpartisan administration of elections. The photo ID proposal has generated significant opposition. See story from Christian Science Monitor
Just six months into a new term for President Bush and the Republican-controlled Congress, many major Republican donors are scoring victories on the legislative and regulatory fronts. These include passage of class action and bankruptcy reform, the resignation of SEC Chairman Donaldson, and the continued use of national forest land by oil and gas interests. See story from USA Today
Since 2000, members of Congress have taken more than 5,900 privately financed trips at a cost of $17.6 million, according to the non-partisan PoliticalMoneyLine, which analyzes data on money in politics. More than half of the spending has come from tax-exempt groups such as America's Trust. See story from USA Today
A full summary of the alleged 2004 election irregularities can be found at the Wikipedia web site.
Candidates, parties and independent groups spent more than $1.6 billion on television ads in 2004, a record for any campaign year and double the amount spent in the 2000 presidential election. See press release from Alliance for Better Campaigns
Concerns persist about the integrity of the nation's voting system - particularly in Ohio, where details continue to emerge of technology failures, voter confusion and overcrowded polling stations in minority and poor neighborhoods. Rev. Jesse Jackson and other activists want wholesale changes in the U.S. voting process, ideally before the 2006 midterm elections. Jackson says the most distressing problem appears to be the lack of nationwide standards. No federal agency enforces regulations when states or counties fail to comply with internal procedures. See story from Associated Press
Whether they use ticks on ballot papers, buttons on touch-pads, or hand-held bar code readers, foreign voters enjoy one advantage over their US counterparts: Within each country, voters cast their ballots using just one method, and those ballots are counted uniformly. With the advent of technology, foreign elections have been remarkably free from controversy. See story from Christian Science Monitor
San Francisco has embarked on an innovation in democracy that has the rest of the nation taking notice: The city's voters will elect seven seats on the Board of Supervisors using a method called ranked-choice, or instant-runoff voting. See story from San Francisco Chronicle
This was going to be the year -- thanks to the 2002 campaign finance law -- when big money lost its influence in American politics. But the huge donations of a handful of wealthy liberals named Linda Pritzker, Stephen L. Bing, Peter B. Lewis and George Soros have had a significant effect. Together, they have given more than $26 million to help finance the most extensive get-out-the vote operation in history, the goal of which is to make John F. Kerry president. See story from Washington Post
The character attacks in this Presidential campaign may actually benefit Bush even when the attacks are directed at the President. Kerry would like to change the dialogue to issues that favor him, and anything that's a distraction from that is to Bush's advantage. Polls show that voters favor Kerry on most issues, such as jobs and healthcare, with terrorism the major exception. See story from Christian Science Monitor
When the Supreme Court upheld campaign finance reform last December, the hopes and fears of political observers ran high. Nothing of the kind has happened. The parties, now unable to receive those large, unlimited donations, have been forced to expand their donor bases, and are wealthier than ever. See story from Christian Science Monitor
The two campaigns and their allies have spent more than $250 million in ads thus far in an election cycle that features unparalleled intensity, unusually early. And in the end, all this message-mongering sways very few votes. See story from Christian Science Monitor
As the political conventions begin, corporate big spenders, who have been restrained by new campaign finance laws, finally can cut loose. In all, more than 150 donors have contributed more than $39.5 million - money they could not legally give to a political party or a candidate under the new law but are permitted to donate to a convention. See story from New York Times
A coalition of computer scientists, voter groups and state officials, led by California's secretary of state, Kevin Shelley, is trying to force the makers of electronic voting machines to equip those machines with voter-verifiable paper trails. See story from New York Times
With a new round of presidential debates on the horizon, third-party candidates are preparing to file suit in federal court in Washington, challenging what they say is a pattern of manipulation of the debate process in favor of major-party candidates. They argue that Democrats and Republicans run the Commission on Presidential Debates for the benefit of the nation's two major political parties and at the expense of virtually all the country's smaller parties and lesser-known candidates. That raises a deeper question about what rules can best serve the informational needs of America's prospective voters. See story from Christian Science Monitor
Term limits - the great political revolt that rolled into California and spilled across 21 states since the early 1990s - has reached its high- tide mark and may be ebbing. See story from Christian Science Monitor
After decades of playing poor relation to television advertising, grass- roots politics has become a campaign star this year, as many political pros predicted it would be in the aftermath of the Bush-Gore face-off of 2000. See story from New York Times
The House ethics system has almost stopped functioning because public interest groups can no longer file complaints and party leaders have an informal agreement not to trigger new investigations. Conservative Judicial Watch, joined by mostly liberal groups in a news conference, urged reversal of the prohibition against nongovernment organizations and an end to what they called a sweetheart pact to avoid investigations. See story from Associated Press
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