Regardless of the ultimate effectiveness of the Wall Street bailout bill, it may well prove to be a milestone on the road to opening up the legislative and governing processes to genuine transparency and accountability. You can read the entire text of the proposal on the Sunlight Foundation’s PublicMARKUP.org web site.
I also encourage you to spend some time on thet Open House Project web site where John Wonderlich details the important transparency provisions contained in the proposal. John notes the call by Sunlight’s Ellen Miller that Congress post the text of the bailout prior to congressional voting in order to assure the public sufficient time to evaluate the proposal and comment on it. Doing so marks a significant step forward for representative government.
At the risk of sounding boastful, I am going to step forward and claim some credit for The Washington Examiner in this process. A week ago tomorrow, we said in an editorial entitled “Bailout plan or a bum’s rush” that negotiators for the Bush administration and Congress needed to slow down and think carefully about what they were doing. And we said:
“Second, a related point is the need for greater transparency in the whole process. It is troubling that more than a few members of Congress came away from closed-door briefings by Paulson over the weekend saying what they heard scared the daylights out of them. The public cannot make wise decisions regarding the present crisis if they do not know the full truth about its seriousness. Paulson and those he briefed need to step up and level with taxpayers. And there should be no hesitation about adopting the suggestion from John McCain and others that all transactions authorized in a bailout be posted on the Internet in an accessible, searchable format. Anything less will be an invitation to the worst kind of insider lobbying abuses that undermine the public interest.” (emphasis added)
I note this not to make a partisan point on behalf of McCain, but to encourage acknowledgement of an emerging reality: McCain was not alone in calling for that level of transparency, of course, but, with key Democrats involved in the negotiations, he was among the first to do so.
That is not surprising because McCain was an important co-sponsor of the Coburn-Obama Federal Financial Accountabilty and Transparency Act of 2006 (FFATA) and is a co-psponsor of the successor bill, the Transparency in Government Act of 2008. The former established USASpending.gov, the searchable database of government spending, while the latter provides important improvements, including posting govenrment contracts online in an accessible format.
Obama made reference to both of these bills during the first presidential debate. Having played a small role in securing passage of FFATA, I freely admit to having absolutely beamed at that point in the debate!
It was all-too-recent that any consideration of transparency on a major national issue was at best an after-thought. Now, it appears that a healthy recognition of the central role of transparency in representative democracy’s governing processes is becoming a fixture in political landscape, even in Congrress.
As Wonderlich notes in his post: “Regardless of the incentives facing congressional leadership, and regardless of the substance of the bill, this episode shows one thing very clearly: the bar for public disclosure has been raised.” That should be encouraging to citizens of all political persuasions, even as much progress remains to be accomplished on this front.
