Senate May Soon Consider Bill Requiring Electronic Filing of Campaign Finance Data

POLITICO [1] reports that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) are negotiating when to bring up a common sense bill that has been held up for years. The Senate Campaign Disclosure Parity Act, S.482 [2], would require campaign fundraising reports to be published on online as House candidates, presidential candidates and other political committees already do. "While the Senate is nearly a decade behind the rest of the world in online transparency, these potential breakthroughs are significant for a chamber that still spends hundreds of thousands of dollars to physically print the documents that show who donates campaign money and how senators spend their office budgets."

Reportedly, Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-IL) conducted an informal whip count. Even though the result of the count was not revealed, it is a good sign that it even occurred. The bill has been stalled in the past partly due to an amendment that has been insisted on, which would require nonprofits that file ethics complaints with the Senate Ethics Committee to disclose their donors. Sen. Pat Roberts (R-KS), "said the amendment is part of a 'longtime' effort to reform the ethics process and that such a proposal is unlikely to move unless it's attached to other legislation. 'Whether or not we’ll be successful, I just don’t know,' Roberts said about his amendment. He said he does not oppose the underlying bill."

Ideally, the bill would pass in time for a new system to be in place for the 2010 elections.

Image by Flickr user artnoose, used under a Creative Commons license.