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Taxpayers Still Missing Sunlight Before Signing
Wednesday, July 7, 2010 12:19 PM
by Julie Borowski We have detailed how President Obama’s campaign promise to place all legislation online for at least 5 days prior to signing has been broken time and time again. According to the Cato Institute, only 6 out of 123 bills were available for the public to read online 5 days before signing in 2009. Since then, the Obama administration has made very gradual steps to increase transparency. This includes making the White House website a bit easier for the casual viewer to navigate and read the entirety of specific bills. However, CFA would prefer the legislation section of the site to be in an organized order instead of a complete clutter like it is currently. This year, 37 out of 69 bills have received the Sunlight Before Signing treatment. While this is an improvement from last year, 53.6% of the bills getting Sunlight Before Signing still falls short of Obama’s promise – and as we’ve seen before, without a 100 percent commitment to the posting of bills, political expediency will supersede transparency. Congressional leaders, who have promised to do their part to put bills online for taxpayer viewing, have not upheld this promise either – we have repeatedly held Speaker Pelosi’s feet to the fire on her pledge to put all legislation online for 72 hours before it receives a floor vote, though we have yet to see a consistent effort made to that end. We will continue to urge both the White House and Congress to let taxpayers read the bills they are signing into law. The trend upwards of bills that have been available for taxpayer viewing is positive, but we are still a far cry from the complete legislative transparency taxpayers were promised.
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