For a while last week it looked as if the Senate was finally going to wrestle itself into the digital age (and full public view) and require members to file their campaign fund-raising reports electronically. That is until Senator Unknown, Republican of Nowhere, put a hold on the bipartisan legislation.
For years the Senate has clung to a tedious paper-intensive method of filing worthy of Bartleby. The information, which can show which senators are close to what big-money special interests, is churned twice like a cud, through paper, then separate computer versions, before being available to the public, months after the comparable money reports of House members and lobbyists.
The reform measure, sponsored by Senators Russell Feingold, Democrat of Wisconsin, and Thad Cochran, Republican of Mississippi, was suddenly stopped on the way to passage by the G.O.P. floor manager acting in behalf of some unidentified colleague. Senator Dianne Feinstein, the Democrat of California who shepherded the bill through earlier committee gates with unanimous approval, was mystified as she wondered aloud about “somebody in this body” up to an old trick. It is time for someone — Senator Mustard in the cloakroom, perhaps — to end the hold and stop embarrassing the Senate.
And while they’re at it, it is time for senators to give up their right to block action anonymously, without having to admit their obstructionist ways.
This hoary tradition, perpetrated as stealthily as a poison ring potion in the Medici era, was singled out for complaint this year in Congress’s ethics-reform debate. A bipartisan Senate majority voted commendably to end it as part of a larger reform bill. That measure, however, still needs final approval in the House.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/22/opinion/22sun3.html
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