U.S. Congress

Help Solve the Mystery - For Whom Were the Fired U.S. Attorneys Pushed Aside?

The nation's capital has been in an uproar this week over the U.S. attorney firings controversy. Both the House and Senate Judiciary Committees held hearings Tuesday on the matter, where six of eight former U.S. attorneys (all fired in late 2006) testified that they had been the target of complaints, telephone calls and threats from either a high-ranking Justice Department official or members of Congress in the days and weeks preceding their abrupt dismissals. The replacements for the attorneys are rumored to be political appointees with little prosecutorial experience.

The story dates back to March 2006, when President Bush signed the reauthorization of the USA Patriot Act. The bill included a provision (inserted by a staffer to Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) at the request of the Justice Department) allowing the DOJ to appoint U.S. attorneys indefinitely without a presidential nomination or Senate confirmation (previously, this type of appointment could last only a maximum of 120 days). In late 2006, the administration fired eight U.S. attorneys, insisting each dismissal was motivated by performance.

Congresspedia and Sunlight at the Conservative Political Action Conference

I'm at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Washington, DC representing Congresspedia and the Sunlight Foundation. So far it's been a great opportunity to tap into the conservative community's zeitgeist and find out what upcoming issues in Congress they are most interested in. I've had particularly interesting conversations with the folks from the National Rifle Association, American Foreign Policy Council, National Center for Public Policy Research and the Heritage Foundation about what they're working on. As Congresspedia expands to increasingly cover legislation and issues, the staff here will stay in touch with these organizations and help them and our citizen editors maintain the relevant articles on the wiki. We may even get some interesting (and hopefully productive) dialogues going between editors of opposing ideologies. Because, while people from different ends of the political spectrum may have different opinions, we should all have the same facts. Creating a common, collaborative knowledge base that all people can use to inform their opinions is one of the central – and most exciting – purposes of this project.

So, to kick things off, here are five "stub" pages we've created based on the topics Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) outlined today as important to conservatives in the coming year. If any of them interest you, please jump in and help us expand them into full and rich articles:

OpenCongress: Making citizens the "insiders"

The Sunlight Foundation has taken yet another big step in making government information more accessible to the public. This week, Sunlight launched OpenCongress, an exciting sister project of Congresspedia aimed at providing citizens with a user-friendly avenue to follow the nitty-gritty details of Congress. OpenCongress will track legislation, committees, member fundraising, and what the mainstream media and bloggers are saying about Congress. We believe the project is a great complement to our own project, as providing this wealth of data will help the citizen journalists on Congresspedia do more effective reporting. Together the narrative, citizen-generated content and the hard data combine to give the fullest picture of what Congress is up to.

Here’s the Sunlight Foundation’s Executive Director Ellen Miller to further explain the new project:

Embracing Wikis to Turn College Students into Public Scholars (Using Congresspedia)

Under the old, "broadcast" model of journalism and academia, undergraduate students were generally limited to consuming the scholarship of others while their own research and writing was largely confined to practice exercises. Now Congresspedia is engaging students in the new, participatory model of media and society by publishing their writing on the wiki rather than having it collect dust in a file drawer somewhere. As part of this project (our Student Editor Program), I met last week with the students of Prof. Phil Tajitsu Nash's Asian Pacific Americans and American Public Policy class at the University of Maryland. Prof. Nash's students are engaged in a fascinating research project on the movement for redress for Japanese Latin Americans who were put in internment camps during World War II. Despite enduring similar conditions to US-based Japanese Americans, they were exempted from the redress bill President Reagan signed in the 1980s.

Participatory Democracy: Rate Your Senators' and Representative's Web Pages

The Sunlight Foundation, the Center for Media and Democracy's partner in Congresspedia, has been doing some really interesting participatory journalism lately. Their current project is to get citizens to rate the websites of their members of Congress for transparency and accountability. So far 294 members have been rated and, in the wake of members like Sen. Jon Tester (D-Mont.) and Rep. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) posting their daily schedules online, the bar is getting higher for what citizens expect. The best part is that when the results are all in, we're going to post them on every member's Congresspedia profile so it can become part of their permanent record.

Here's the Sunlight Foundation's Bill Allison to explain the effort and how you can participate:

Pombo's Clear-Cut Path to the Revolving Door

Submitted by Diane Farsetta on

"Former [U.S.] House Resources Committee Chairman Richard Pombo has joined a lobbying and public relations firm that backed his attempts to rework the Endangered Species Act and open the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve to oil drilling," reports Josh Richman.

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Main Source: 
Contra Costa Times (California), February 21, 2007
Topics: 
Astroturf
U.S. Congress
Environment
Lobbying
Public Relations

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