Ensign: No Transparency for YouIt’s a minor victory, one that won’t be recorded in the history books. But it looks like the Senate Republican leadership’s strategy to keep Senate campaign disclosure reports from being easily searchable is on its way to success.
As we laid out before, they’ve long been fighting a bill to require the disclosure reports to be filed electronically, something the House did six years ago. The latest coup was a move by Sen. John Ensign (R-NV) to add a poison pill to the simple and thoroughly uncontroversial bill (it’s got 41 co-sponsors, including 16 Republicans). Ensign said that bill is going nowhere unless it has his amendment, which would require non-profits that file ethics complaints against senators to disclose all donors who gave $5,000 or more, a measure that would effectively discourage ethics complaints against senators.
Last month, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) asked pretty please if Ensign might offer the amendment separately, since it has nothing to do with the underlying bill. Today, his answer came: no (sub. req.). And that means that senators will most likely not be required to electronically file in the run-up to the 2008 election — definitely good news for candidates who will be receiving contributions they’d rather not have to explain.