For months, the Senate Republican leadership have worked to block a Senate bill that would make campaign contributions to Senate candidates immediately and easily searchable. Perhaps figuring that honey works better than vinegar, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) wrote Sen. John Ensign (R-NV) yesterday to ask if he would compromise on the latest effort to sink the bill. We've pasted the letter below.

All the bill would do is require Senate campaign reports to be filed electronically. That's it. The House started doing that six years ago, and journalists, watchdogs, and others constantly rely on the House's easily searchable records to see who's giving to campaigns. The speed of that reporting is especially crucial near the end of campaigns, when Senate candidates' voluminous paper filings, often hundreds of pages long, can make it much harder to figure out a candidates' supporters.

The bill has forty co-sponsors, including sixteen Republicans. Time is running out for the bill to affect the 2008 elections.

But Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) has worked to block the bill for months. And Ensign, coincidentally also the chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee (which works to get Republicans elected to the Senate), stepped up this September to employ a canny strategy of attaching a "poison pill" amendment to the bill. We'd laid out the whole scheme here.

In her letter yesterday, Feinstein asks Ensign to be flexible on his offered amendment, which would require all non-profits that file ethics complaints against senators to disclose all donors who gave $5,000 or more.

Last week, a group of watchdogs from left and right wrote Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) and McConnell to ask that they defeat Ensign's amendment, calling it "a clear attempt to intimidate the public from seeking enforcement of Senate ethics rules."

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It's not hard to imagine: while Harry Reid launches into his tryptophan-fueled nap after Thanksgiving dinner, President Bush makes a flurry of recess appointments.

The Senate majority leader doesn't want that to happen. So, Roll Call reports (sub. req.), Reid is mulling using a little procedural jujitsu. He could keep the Senate in what's called "pro forma" session, where official recess is avoided by having certain Senate floor personnel show up every three days. No recess, no recess appointments. Reid and Bush struck a deal in August in order to avoid that; Bush got a couple nominees through, but agreed to make no recess appointments. But:

Since then, however, tensions have risen between the two branches, and on Wednesday sources said Reid doesn’t seem willing to negotiate with the White House this time. Also, several Senate aides suggested that Bush is increasingly likely to exercise the option since the clock is ticking on the second term of his presidency.

“I don’t think it should surprise anybody,” said one GOP leadership aide.

The chief candidate for a recess appointment would be surgeon general candidate and gay rights foe James Holsinger, but there would assuredly be others. With two days to go until the break, time is running out for a deal.