Last August, we united with Porkbusters.org and GOP Progress to unmask the senator who was holding up a bill introduced by Sens. Barack Obama (D-IL) and Tom Coburn (R-OK) to create a public, searchable database of all federal grants and contracts.

For days, we worked the phones and gathered responses that hundreds of TPMm readers had received from senators' offices, eventually eliminating 98 senators as being behind the hold. And indeed, there turned out to be not one, but two pork-happy senators behind the hold: Sens. Ted Stevens (R-AK) and Robert Byrd (D-WV). (The two didn't seem to appreciate the irony of holding up a government transparency bill in a singularly nontransparent way.) After being unmasked, the senators lifted their holds and the bill sailed through to passage.

Well, this morning, FedSpending.gov finally launched.

It'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.