Politics

Lobby for a Special Interest: Yours

By Nicole Aro

As Ellen wrote yesterday, today marks the one-year anniversary of the landmark Citizens United v. FEC decision. On this day, the Supreme Court drastically altered our electoral landscape by giving corporations and unions the right to spend unlimited sums on campaign advertising. With the failure of the DISCLOSE Act in the last Congress, it is becoming increasingly difficult to track this influx of money and how it impacts our democracy.

Campaign funding isn?t the only place money impacts politics, however. The increasing and opaque influence of lobbyists gives moneyed special interests ever more power over legislative decisions and policies that affect our daily lives.

It?s time to change that.

Over the coming months -- and if necessary, years -- Sunlight will fiercely advocate for greater transparency and disclosure around lobbying, and we want you to be involved every step of the way. The first step is building legislation that closes the loopholes for lobbyists and makes the influence of special interests transparent to the public.

You can see and comment on our first draft of it at PublicMarkup.org - it?s the Real Time Online Lobbying Transparency Act. (Note: Ideas for catchier names are also welcome).

Over the next few weeks, we?ll solicit your thoughts, suggestions and edits on PublicMarkup. We?ll incorporate these into the final legislation that we?ll use to build our campaign for real-time, online lobbying transparency. To join the campaign and get regular updates on lobbying reform, sign up at http://sunlightfoundation.com/policy/lobbying/.

Full post as published by Sunlight Foundation on January 21, 2011 (boomark / email).