Politics

Sunlight Live: Financial Regulation Debate

By Jake Brewer

Starting at at 2pm ET today, Sunlight is going to be covering the endgame of the financial reform in the Senate with our pretty-awesome-if-we-do-say-so-ourselves Sunlight Live platform.

Tune in at http://sunlightfoundation.com/live.

This will be our  latest experiment with Sunlight Live, as Sunlight’s team of reporters and technologists will provide contextual political information about interest groups trying to influence reform and senators as they take to the floor for the final maneuvering.

We hope you’ll join us, ask questions in our live blog forum, and share your thoughts on Twitter.

We most recently used the Sunlight Live platform to cover the health care debate in February as it unfolded during a bi-partisan summit convened by the White House. It was a lot of fun and was met with rave reviews, so we figure we should keep doing it (and keep getting better at it).

We’ll be starting our coverage with today’s vote on cloture, and if cloture clears, continue our coverage for the final debate and vote tomorrow (May 20). Typically a cloture vote wouldn’t be so interesting, but there’s a lot going on up on the Hill this week, so we hope you’ll join in for some (potential) fireworks.

The shortlink we’re using to share the debate coverage on Twitter and Facebook is http://bit.ly/FinRegLive alongside the politically ubiquitous hashtag #FinReg

To get started immediately, here are a couple useful bits to catch anyone up who may not be feeling up to speed.

First the actual bill being debated:

S. 3217 Restoring America?s Financial Stability Act of 2010
?   Sponsor: Sen. Chris Dodd (D-CT)
?   No cosponsors
?  150 amendements proposed
?  As of 5/18/10 only 13 amendments had been agreed upon by the senate.

Of particular note in the bill today is Senator Blanche Lincoln?s proposed legislation to regulate derivates which has been rolled up into Dodd?s bill. Because Senator Lincoln’s primary in Arkansas has resulted in a runoff, her part of the bill is in question. If she ultimately loses the Arkansas primary, then her contribution to bill S. 3217 could be scrapped.

And second, to see Sunlight’s work during the financial reform debate from the last few months, we’ve collected it all in one page here:

http://sunlightfoundation.com/topics/financial-reform/

See y’all at Sunlight Live!

Full post as published by Sunlight Foundation on May 19, 2010 (boomark / email).