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Confessions Of A Beltway Journalism Insider

I've been inside the Beltway too long. I know this because of the blog entry I inadvertently posted yesterday (now deleted), before realizing I had fallen prey to a bunch of insider mumbo-jumbo about arcane Senate traditions.

The subject of my attention was the latest blog swarm against "secret holds" in the Senate. On Tuesday, two Democratic senators tried to win expedited passage of a bill, S. 223, to mandate electronic filing of Senate campaign finance documents, but an anoynmous Republican senator objected and thus blocked action on the bill.

Led by the Sunlight Foundation, blogs pounced on the inaction and accused the unnamed senator of placing a secret hold on yet another bill aimed at government transparency. The watchdog group reminded readers that two senators had availed themselves of the chamber's "hold" tradition last year to block a bill on federal budget transparency, only to be embarrassed by bloggers into lifting the hold.

"We need your help to find out who placed this secret hold!" Paul Blumenthal wrote. "Call your senators and ask them if they are the one with the secret hold on S. 223. Then report back."

Multiple blogs, including Instapundit, TPMMuckraker and GOPProgress, which played lead roles in last year's successful fight against the secret hold, touted the latest call for transparency in government. Even The Caucus, a blog of The New York Times, reported the story.

I loved watching bloggers out the secret holders last year. It was a telling example of the power of networked citizen journalism. It also put to shame we Beltway journalists who see parliamentary shenanigans all the time and ignore them rather than asking simple questions like, "Are you the senator behind the secret hold?"

With that in mind, I decided to ask that simple question myself this time. Knowing that a Republican was behind Tuesday's objection to expedited passage of the electronic disclosure bill, and that Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., is no fan of campaign finance law, my first instinct was to contact his office and see if he was the culprit.

McConnell spokesman Don Stewart responded immediately via e-mail and said McConnell was not behind the objection. But then he said something else that completely threw me off the scent of the transparency story: There was no "hold" on the bill at all because it had not been "hotlined" -- another Senate tradition by which lawmakers privately gain unanimous consent to a bill and then move it to the floor.

His point sounded plausible, so I did a little more reporting and indeed learned, by checking the Congressional Record, what actually happened on the floor.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., asked "unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the immediate consideration of [the bill] ... that the committee-reported amendment be considered and agreed to; that the bill, as amended, be read three times, passed; and that the motion to reconsider be laid upon the table, with no intervening action." In other words, she requested immediate passage of the bill, without any floor debate.

The anonymous Republican senator in question may well oppose the bill itself, but his or her objection technically was only to an expedited vote on the measure -- and that's not at all unusual for the more deliberative half of America's legislative body.

I mentioned all of that in a post much like the one Robert Bluey of the Heritage Foundation penned when I realized that McConnell's spokesman had been dodging my other questions.

Specifically, I asked four times, in some way or another, "Which Republican senator objected to the bill?" Stewart ignored the question the first three times and never answered the fourth e-mail. In that last e-mail, I also asked whether McConnell will vote for the campaign finance transparency bill on the floor. No response.

That's when it dawned on me that for whatever reason, the minority leader's office doesn't want to talk about the substance of the bill and whether it should be passed.

While bloggers may be wrong on parliamentary procedure, they appear to be right on the money in assuming that some Republican lawmaker -- and perhaps the Senate Republican leadership -- doesn't like yet another transparency bill and may even be working to keep it from seeing action. "In our mind," the Sunlight Foundation's Blumenthal wrote, "a hold is a hold is a hold, unless you want to debate what the definition of 'is' is." He urged people to keep pressuring their senators for answers.

Republican new media consultant David All agreed with that sentiment: "Regardless of what procedure was used -- secret hold/anonymous hold -- the facts point out that this bill was blocked in one way or another. Whether it was to review the bill -- which is a noble pause for reflection -- is not the issue." He also predicted that "this procedural hiccup" will help win passage of the bill "in the very near future."

I entered this fray as a journalist, not as an activist for or against the particular bill in question. I just wanted to ask a question and get an answer. That didn't happen. With me at least, Don Stewart chose spin over transparency, and I'm not happy about it.

So to all of you bloggers out there, I wholeheartedly endorse the underlying message of this campaign against a non-hotlined, secret, non-hold objection: Keep calling your senators and demanding answers. I don't care whether you're doing it because you're more interested in journalism (like me) or campaign finance activism. Just do it -- and don't let anyone stonewall you.

Posted by Danny | 12:07 PM

Comments

Speaking as a relatively new blogger myself I love seeing and hearing this sort of thing. The more people we have working together the more we can force our *COUGH*elected officials*COUGH* to be more responsive and OPEN to us *mere* citizens. And I mean BOTH sides fo the aisle. They both have weasles within their ranks.

Rico J. Halo | 04.19.07 10:30 PM

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