Recently, Matt Stoller at OpenLeft noted that transparency is a place for bipartisan coalitions:
Transparency is one of the few places where there really is a bipartisan alliance. Newt Gingrich created Thomas, the web resources for legislation, and the Republicans do have a history of advocating for open government and new models of communication, including C-Span, direct mail, and web communication. Some progressive Democrats do as well, but the old school top-down Democrats elected under the good government influences of the 1970s tend towards restricting political participation.
A number of conservative groups, under the umbrella of Show Me The Spending, have been pushing the idea of requiring state governments, check the progress here, to put all spending on the web, modeled on the Coburn-Obama:
With your assistance and the help of a wide-ranging coalition of organizations, Congress passed the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act, creating a website (now located at www.usaspending.gov) where visitors can search for federal grant and contract spending. This was a great victory for government transparency, but now we need to replicate this win in all 50 states.
The basic idea is that every disbursement by the state government would be recorded. The amount, the date, the recipient, etc. This is not a partisan issue, although it creates the context for populist revolts. In Washington state, a law was passed through both Democratic controlled houses and signed by a Democratic governor.
Even better, this can be done by governors through executive order. Once people and the press start using that, there will be a constituency that will prevent a bad governor from repealing. And once we achieve transparency at the state level, we can push it down into the municipalities.
As I said, this creates conditions that support a populist revolt. Grover Norquist has described each of these as little earmarks that can be exposed, and it provides the record that you can wrap around the neck of corrupt politicians.
We need this kind of stuff. Let’s go to work.