Unlock the Sausage Factory

The executive branch isn’t the only place where our government is far too secretive. Congress has its own problem with hiding its activities, which is particularly disgraceful because legislators are supposed to be the people’s representatives.

As I’ve discussed, one of Congress’s main jobs is to oversee the executive branch. The founding fathers intended Congress to be most directly overseen by us. But how can we do that when they hide so much of their work from us? We have a right to know what they are doing. We pay their salaries and we hire and fire them every time there is an election.

“If you like laws or sausages, you should never watch either of them being made.” - Otto von Bismarck

Bismarck might be right about the making of laws. Making them may not be pretty-not to mention, it can be a brutally boring process-but no matter how tough it is on the eyes, we should be able to witness every aspect of the legislative process. That means every vote, every debate, and every meeting of every committee and subcommittee. Nowadays, C-Span only shows a small fraction of the activities happening everyday. The votes, meetings and hearings the network does not show should be readily available on the Internet.

In addition, the attendance records and daily calendars for every member of Congress should be public record. I challenge legislators to publish their meeting schedules on the Internet and account for every minute of every day. After all, they’re supposed to be our employees. We pay their bills. Don’t we, as their bosses, have a right to know what they’re doing with our time?

Most importantly: There should also be publicly available databases for every dime spent by Congress. We should be able to look up individual lawmakers on the Internet, click on their names, and see a complete list of the funding projects they have sponsored.

The fact that lawmakers can slip in millions, even billions, in earmarks when no one is watching is just too much temptation, not to mention too much power. If they know we’ll be able to see what they’ve done, I guarantee you our legislators won’t be so quick to lard their bills with thousands of earmarks and pet projects. Sunshine isn’t just a good cure for corruption, it might just be a way to stop out of control spending.

NEXT: Reason #26: The Business of Government is the Business of Business