Quorum Call
Electronic filing for Senate candidates won't pass if committee members don't show up.

Wednesday, March 28, 2007

TODAY AT 10 a.m., the U.S. Senate could take its first step into the 21st century when the Rules and Administration Committee meets to vote on a measure that would require candidates for the Senate to file their campaign finance reports electronically. That's great news for a voting public that ought to be able to see immediately who's giving to whom and how the money is being spent. Of course, this issue being at the crossroads of politics and money, the prospects of something so simple being passed today are anything but simple.

All that sponsors Russell Feingold (D-Wis.) and Thad Cochran (R-Miss.) wanted to do was bring to the Senate the common-sense advance that for years has been standard operating procedure for candidates for the House of Representatives and the White House and for political parties, "527" groups and PACs. Electronic filing for Senate candidates would eliminate the so-last-century practice of filing papers with the Senate Office of Public Records, which then scans and sends them to the Federal Election Commission, which then sends them out to a vendor, which keys the information into an electronic database and sends it back to the FEC in its new form.

Enter Sen. Bob Bennett (R-Utah) to gum up the wheels. He has proposed an amendment that would do away with limits on how much parties can spend in coordination with their candidates. He maintains that his proposal will increase the transparency of the underlying legislation. But it's clear that the best and probably only chance for this proposal is if the committee approves a clean, unadulterated bill. Proponents want it approved by unanimous consent to keep it from becoming flypaper for any senator's half-baked campaign finance innovation.

But here's the next and more immediate problem: There's no guarantee even of a quorum for today's vote. Committee members say they're in favor of the electronic filing bill. But what better way to kill the bill in committee than to conveniently miss a decisive vote? The 19 members of the Senate Rules Committee should show up today and pass a clean bill that would finally pull their august club into the modern world.