U.S. Congress

The Center for Media and Democracy and Free Press today issued the following letter to members of the House Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet.

This past week was a busy one on Capitol Hill, as both the House and Senate were in session all five days. To summarize the items which were debated and considered on the floor, we will turn to TheWeekInCongress. As we first told you earlier this week, Congresspedia will be cross-posting stories covered on this site (a project of Sunlight friend Robert McElroy) at the end of each week in which at least one chamber was in session.

The nation's capital has been in an uproar this week over the U.S. attorney firings controversy. Both the House and Senate Judiciary Committees held hearings Tuesday on the matter, where six of eight former U.S. attorneys (all fired in late 2006) testified that they had been the target of complaints, telephone calls and threats from either a high-ranking Justice Department official or members of Congress in the days and weeks preceding their abrupt dismissals. The replacements for the attorneys are rumored to be political appointees with little prosecutorial experience.

The story dates back to March 2006, when President Bush signed the reauthorization of the USA Patriot Act. The bill included a provision (inserted by a staffer to Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) at the request of the Justice Department) allowing the DOJ to appoint U.S. attorneys indefinitely without a presidential nomination or Senate confirmation (previously, this type of appointment could last only a maximum of 120 days). In late 2006, the administration fired eight U.S. attorneys, insisting each dismissal was motivated by performance.

I'm at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Washington, DC representing Congresspedia and the Sunlight Foundation. So far it's been a great opportunity to tap into the conservative community's zeitgeist and find out what upcoming issues in Congress they are most interested in. I've had particularly interesting conversations with the folks from the National Rifle Association, American Foreign Policy Council, National Center for Public Policy Research and the Heritage Foundation about what they're working on. As Congresspedia expands to increasingly cover legislation and issues, the staff here will stay in touch with these organizations and help them and our citizen editors maintain the relevant articles on the wiki. We may even get some interesting (and hopefully productive) dialogues going between editors of opposing ideologies. Because, while people from different ends of the political spectrum may have different opinions, we should all have the same facts. Creating a common, collaborative knowledge base that all people can use to inform their opinions is one of the central – and most exciting – purposes of this project.

So, to kick things off, here are five "stub" pages we've created based on the topics Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) outlined today as important to conservatives in the coming year. If any of them interest you, please jump in and help us expand them into full and rich articles: