Nearly four decades ago, the delivery of a suitcase stuffed with $250,000 in cash to one of then-President Richard Nixon's top aides helped fuel the Watergate scandal and a complete overhaul of the laws regulating campaign finance. Voters in the 2012 election are likely to know less about who is trying to influence their decision than they have at any time since then. And, compared to the amounts of unregulated dollars flowing into campaigns, the stash of cash that former Commerce Secretary Maurice Stans accepted during the 1972 presidential campaign seems like peanuts.

Here's a look at the rise and fall of the system designed to limit the influence of big money in politics. For an interactive version of this timeline, check here.

1971
Congress passes major overhauls to the patchwork of regulations governing campaign finance. The Federal Election Campaign Act established comprehensive rules for political parties, campaign committees of politicians and political action committees. The Federal Election Campaign Act set rules for raising money, and limited the amount that donors could give to campaigns -- as well as how much candidates themselves -- and their families -- could subsidize their races. The act required campaigns, parties and PACs to disclose their donors and their spending. One major weakness was the lack of a centralized agency to handle disclosure and enforcement The Revenue Act enabled taxpayers to voluntarily set aside $1 ($2 for married couples) – on their federal tax returns for the Presidential Election Campaign Fund. The amounts were raised in 1993 to $3 and $6 respectively.

1972
The Watergate scandal erupts, beginning with an investigation of a break-in at Democratic Party headquarters in the Watergate hotel and ending, the following year, with the resignation of President Richard Nixon. One of the associated scandals around Nixon’s Committee to Reelect the President, dubbed CREEP, involved finance chair Maurice Stans, who doubled as Nixon’s commerce secretary and raised $60 million for the boss’ reelection. This infamously included a $250,000 cash contribution—delivered in a bulging briefcase—from financier and fraudster Robert Vesco, who sought to end a Securities and Exchange Commission investigation of his looting of a Geneva-based mutual fund. Some of Vesco’s cash ended up going to the Watergate burglars. Stans delivered $70,000 worth of it, again in a briefcase, to Nixon’s personal lawyer to pass on to them. The reaction to Watergate prompted Congress to adopt more stringent campaign finance regulatons.

1974
Congress passes the post Watergate amendments the Federal Election Campaign Act, limiting the size of individual contributions to candidates; limiting donations for independent expenditures to elect candidates and prohibiting or restating longstanding prohibitions on political contributions and expenditures by corporations and labor unions. The act created the Federal Election Commission as a central point for disclosure and enforcement of campaign finance rules, and required those engaged in election activity to register with the FEC and disclose funding sources and expenditures

1976
The first presidential election in which public financing is available to candidates is conducted as a major court challenge is mounted to the Federal Election Campaign Act. In Buckley v. Valeo, the Supreme Court first established the notion that the First Amendment bans the government from limiting how much money is spent on campaigns . In the Buckley case, the issue revolved around the self-financing of a campaign: Could an individual use his personal fortune to run for public office? The court ruled that he could. While government can limit size of contributions to candidate, it can’t limit the size of spending by a candidate independently advocating his own election, the high court said. Trevor Potter, a former FEC chairman who has served as GOP presidential candidate John McCain’s 2008 election lawyer now as satirist Stephen Colbert’s super PAC consultant, told a group of Austin lawyers in December that the seeds for super PACs were planted in the Buckley v. Valeo decision.

1980
Public participation in the presidential public financing system reaches an all-time high of nearly 29 percent. As of 2010, the number was just above 7 percent.

More >

Here is an interactive timeline of the events that shape money in politics. Click on the dots for more information.

Sources: Campaign Legal Center, Congressional Research Service, FEC, OYEZ, Sunlight reporting

Making good on part of the House of Representative's commitment to increase congressional transparency, today the House Clerk's office launched http://docs.house.gov/, a one stop website where the public can access all House bills, amendments, resolutions for floor consideration, and conference reports in XML, as well as information on floor proceedings and more. Information will ultimately be published online in real time and archived for perpetuity.

The Clerk is hosting the site, and the information will primarily come from the leadership, the Committee on House Administration, the Rules Committee, and the Clerk's office. The project has been driven by House Republican leaders as part of an push for transparency. Important milestones include the adoption of the new House Rules in January 2011 that gave the Committee on House Administration the power to establish standards for publishing documents online, an April 2011 letter from the Speaker and Majority Leader to the Clerk calling for better public access to House information, a Committee on House Administration hearing  in June 2011 on modernizing information delivery in the House, a December 2011 public meeting on public access to congressional information, and finally the late December adoption of online publication standards.

Today's effort focuses on House documents, but there is a similar series of requirements for committee and other documents that will be addressed as the Clerk's site is further built out. Three things strike me as particularly important for what has happened today

First, the House made a commitment to do something concrete -- publish documents online in machine-friendly formats by January 2012-- and they did that. All too often, transparency promises fall by the wayside or are beaten back by bureaucracy. This is a commitment made, and one that is being kept. (We will keep a close eye on things, just in case.)

Second, the ongoing process of releasing documents online, in real-time, and in machine-readable manner is a tremendous sea change from the slow and ponderous paper publications that are often late,  fairly difficult to use, and unfriendly to computers. PDFs, by themselves, are simply insufficient for transparency purposes, and have been for a very long time, and it's important that we're moving towards making information available in such as a way as to maximize its usefulness.

Third, the House is forging ahead the best it can. It would be ideal to have the Senate joining the House in this effort, or have legislative support agencies taking the initiative, but all too often these joint efforts result in nothing happening. It's important for everyone to make the best progress they can, and that's what's happening here.

It will be fun to see when the next shoe drops.

Original post >

While the middle class is facing a tax hike because of yet another congressional stalemate, Wall Street hedge funds and their investors are increasing their worth by employing a strategy of secret meetings with Capitol Hill lawmakers to glean insider information that impacts stock prices and guides investment strategy.

As I noted here,the legal yet secretive political intelligence industry uses connections to lawmakers to find out whether stocks are likely to rise or fall in the face of upcoming congressional action. Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal reported on the practice, documenting dozens of meetings between political intelligence firms and Members of Congress that helped hedge funds make investment decisions yielding hefty profits.

It is outrageous that political intelligence firms acquire market-moving information before anyone else, and can do so without any transparency. Unlike lobbyists, who at least have to disclose who their clients are and what issues they are working on, political intelligence operatives are subject to no disclosure mandates.

The Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge Act (STOCK Act) would require anyone collecting information for the purpose of investment decisions to register and report their activities. The bill would also explicitly ban insider trading by Members of Congress and their staff.

Unfortunately, despite 241 cosponsors in the House and companion legislation in the Senate, some in Congress are attempting to derail the bill, or at the very least weaken its provisions. According to the Journal story, Sen. Joe Lieberman is pushing to require a government study of the issue, rather than immediately impose disclosure requirements.

In response, Rep. Slaughter, a lead sponsor of the bill said in a press release, “Let me tell you, we don’t need a study to understand this industry; we need transparency and regulation so that the public, Members, staff, and regulators know who is speaking to Congress to gain an advantage on the financial markets.”

We couldn’t have said it better ourselves.