Legistorm: Transparency's Sidekick

Vice President Dick Cheney might head his own fourth branch of government, as his critics have noted of his unusual legal claims to be outside the disclosure laws of the other branches of government, but some of his staff's salaries are reported with the legislative branch. Just not all of them.

So we are reminded by a piece by Dan Froomkin on today's Washington Post website, which points out that our web site has salaries for 33 Office of the Vice President staffers by virtue of its "mostly ceremonial role as president of the Senate." But "top Cheney aides such as chief of staff David S. Addington and national security adviser John Hannah, who are paid out of the vice president's executive appropriation, don't show up anywhere in the public domain."

It must be nice to avoid such kind of scrutiny.

A congressman, Rep. Roscoe Bartlett (R-Md.), says he will be amending his personal financial disclosure after a local newspaper, the Frederick News-Post, reported that he failed to disclose about $1 million in real estate sales as well as real estate loans he provided.

The congressman called it a simple oversight due to inattention and confusion over several properties. "Nothing sinister, not trying to hide anything," he told the News-Post.

We expect that with the greater availability of financial disclosures of both members and staff, which LegiStorm put online for the first time this year, more such disclosures are likely.

LegiStorm has posted the latest congressional staff salary data from the U.S. Senate.

The salary data covers the period Oct. 1, 2007 through March 31, 2008. The six-month semester of Senate disbursement data was made available by the Government Printing Office in book form in June and since then we have been busy converting that data into an accurate and structured database form.

This latest addition of staff salary data brings our salaries database to nearly 500,000 individual salary records. We now have Senate data from October 2002 forward and House data from January 2002. We are continuing to grow our database by adding historical data.

LegiStorm has now completed the upload of all personal financial disclosures filed in 2008 for all House and Senate members and aides.

We uploaded the members of the House and Senate the same morning they were released but the staff have been a much bigger chore. We uploaded Senate staff last week and have now just completed the House staff.

All in all, we have 1,727 disclosures from members of Congress, including amendments. We have 4.850 disclosures for aides. All are avaiable to users who register for free.

We at LegiStorm were fascinated to read a story in Politico this week which polled the offices of all senators to find out where they got their mortgages, especially by the answer of the former head of the Senate banking committee, Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Ala.).

The Politico survey comes after documents reveal that two senators, Chris Dodd (D-Conn.) and Kent Conrad (D-N.D.), received preferential treatment on their mortgages from Countrywide after requesting help from the head of the company. So Politico surveyed senators to find out how others received their mortgages. So far, 15 senators have not bothered to answer the poll.

But we were particularly intrigued by the response of Shelby, who headed the Senate Banking, House and Urban Affairs Committee and is still its ranking member. According to Politico, Shelby responded that he has no mortgages on his two homes. In fact, LegiStorm's data indicates that Shelby has a $1-$5 million mortgage with Wells Fargo Bank.