The Washington Post's Dana Milbank is brilliant today in discussing Alan Schwartz, the former CEO of Bear Stearns and the richest welfare recipient in the nation, and his appearance before the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs. Milbank notes that the head of the investment firm that nearly dragged the entire economy down was questioned by sympathetic and apologetic lawmakers who just so happen to have received $20 million as a whole in campaign contributions from the Securities and Investment industry. Watch the video and read the story:

Last week, Sunlight hosted Larry Lessig as he unfurled the carpet for his new project, Change Congress. The Change Congress effort will ask candidates to select from a pledge whether they will refuse lobbyist and PAC money, refuse earmarks, support public financing, support full transparency in Congress, or a selection of all or some of these proposals. Today, Roll Call reports on the kind of practice that seems to highlight the institutional problems that Congress faces in dealing with the issue of money and influence in the Capitol. The problem does not rest solely with members themselves:

It looks like congressional Republicans have seen MAPLight.org - the insanely useful money-for-votes tracker - and they like the idea. (Also see: National Association of Home Builders.) That idea being that money equals votes and votes equal money and therefore interests that they vote in favor of should kick back some campaign cash to reward their votes:

With the House Democrats’ refusal to grant retroactive immunity to phone companies — stalling the rewrite of the warrantless wiretapping program — GOP leadership aides are grumbling that their party isn’t getting more political money from the telecommunications industry.

Earlier this week we talked about all the cool new applications over at OpenCongress.org (which are really taking off), and today we're delighted to tell you that MAPLight.org has produced some new widgets that allow you to track fundraising for over 1,500 congressional candidates. These widgets are perfect for blogs, social networking pages, and personal Web sites, and they are completely customizable according to the candidates you are interested in.

The congressional money race widgets follow MAPLight.org's August release of presidential money race widgets that allow users to track funds raised by presidential candidates.

For the past year, the Sunlight Foundation has worked to get a bill passed that would require Senators to file their campaign finance contribution reports electronically, allowing that information to be more readily available before elections than it is now. Passage of the bill has been blocked by Republicans, specifically Sen. John Ensign, for this same amount of time. We aren't going to give up on our fight to get S. 223 passed and intend to keep the pressure on this year. To kick things off we've made this video to explain the issue and keep the attention on Sen. Ensign and his unreasonable hold on the bipartisan bill:

Sen. John Ensign continues to block the campaign finance electronic filing bill that Sens. Dianne Feinstein and Russ Feingold have been attempting to pass all year. The bill, which the Sunlight Foundation has fought hard to get passed, has 41 cosponsors including 16 Republicans (including Sens. Bob Bennett, Lamar Alexander, and John Cornyn among others). Despite this not being a partisan issue, Ensign insists on blocking consideration of the bill by offering an irrelevant and controversial amendment, which initially came from the offices of Sen. Mitch McConnell, to require outisde groups filing ethics complaints to disclose their funding sources. This has been noted as unconstitutional law and is an absurd requirement to demand.

Is the Senate Ethics Committee truly overburdened with cases? Sen. Ensign says that complaints in the Senate can be written "on a beverage napkin or written in crayon." I'm not sure what number of ethics complaints are submitted by drunks and children (or some combination of the two) but it can't be that high. In fact, the only known ongoing Senate Ethics Committee investigation was started by the Senate Republicans when they filed a complaint against Sen. Larry Craig for pleading guilty to possibly, maybe, perhaps being gay. Ellen just linked to a list of potential ethical issues facing a number of Republican Senators that could be investigated. If outside groups can file these complaints so easily - in crayon and on a beverage napkin - why isn't the Ethics Committee investigating anything?