Dep’t. of Unsexy: Support Disclosure Parity

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You want no-brainer legislation? Here’s no-brainer legislation.

The Senate Campaign Disclosure Parity Act (S. 223) eliminates the archaic system by which the Senate files campaign fundraising disclosure forms, a system the House did away with years ago. Currently, House candidates and presidential candidates file their fundraising disclosures electronically to the Federal Elections Commission, meaning that information about who is filling the candidates’ coffers gets to the public expeditiously.

The Senate on the other hand has preserved for itself a system that adds darkness and delay to the process. Senate candidates file their reports with the office of the Secretary of the Senate, which prints them out and delivers them in paper to the FEC. The FEC then inputs them into its computer databases, which can accessed by the public online and allows great groups like the Center for Responsive Politics and the Sunlight Foundation to do the things they do so well. The process takes months, meaning that fundraising in the homestretch of any Senate campaign is effectively done without oversight by the public.

Six good government reform groups are pushing for the passage of S. 223, and have set up a website where you can put your weight behind them. You can also see if your senators back the bill.

Two previous versions of the bill have failed, but every time Sen. Russ Feingold (D-WI) introduces it, he gains co-sponsors. In 2003-2004, he had 2. In 2005-2006, he had 23. Today he has 42. So the bill has never had a better chance of passing. As the title of this post suggests, disclosure requirements are an unsexy topic, so the few people who actually care have to do what they can to help.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We canā€™t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who wonā€™t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its futureā€”you.

And we need readers to show up for us big timeā€”again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

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