Secret block hampers open-government bill
Measure to make congressional spending more transparent repeatedly stymied by opaque maneuvers
By Rebecca Carr
Cox News Service
September 6, 2006
WASHINGTON - Just when Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., thought his legislation to make federal spending more transparent was safe from meddlers, another senator used a parliamentary maneuver to secretly block the measure.
By placing a "secret hold" on legislation to pry open the spending patterns of Congress, the unidentified senator opened a new chapter in the political caper unfolding on Capitol Hill.
After being pressured by bloggers, Sen. Robert Byrd, D-W.Va., lifted his "secret hold" on the measure last week. Sen. Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, lifted his secret hold Tuesday afternoon and then reinstated it without an explanation less than four hours later.
The Republican cloakroom informed Coburn's office Tuesday that still another senator is using his hold power to prevent the legislation from coming to the floor for a vote.
"The shenanigans appear to be ongoing," said John Hart, communications director for Coburn, whose bill would create a searchable database of about $2.5 trillion in federal spending, including contracts, grants, loans, insurance and financial assistance.
Now the bill is back in political limbo. Under senate rules, unless the senator who placed the hold decides to lift it, the bill will not be brought up for a vote.
The latest hold might be part of an effort to place a "rolling hold" on the measure, said Brian Darling, director of Senate relations at the Heritage Foundation, which is one of 100 conservative and liberal groups that support the open government measure. The move is when a senator puts a hold on a bill and then when the hold is made public, another senator rises to the occasion on behalf of the previous senator to keep the bill from coming to the floor.
"When a handful of senators want to kill or slow down a bill and they don't want their identity known, they will sometimes employ a strategy that is called the rolling hold," Darling said. "It is almost like Whack-A-Mole. You may find the senator and get that senator to remove a hold, then another hold pops up."
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