This year brings a landmark for the Sunlight Foundation. We’ve been hinting for some time that we’re going to make a serious play in state government, and New Mexico is one of the first where we’ll focus those efforts. As my colleague Noah wrote earlier this month, the state’s House of Representatives has voted to [...]

Full details and more photos below.

A couple of weeks ago we talked about the possibility of Congress rolling the remaining appropriations bills into one package (called an omnibus bill) so lawmakers could approve the legislation before the end-of-year recess. Aside from that deadline, a continuing resolution (the second one this year) is set to expire on Dec. 18, and that [...]

While the country has experienced an almost unprecedented economic downturn this year, one of the most effective forms of stimulus has been unemployment benefits. As reported in a new study (PDF) published by the National Employment Law Project and the Center for American Progress Action Fund, “[t]he part of the stimulus providing the biggest bang [...]

In a new (and welcomed) form of disclosure, House members have released a huge document dump containing office expenditures for all 435 representatives. Sunlight will be doing a distributed research project of some sort to sift through the data, but I wanted to get out the info on New Mexico’s congressional delegation. For the following [...]

So, I’ve been incredibly silent in this space lately, but it’s warranted. Work has been incredibly busy (you can see some of my recent photos from a Capitol Hill event here, for example), but I think I’ll be posting more often in the coming weeks. I have some New Mexico posts swirling around in my [...]

The House today is set to vote on an extension of unemployment benefits. The comment threads on bills related to the issue have long been a valuable resource for people seeking information on unemployment benefits. For example, with huge interest in the House health care reform bill, the legislation generated 1,500 comments. By [...]

Recently, we at OpenCongress have received a lot of requests to see the text of the America’s Affordable Health Choices Act (HR 3200) with page numbers. There’s no denying this is a complex piece of legislation with far-reaching effects on Americans and the economy, and I think there’s a genuine movement by Americans to understand the [...]

While the struggle to pass health-care reform legislation continues as the biggest story in Congress right now, that other “news” story just won’t seem to die:
Dem Rep. Neil Abercrombie of Hawaii is going to introduce a resolution on the House floor today that seems designed to put House GOPers who are flirting with birtherism in [...]

This is a little something I’ve been working on since my May visit to New Mexico. Your mileage may vary (I stitched it together on my Mac and it’s color-calibrated for my printer), but I definitely recommend viewing it large.
Many thanks to my Aunt Margie for letting me stand up in her SUV and shoot [...]