Yesterday evening the Senate passed a watered down version of the energy bill that the House of Representatives passed last week. The oil and gas industry, and their allies in the Senate to whom they’ve given millions in campaign contributions, kept their billions in tax giveaways; while investment in alternative energy sources was deferred.

Tomorrow's an exciting day! The Senate Rules Committee is set to hold the first hearing on the Fair Elections Now Act (FENA) to bring full public financing to congressional elections. Set to testify at the hearing are Sens. Richard Durbin and Arlen Specter who are the lead co-sponsors of FENA, our President and CEO Nick Nyhart, and other notable reformers, election law experts, and prominent political figures. Read more on the event here.

Well, we've tried asking nicely but it hasn't worked so far so today, together with the Sunlight Foundation who have led this from the very beginning, we are taking things up a notch in our effort to get Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) to reveal who is holding up a bill that would require Senators to file their campaign finance reports electronically.

The Senate is considering legislation (possibly voting on it today) that would ban spouses of senators from lobbying any part of the chamber—unless the spouse was lobbying a year before the senator was elected.

In his speech on the floor of the Senate announcing his intention to introduce a full public financing bill, Assistant Majority Leader Richard Durbin (D-IL) asked his colleagues to think beyond initial ethics reform to a more comprehensive solution: "I hope it will only be the beginning and that we can move, even in this session of Congress, to meaningful hearings and the passage of public financing of campaigns that will truly reform the way we elect men and women to office at the Federal level and restore respect to this great institution of the U.S. Congress, both the House and the Senate. " Read on for the full text of the speech.

This is cool.  A bipartisan bill was set for a vote in the Senate just before it recessed - the bill, designed to give more transparency to government spending, would create a searchable database of federal grants and contracts.  But a Senator's placed a secret hold on it.  Who? Bloggers are uniting to figure it out and hold the Senator in question accountable.