Navigating legislation (after the fact, of course)
Josh Tauberer
In May, the Congress passed the 2008 Farm Bill, which regulates various
food, nutrition, and apparently biofuel issues. Tufts food policy
professor Parke Wilde writes on his blog today:
[http://usfoodpolicy.blogspot.com/2008/08/ers-posts-farm-bill-side-by-side.html]
The 629-page text (.pdf) of the 2008 Farm Bill is so complex and
unreadable that the U.S. food policy community has been on the edge of
our seats waiting for the USDA/ERS side-by-side comparison unveiled today.
The ERS side-by-side tool <http://www.ers.usda.gov/FarmBill/2008/>
compares the new Farm Bill with current law, title by title, so we can
finally begin to understand what the law really means.
ERS is the USDA’s Economic Research Service. Their side-by-side webpage,
which I think was just published this week, shows the provisions of the
previous and the current bill side-by-side. (It’s not a comparison of
the bill text, but of summaries of the provisions.)
This is interesting on a number of accounts. First, the fact that it is
the USDA making this comparison suggests that everyone agrees that the
bill itself is effectively incomprehensible even to professionals and
scholars on account of its size and summarizing it is costly enough that
only the government would do it, taking three months to prepare.
Second, if this is what was needed to understand the Farm Bill, was it
passed without anyone understanding it?
Third- This comparison was made by and for professionals and scholars,
not by tech geeks. Why aren’t we talking to them?
The ERS tool comes complete with a seemingly unintentionally hilarious
intro video
<http://www.ers.usda.gov/FarmBill/2008/video/FarmBillVideo.htm> — overly
dramatic with background music fit for the Miss Universe competition.
(Wilde likened it to “a documentary by Kenneth Burns or an account of a
manned mission to the moon”.)
--
- Josh Tauberer
- GovTrack.us
"Yields falsehood when preceded by its quotation! Yields
falsehood when preceded by its quotation!" Achilles to
Tortoise (in "Godel, Escher, Bach" by Douglas Hofstadter)
David Weller
Also, to my delight www.ReadtheBill.org is active again, as it is now under the management of the Sunlight Foundation. Check it out and anticipate more stuff added as time goes on. It is in All Things Reform's "Federal Government Ethics Orgs." feeds list in the lefthand column.
David Weller
www.AllThingsReform.org
"People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel." -Maya Angelou
Josh Tauberer
> Also, to my delight www.ReadtheBill.org <http://www.ReadtheBill.org> is
> Foundation. Check it out and anticipate more stuff added as time goes
> on. It is in All Things Reform's "Federal Government Ethics Orgs."
> feeds list in the lefthand column.
To put in my two cents on that issue- I hope ReadTheBill takes a
slightly broader perspective on this issue going forward than a 72 hour
rule. What some of us learned at a conference a couple of months ago is
that legislation doesn't appear out of nowhere. Even if the final form
of a bill is not decided on until moments before a vote, the pieces have
(often? sometimes?) been in play for a long time, either as proposed
amendments, as separate bills, or as issues going back to committee
deliberations.
Not that this really excuses Congress from being deliberate, or excuses
the Members from not even reading legislation in its entirety (rarely?
sometimes? usually?), or excuses them from giving the public a heads-up.
So I think a 72 hour rule is a good idea, no doubts there.
But to collapse all three of those problems into a simple "72 hour rule"
I think would be a mistake, and misses the larger issues.
So, for instance, I would love to see some original research done by the
new Sunlight version of ReadTheBill on:
* How Members and their staffs read legislation. How often do they read
bills from start to finish? On tiny bills it must be more often than on
600 page bills. How often have they read all of the pieces that went
into a bill before a vote even if they haven't read the final bill
itself? How much of reading is done by staff and not by the Members
themselves? And if they haven't read it, how do they decide how to vote
(besides the obvious of being corralled by the whip)?
* What is the average duration that the components of a bill are
available to read by Members or the public before a vote? For instance,
you might write: For bill X, 80% of the sections in the bill went back 6
months to the measure as introduced, 10% of the sections in the bill
went back 1 month to amendments introduced on the floor, and 10% of the
sections came from amendments introduced just minutes before the vote.
And then looking across bills, say, 40% of bills voted on had more than
10% of their sections established only within hours of the final vote.
J.H. Snider
Josh,
There is a large academic literature on the subject of how members of Congress read bills. The classic is John Kingdon’s Congressman’s Voting Decisions. If you did a citation search on that book, you’d probably be able to get the whole literature on this subject with relatively little effort. The basic answer is that members of Congress and their staffs read (or understand) relatively little of the legislation they vote upon. Instead, they rely on people whom they trust, such as party leaders, lobbyists, caucus leaders, and others with a similar ideological disposition, for cues as to how to vote.
On the question of tracking the history of bills, what is needed is a date stamped, dynamic, integrated bill versioning system. Microsoft Word has much of this type of functionality under its “reviewing” tab; Adobe Acrobat also has this type of functionality. The legislative counsels who do the bill drafting use such software when they prepare new bill text for members of Congress. But this information is stripped out when bills are posted to Thomas.
--Jim Snider
J.H. Snider
iSolon.org
If you’re interested in citizens assembly based democratic reform, join the Citizens Assembly Facebook Group.
Jones, Tom (Commerce)
Tom Jones with DeMint here. A couple thoughts.
Leg Counsel always drafts the bill in electronic flormat but what ends up happening is that conference committee staff make handwritten changes to a printed version of the bill and / or sign off on agreements with written annotations in the margins. Agreements could likely be done with some sort of digital signature and changes could be made by leg counsel.
What is more important though is that any rule on bills having to lay over for a certain period of time is that the bills be searchable. If they're in a searchable format we can theoretivally have leg counsel run a red line on the differimg versions.
Rules like this could help us get to what is the real problem which is that the drafters of a lot of these bills is that they know that they're like fish - the longer they sit out the more they stink. What they do is they toss the bills out up against a recess and force members to vote for the bill or not get to go back home. If bills could not be offered within some period before a recess or adjournment was to occur - and they had to be searchable - you might see a lot of this mischief stop.
As a practical matter searchability - and an associated red line - would help a lot. If we can see what parts of the bill moved we'd have a better idea of what happened.
I would also encourage you to look at how the conference process has eroded and made the process increasingly opaque. The use of "substitutes" is problematic becuase it gives conferees the latitute to drop a lot of new matter in in conference which wasn't really what the conference was supposed to be about. It also gives a select few (comm chairs and maybe some conferees) the ability to control the process. When all there is is a substitute the first time you ever see anything is when the substitute comes out. By then things are cooked.
Additionally the use of amendments between the houses is corrosive. The Senate has strong rules governing the conference process - they aren't perfect but they're better than nothing. The recent use of messages betweeen the houses and filling the tree by the leader effectively guts the conference process. It allows the leadership to conference the bill without any of the conference restrictions (scope, airdrops, etc) and then throw it on the Senate floor and block amendments and force members to vote on it.
Anyway just some thoughts. Hope they're helpful
Tom
From: openhous...@googlegroups.com
To: openhous...@googlegroups.com
Sent: Sun Aug 24 10:11:02 2008
Josh Tauberer
> There is a large academic literature on the subject of how members of
> Voting Decisions/.
Ahha, great, thanks for the tip. I plan to get it from the library
today. So I revise point 1 of my previous email- if the work has already
been done, all ReadTheBill has to do is summarize it!
> On the question of tracking the history of bills, what is needed is a
> date stamped, dynamic, integrated bill versioning system. Microsoft
> Word has much of this type of functionality under its “reviewing” tab;
> Adobe Acrobat also has this type of functionality. The legislative
> counsels who do the bill drafting use such software when they prepare
> new bill text for members of Congress. But this information is stripped
> out when bills are posted to Thomas.
engrossed, enrolled, etc. Are bills drafted --- that is, is the full
text of the current state of a bill put together --- at intermediate
points internally but not published? That would be something like after
amendments but before the vote on passage, after a conference but before
a vote on the conference report.
Once the text is available, making a line-by-line comparison and adding
'red lines' is technically straightforward. I do it on GovTrack. [1] It
would help to have the bill text as drafted with GPO locator codes,
rather than PDFs from GPO or HTML from THOMAS, which GPO *sells* at
$8,000/year (any buyers listening? we can split the cost...), and
getting public access to those files was part of the motivation of
mentioning the GPO in the House leg branch appropriations report, which
Rob posted about [2].
So there are really two parts to this, and considering from Tom's email
that it would seem to be a big benefit to Members, it would be nice to
get their support in:
1) Having GPO & leg counsel publish, to the public, the raw files
that they write legislation in. This would allow the public to
pick up the task of making bill changes readily understandable.
(XML is already made available for bills, mostly. It would help
to have the GPO locator code files for the bills not drafted in
XML. No files are made available for amendments, and I think
only PDFs for conference reports (and PDFs are entirely useless
for this).)
2) Increasing the frequency bills are drafted and published to the
public. Namely, before votes rather than after votes. However,
what frequency is needed depends a lot on what format amendments
are published in. The richer the format is for amendments, the
more we can have computers pick up the work of updating bill text,
rather than asking leg counsel to do more work.
Josh
[1]
http://www.govtrack.us/congress/billtext.xpd?bill=h110-67&version=eh&show-changes=1
[2]
http://groups.google.com/group/openhouseproject/browse_thread/thread/903b3f1cef0a7c81/b0fe3e61ad823dde?lnk=gst&q=leg#b0fe3e61ad823dde
lisaero...@gmail.com
input is invaluable. (I guess I'm going to pick up Kingdon's book,
for staters!)
The site will eventually be a one-stop-shopping site for all things
related to the 72 hour rule, our ultimate goal being getting a useful,
meaningful piece of legislation enacted. It goes without saying that
any 72 hour rule will have to address the key stages where bad bills
or bad provisions become law. We want to end bills being jammed
through at the end of a congressional session, and control irrelevant
or new provisions being inserted during the conference committee
process. At the same time, there are many stages earlier in the
process where bills are drafted, debated and amended where public
input could be even more valuable then during the end game. If
possible we want to find ways to best address those issues and your
ideas are welcome.
In addition to defining the appropriate times and methods for
transparent legislation, we are also seeking a few key things to put
pressure on Members to a 72 hour rule. Examples of bills like the
Patriot Act, where no one knew what they were voting on before they
voted, are going to be crucial to that endeavor. We also need to
address the issue of major amendments--allowing them to sit for 72
hours before a vote is a perfect way to fillibuster a bill. At the
same time, not requiring review of significant amendments creates an
entirely new avenue for mischief and undermining the goal of this
legislation. Your thoughts are appreciated.
Lisa Rosenberg
Government Affairs Consultant
The Sunlight Foundation
>
> [2]http://groups.google.com/group/openhouseproject/browse_thread/thread/...
>
>
>
>
>
>
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: openhous...@googlegroups.com
> > [mailto:openhous...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Josh Tauberer
> > Sent: Sunday, August 24, 2008 9:40 AM
> > To: openhous...@googlegroups.com
> > Subject: [openhouseproject] Re: Navigating legislation (after the fact,
> > of course)
>
> > David Weller wrote:
>
>
> - Show quoted text -
J.H. Snider
I’m not convinced that improved amendment/bill transparency will lead to as much enhanced accountability as Sunlight and many on this listserv seem to expect. For example, if amendments and bills are bundled into omnibus legislation, then congressional roll call votes become relatively uninformative. What we are seeing is an information arms race between incumbent legislators and the public. As the level of amendment/bill transparency increases, the accountability of amendment/bill information has decreased. So today we get lots of roll call votes on trivial issues, such as uncontroversial resolutions, and very few roll call votes on the really important issues before Congress. In my recent working paper for Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy, I argue that the current move to increase transparency must be supplemented with an effort to fundamentally rethink legislative procedure so that this information arms race is short circuited. For example, the current push for greater transparency, such as readthebill.org’s legislative agenda, must be complemented by a greater push for the introduction of First Amendment values into legislative procedure.
--Jim Snider
J.H. Snider
iSolon.org
If you’re interested in citizens assembly based democratic reform, join the Citizens Assembly Facebook Group.
John Wonderlich
To see the intricacies of the balance between what can be subpoena'd, and what falls under speech or debate protection, see Michael Stern's recent blog post on Senator Stevens' motion in limine to render some evidence inadmissable via the speech or debate clause. (the whole series is excellent, if more detailed than I can fully grasp.)
My question, though, is this: how can disclosure requirements that aren't House or Senate Rules-based place restrictions on Congress without affecting the independence of the body? Doesn't any "law of general applicability" (if I'm getting the terms right), if applied to Congress separately, introduce inter-branch concerns? Even the Ethics in Government Act, with its financial disclosure requirements, is applied to Congress through a convoluted agreement between the House and Senate Rules and the US Code, each of which sort of claiming primacy in their respective domains, with the House Rules excerpting the Code.
That the legal context surrounding disclosure requirements made outside a simple Rules regime is convoluted is probably not a surprise in a common law system, but I do think the lack of clarity in this realm makes it all the more difficult to propose reforms outside the context of rules requirements.
J.H. Snider
If legislative procedure is to be brought into the information age (so that legislative procedure actually generates democratically useful information), it will have to be instituted the way all legislative procedure has been instituted: through the resolutions of Congress. Thus, I see no separations of power issue, including conflict with the Constitution’s speech or debate clause.
It is true that incumbent members of Congress have a blatant conflict of interest in instituting certain types of democratically desirable legislative procedures. But I would not argue that the executive or judicial branch should thus be given the power to do what Congress will not do for itself. I do hope that one day a citizens assembly will have an important role to play in dealing with issues where incumbent members of Congress have a blatant conflict of interest. But I conceive of a citizens assembly at the Federal level as only a type of congressional committee, with final authority still given to duly elected members of Congress.
Less ideally but more practically, I hope that one day a minority party will find it in its interest create the type of vigorous deliberative forum (“shadow legislature”) that information technology now makes eminently feasible. Once this legislative genie was out of the bottle—like instituting Thomas or televising floor coverage—I believe it would be hard to place it back in.
In sum, I am optimistic that the information arms race problem can be mitigated without violating the Constitution.
--Jim Snider
John Wonderlich
I think we're on the same page, since you write that disclosure requirements "will have to be instituted...through the resolutions of Congress."
I'm wondering about what FOIA-like provisions could possibly be applied to Congress. First, I'm suggesting that any such provision would have to be self-imposed, through House and Senate Rules, since laws "of general applicability" would generate some Speech or Debate issues, and also bring up other separation of powers issues.
I'm also wondering what FOIA-like provisions, if instituted through self-imposed rules changes, could look like. Most of the things I'm imagining would become a political hassle, stifling debate and research from staff engaging in good faith communications.
If, by FOIA-like provisions, you mean generally enhancing disclosure requirements and procedures, by say mandating that THOMAS generate by-Member searchable roll call votes, or requiring THOMAS to provide links to individual lines of bills (Josh appears to have just set this up on GovTrack, which I'm quite excited about, see here), then I'm right with you.
I do, however, have a hard time imagining a request-based system (like FOIA) for any kind of Congressional information that doesn't become a minefield of unintended consequences. The closest parallels I can think of are GAO reports, CRS reports, and Ethics investigations, all subject to carefully prioritized consideration only by the request of a Member, and all carefully designed to avoid politicization, abuse, and separation of powers issues.
I'd also like to point out that these support mechanisms are generally overloaded, with GAO currently hovering around half its previous FTE levels, despite a workload increase and compelling evidence that spending on GAO yields a very high return on investment (by dispelling waste and abuse). They're also not fulfilling their statutory requirements, as set by the Ethics in Government Act.
So I guess I'm asking, precisely, whether there are additional disclosure enhancements for Congress that fall outside rules and administrative process reforms, aside from funding and supporting the legislative support agencies that generate public congressional information.
J.H. Snider
FOIA (especially the principles behind Electronic FOIA) has some appealing elements as a model for congressional transparency. However, FOIA-like rules won’t solve the information arms race problem, and they are not what I’m talking about when I refer to improved legislative procedure. The problem is: garbage in, garbage out. FOIA-like rules are only as good as the public records that are already generated by the legislative process. If all FOIA-like rules make available is information garbage, then its appeal is undercut. For example, what good are roll call votes by legislator if the roll call votes generated by legislative procedure are crap? (This is phrased too strongly in order to clearly make a point.)
Your closing paragraph asks a good question to which I don’t have a very good answer. As a practical matter, I don’t see how there could be rules and administrative process reforms that fall outside the jurisdiction of Congress. However, the development of the “administrative state” in the early 20th century involved a massive delegation of congressional authority to quasi-independent entities. As long as Congress in some sense retains ultimate control of these law/rule making agencies, they don’t violate the Constitution.
--Jim Snider
J.H. Snider
iSolon.org
If you’re interested in citizens assembly based democratic reform, join the Citizens Assembly Facebook Group.
Josh Tauberer
point. And I mean this seriously:
Why should we want Members or their staffs to necessarily read bills?
For instance, do we think they learn more by reading legislation rather
than getting the advice of people they trust? For very complicated bills
like the Farm Bill, where knowledge of the domain is critical for
understanding the ramifications of each provision, anyone except domain
experts would learn a lot more talking to a human than looking at the
text, and it would be a waste of time to try to read every word of the
bill. For bills that are too long or complicated for any one person to
reasonably read, it makes sense to divide up the labor of understanding
the bill. The labor could be divided between different offices, even,
and so long as they share notes, that would seem to be a reasonable
thing to do.
On this view (which I don't necessarily agree with), "read[ing] the
bill" isn't the right label for this cause.
So is this all really about reading bills? If there was more time, would
they and should they? Or is the reason there isn't as much reading as
one might like that bills are too complicated and it actually makes a
lot of sense to make decisions in ways besides reading them?
(There's also the public access side to 72 hours which is still
important, even if Members reading bills isn't.)
--
- Josh Tauberer
- GovTrack.us
http://razor.occams.info
"Yields falsehood when preceded by its quotation! Yields
falsehood when preceded by its quotation!" Achilles to
Tortoise (in "Godel, Escher, Bach" by Douglas Hofstadter)
Joshua Gay
-Josh
Chris Kinnan
This complexity is by design. The domain owners deliberately create
complexity to obscure their real purpose, which is usually fleecing
taxpayers and/or consumers, and to game budget rules. Complexity also
raises the costs of opposing them. I worked on the reform side of
1995-96 Farm Bill and we were constantly told "oh you just don't
understand farm programs" as a way of de-legitimizing our arguments.
Complexity also creates power for staff, and for the lobbying shops
that will eventually employ those staff. The tax code works the same
way. The complexity hides the graft and makes it impossible for
Members who don't have professional committee staff to offer
meaningful amendments or alternatives.
Clay Shirky
Last night I ran some of these issues by a friend who raised a very good
point. And I mean this seriously:
Why should we want Members or their staffs to necessarily read bills?
For instance, do we think they learn more by reading legislation rather
than getting the advice of people they trust?
--
Get a copy of my new book, "Here Comes Everybody: The Power Of Organizing Without Organizations", through http://isbn.nu/9781594201530/
John Wonderlich
But, I think it would be a mistake to conflate the 72 Hour Rule with "members reading bills", for a few reasons.
First, there's a big difference between recommending that Members do anything (nearly impossible task) and making it possible that they or their staff do it. Obscurantism shouldn't be arrived at through rapid legislative maneuvering, or by contrived complexity, as Clay and Chris note.
Now, that isn't to say that Members and staff are going to start reading all bills. I actually think it's important that a Members can vote ignorantly if they'd like to; you can't mandate competence to a legislative body that's supposed to be independent.
Indeed, the current Rules of the House provide that each bill is read three times, in Rule XVI, 8:
(a)...in full when...first considered.
(b)...when the bill...is read for amendment in a committee of the Whole House...
(c)...a third reading precedes passage...
Second, I'd like to raise the public component to the 72 hour rule.
Posting legislation online 72 hours before votes is about more than member and staff consideration. This is yet another case where the needs of congressional staff and public citizens overlap (a point Rob Pierson makes constantly). "Representing" a district shouldn't be a metaphor, it should be more of a gerund. When a member "represents", they shouldn't just represent in the same way a roadsign represents an upcoming turn. Representation necessarily involves interaction.
Maybe I'm wandering back into the world of saying what members should do, so let me walk that back a bit. If legislation isn't posted online before consideration, then an interactive style of representation is impossible. Constituents are necessarily shut out of that aspect of the legislative process without some lag between posting a final version and its floor consideration.
Our conception of public involvement in legislation suffers from a weird mythology, where stories like Mr. Smith goes to Washington or the ladybug story, where some exceptional circumstances lead to (gasp!) the impossible puncturing of the legislative bubble, proving that we can all make a difference if we just try.
I'm as susceptible to public involvement glurge as much as the next person (I think the ladybug story is excellent), but this narrative about miraculous public engagement overshadows what's really going on: the public has an immense and largely untapped capacity to engage in the substance of legislation. Policy already flows out of lobbyists, legislative support agencies, "urgent issues" sometimes fomented by the popular media, trade groups, and scientific research. These communities, to various degrees, have developed institutional pathways leading from need to legislative action.
The 72 hour rule is about making it possible for the dispersed expertise, whether well connected to the instituions of Congress or not, to react to legislation before floor consideration, and to allow representatives to more fully represent, insofar as they're moved to.
Clay Shirky
The 72 hour rule is about making it possible for the dispersed expertise, whether well connected to the instituions of Congress or not, to react to legislation before floor consideration, and to allow representatives to more fully represent, insofar as they're moved to.
Greg Elin
Last night I ran some of these issues by a friend who raised a very good
point. And I mean this seriously:
Why should we want Members or their staffs to necessarily read bills?
Let me offer a quote from Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz of the Galactic Hyperspace Planning Council here:
been on display in your local planning department on Alpha Centauri for fifty of your Earth years,
so you've had plenty of time to lodge any formal complaint and it's far too late to
start making a fuss about it now."
--
Greg Elin
Sunlight Foundation (http://sunlightfoundation.com)
Sunlight Labs (http://sunlightlabs.com)ge...@sunlightfoundation.com
Josh Tauberer
> Last night I ran some of these issues by a friend who raised a very good
> point. And I mean this seriously:
>
> Why should we want Members or their staffs to necessarily read bills?
>
> For instance, do we think they learn more by reading legislation rather
> than getting the advice of people they trust?
>
>
> The almost tautological answer is that bills are part of the legislative
> process rather than the regulatory one.
> Legislation, however, does not work that way, and allowing bills to
> become part of a technocratic process by fiat of complexity is lazy in
> the individual case and dangerous to the US system of government in the
> overall case.
Why?
I'm actually not sure exactly what you're responding to, so I'll take it
in two parts.
My (friend's) hypothesis is that Members legitimately learn more by
doing things other than reading the text itself. If that's true, then
it's very well a good thing and certainly isn't dangerous. If there's
danger, it must be because Members have been missing something by not
reading the text, but what?
I agree that complexity may be dangerous, since it shifts power, as
Chris wrote. But this takes things in a new direction because this isn't
a time issue at all. For as many hours as there are given to read bills,
one can make the text that much more complex. Giving more time because
bills are too complicated is just playing into the complexity arms race.
But back to time. John raises the "making it possible" case for Members
to read bills, but notes that while reading bills on the floor is a part
of the rules, it's skipped. This takes the issue a new direction too,
since a Member who hasn't been given time to read a bill could certainly
interject here. Moreover, he might vote no on bills that have been
pushed forward too fast, or on cloture, and if a bill really *had* been
pushed forward too fast, certainly a majority of Members ought to agree,
at least in principle. None of that ever happens to my knowledge. I
don't hear about no votes being explained on procedural grounds. Anyway,
the point here is that members already have the possibility. In fact,
they have the possibility to change their rules too, obviously.
Just looking at the narrow issue of having time and reading bills, I
don't think you can take the "Sit! Stay! Roll over! Readthebill!" ought
of it. Because they already can, by the rules. If they are lacking
possibilities, it's because they're not free to follow the rules. (And
why not? Somehow it surely goes back to money.)
John wrote:
> "Representing" a district shouldn't be a metaphor, it should be more of a gerund.
I applaud the use of linguistic terminology. :)
Let me sum up my thinking at the moment:
* An obligation for Members to "read bills" is a mistake. In many cases,
it would be an improper use of their or their staff's time because they
can legitimately do a better job by going other routes to understand the
issue. Further, as John says, "you can't mandate competence," and I
think that nails it fairly well.
* The fact that Members don't read bill text is possibly a sign that
bills are too complicated, and complexity is surely a de-democratizing
force, as Chris and Clay talk about. But how complex is too complex? I
don't think there is an obvious way to approach this problem, given that
there's no concrete goal to set where you'd say "yeah that's not too
complex". It's worth a look on its own, but seems to be an issue
separate from time.
* I don't know if we know just how much is rammed through at the last
minute. Tom Jones raised the cases of conference reports and substitute
amendments pushed too fast. How often does this occur? How pervasive is
it? What are the parliamentary issues involved in those cases? These
questions need to be answered.
* Members quite already have the potential to get the time to understand
votes, which they frequently abandon when they allow bills to not be
read the third time. (The Farm Bill was around 37,000 words, which read
at 180 wds/min is 3 1/2 hours. For a Member who put off learning about
the bill to the last minute, I'd say 3 1/2 hours is a good amount of
time.) Members clearly have, by the rules, recourse if they haven't been
given enough time, which is to withhold a yes vote. Further, nothing we
say gives them any more power to change their own rules. If they claim
they don't have enough time, then it's not the rules that's the problem.
It's a structural or social issue, because either those that want more
time are in the minority (lowercase m), or the majority doesn't feel
free to exercise the power they have. There is an issue there as well,
but it's something mostly unrelated to reading bills.
* The structural/social issues alluded to above is an issue itself. If
there's pressure to not read a bill, then pressure should be put
squarely on those wielding the power. If this is a problem, the answer
is to not blame the whole Congress with a blanket statement about
reading bills, but to pin the blame directly on the Members acting unfairly.
* Finally, the public comment component of a 72 hours rule I think is
the one part of the point of readthebill that still makes sense.
Clay Shirky
My (friend's) hypothesis is that Members legitimately learn more by
doing things other than reading the text itself. If that's true, then
it's very well a good thing and certainly isn't dangerous. If there's
danger, it must be because Members have been missing something by not
reading the text, but what?
I agree that complexity may be dangerous, since it shifts power, as
Chris wrote. But this takes things in a new direction because this isn't
a time issue at all. For as many hours as there are given to read bills,
one can make the text that much more complex. Giving more time because
bills are too complicated is just playing into the complexity arms race.
Just looking at the narrow issue of having time and reading bills, I
don't think you can take the "Sit! Stay! Roll over! Readthebill!" ought
of it. Because they already can, by the rules. If they are lacking
possibilities, it's because they're not free to follow the rules. (And
why not? Somehow it surely goes back to money.)
Josh Tauberer
> I’m not convinced that improved amendment/bill transparency will lead
> to as much enhanced accountability as Sunlight and many on this
> listserv seem to expect.
> I argue that the current move to increase transparency must be
> supplemented with an effort to fundamentally rethink legislative
> procedure so that this information arms race is short circuited.
I wanted to respond to this also... I think this is a good point, in the
sense that incremental changes on a continuum ("if only we had 72 more
hours"-type proposals) really have no end goal. I complained a lot about
the big ethics bill last year because a lot of it had to do with
increasing dollar amount numbers or whatever. Increasing reporting by
re-scaling what was important. Nothing fundamental.
This happened to have been on my mind the last month as I was reading a
book on (surprise) food policy (Stuffed & Starved by Raj Patel). The
book has a lot of useful points, but when it gets to "and here's the
problem", the claims are all "if only more corporations were involved in
the process", "if only there was more competition"-type suggestions. How
much is enough competition in the market? Will Patel ever be satisfied?
The question, though, is what kind of fundamental changes are actually
realistic? Or, how do you get to a fundamental change through
incremental steps?
(Ok, nothing concrete here, just chatting away.)
Clay Shirky
The question, though, is what kind of fundamental changes are actually
realistic? Or, how do you get to a fundamental change through
incremental steps?
Jon Henke
“One fundamental change would be: No last minute additions, retractions, alterations, or compromises, by definition.”
Another fundamental change that would have a profound effect: Line Item Budgeting. If Congressmen have to vote separately on every item, the incentive to try to lard up legislation and sneak in small items would be reduced dramatically. It doesn’t have to be difficult – just have them submit a checked-off list of yes/no on each item.
Not only would the incentive to load bills up be reduced, but Congressmen would become accountable for their votes on each element of the bill. In the current omnibus approach, a bill will pass even if there is widespread agreement that much of it is wasteful and inappropriate.
From:
openhous...@googlegroups.com [mailto:openhous...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Clay Shirky
Sent: Thursday, August 28, 2008
5:15 PM
To:
openhous...@googlegroups.com
Subject: [openhouseproject] Re:
Navigating legislation (after the fact, of course)
Matthew Burton
Another fundamental change that would have a profound effect: Line Item Budgeting.
One possible countermeasure to this rule would be to make edits during bill enrollment; however, I only know of one case of substantive changes during this phase. Can it be gotten away with on a large scale?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Young#Coconut_Road
Joshua Gay
The time is for the public to read the bills, and to hold the legislators accountable *as if* they had read the bills. Its a question of incentives and consequences for the legislators, in my view, not just time and opportunity.
Aristotle was unable to answer the question, "how one can learn how to legislate." (He gave it a shot with Politics). Nobody really knows the answer of how to learn how to do it well and many are just trying to learn how to do it at all. 500+ elected officials are doing it, but, they need help. So, I think that figuring out accountability, incentives, and consequences for elected officials is an important aspect of Read the Bill. But, ultimately, I think the primary reason we should want 72 hours to read the bill is to help humanity do a better job at figuring out how to legislate.
It's hard problem and we as a people are not good at it yet, and we don't know why we aren't good at it. So we need to make things transparent and we need to understand the process and we need to engage the process from many angles. And we need to record our work, organize our thoughts, and make this knowledge accessible. Up until now taking on a massive problem like this in a distributed fashion would be nearly impossible to imagine. Sharing the kinds and amounts of data and sharing this kind of knowledge in an organized and accessible way would have been unimaginable. But, today we have a tremendous tool for communication, we have a tremendous tool to facility learning, we have the Internet. And we have a community of people who care about our democracy and about improving Democracy.
So let's keep going. Let's see what happens. This is exciting stuff. I'll be 30 in three years and for the first time in my life I've been excited to be an American. I'm excited to know that my peers can run for Senate and that when they want to start figuring out "how it works," they can turn to us and they can join the hundreds (and soon thousands!) of us in the open government community.
Let us give them a helping hand. We don't need the carrot or the stick to make it easier for them to do a good job. 72 hours might not be enough time to do a great job, but it might be enough time to convince 26 Senators to stop fast tracking a bill so we can help them get it right. I think we have a long way to go, but I'm excited that there are becoming enough of us to make it happen. I'm excited to be in this community.
-Joshua Gay
John Wonderlich
Just looking at the narrow issue of having time and reading bills, I
don't think you can take the "Sit! Stay! Roll over! Readthebill!" ought
of it. Because they already can, by the rules. If they are lacking
possibilities, it's because they're not free to follow the rules. (And
why not? Somehow it surely goes back to money.)
When you wonder why Members of Congress aren't free to "follow the rules" (in this case, object to skipping the reading of bills on the floor), I don't think it's that they "aren't free" to defect. I think Members face a complex set of incentives in the procedural and political context of Congress, where acting alone is rarely rewarded by the incentive structures as they exist.
It's a sort of reverse Prisoner's dilemma. In that famous example, the prisoners' isolation forces them to defect rather than cooperate. In the congressional example, reputation and relationship are SO important that the opposite is true; Members face immense pressure to cooperate with the parties that support them (both financially and practically, through interpersonal alliances), making individual members unlikely to defect, even if an individual stands to gain (in isolation) from such a reading.
Congressional rules take some of the pressure off this situation, since the terms under which procedure occurs are up for reconsideration at the beginning of each Congress. Members are MUCH more likely to form coalitions around specific incremental rules changes (especially if they're brooched at the beginning of a Congress), even if they hinder the prerogatives of the majority, than they are to form coalitions around individuals defecting ad-hoc from procedural norms.
Incremental rules changes can fundamentally change congressional incentives, especially in the House, where the majority is afforded such stringent control of the floor and the agenda. A public bill-posting requirement, if self-imposed through rules changes, would go a long way toward forcing party control of the House towards legislation that can withstand scrutiny, since controversial legislation would become the target of focused advocacy effort before final passage.
On the question of line-item budgeting, and of legislative complexity, I don't know how to address that question. An increasing workload makes onmibusses (omnibi?) more likely, I think, and I don't know enough about how the budgeting process works to comment. Reading that part of the House rules is slightly painful. :)
I can say, however, that the two limitations on complexity I am familiar with are: the germaneness requirement, with its specific procedural tests for subject matter relevance (which could conceivably be applied to some kind of budget voting requirement), and the limit on amendment complexity, where amendments to amendments are allowed, but with no more complexity than that.
Josh Tauberer
>> Just looking at the narrow issue of having time and reading bills, I
>> don't think you can take the "Sit! Stay! Roll over! Readthebill!" ought
>> of it. Because they already can, by the rules. If they are lacking
>> possibilities, it's because they're not free to follow the rules. (And
>> why not? Somehow it surely goes back to money.)
>
> When you wonder why Members of Congress aren't free to "follow the
> rules" (in this case, object to skipping the reading of bills on the
> floor), I don't think it's that they "aren't free" to defect. I think
> Members face a complex set of incentives in the procedural and political
> context of Congress, where acting alone is rarely rewarded by the
> incentive structures as they exist.
That's exactly my point. They might object to fast moving bills if only
they weren't afraid of the consequences to their career, or whatever.
Josh Tauberer
quite large mistakes that resulted from the Farm Bill being too
complicated and evidently not available enough to be proof-read: a
"glitch" cutting 2008 funding for Community Food Projects and an entire
section of the bill that got lost. This is a good case study.
I think I've located the "glitch" paragraph or at least something
related to it in H.R. 2419, and you can try out a new GovTrack feature
for linking right to particular paragraphs by following this link:
http://www.govtrack.us/congress/billtext.xpd?bill=h110-2419&version=enr&nid=t0:eh:3228
The Community Food Projects funding provision was changed during
conference, as far as I can tell. The report was filed 5/13/2008 2:05pm
and a vote in the House was taken 26 hours later on 5/14/2008 4:01pm,
according to THOMAS. First, in a previous email I said the bill was
around 37,000 words. I don't know where I got that. The 662-page bill
was around 270,000 words, which would take about 25 hours to read aloud.
Looks like the House was generous and gave an extra hour leeway for
those that wanted to read through the night. From my bill versioning
system I estimate that there were around 230,000 words either inserted,
deleted, or changed by the conference report, which means very roughly
speaking about half the bill changed. (This is all fast and loose so I
might have made some mistakes.)
The loss of a whole section of the bill lead it to be reintroduced,
passed, vetoed, and overridden as HR. 6124. It was voted on again in the
House (i.e. the first vote on 6124) on May 22 -- giving representatives
six more days to find mistakes or change their minds (in principle).
- Josh
http://tefapalliance.org/blog/archives/114#more-114
Community Food Program Faces Funding Hiatus
A glitch in the legislative language of the 2008 Farm Bill may prevent
the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) from distributing nearly $5
million in grants to low-income communities to build and improve food
systems under the Community Food Projects (CFP) program. USDA officials
have notified fiscal year 2008 applicants for CFP funds that the
Department does not currently have the authority to make awards.
The CFP is authorized by the food stamp section of the Farm Bill and a
food stamp provision of the bill, unrelated to the CFP, was worded in a
way that prevents disbursement of fiscal year 2008 CFP funds. More than
a hundred applications for $4.6 million in CFP funds are pending until
the issue is resolved. The money would support community food, planning,
and training and technical assistance projects this year
“Through our advocacy on the Farm Bill, we are certain that it was the
intent of Congress to ensure that there was not an interruption in
funding for Community Food Projects,” Andy Fisher, executive director of
the Community Food Security Coalition (CSFC) in Portland, OR told
Foodlinks America. “Unfortunately the legislative language was not clear
in this regard,” he added.
Fisher noted that a technical amendments bill is being prepared in
Congress to correct this and other Farm Bill problems. It is not unusual
for clean-up legislation to follow the passage of a measure as massive
as the Farm Bill, which ran more than 670 pages. An error of even
greater magnitude – the inadvertent deletion of a section on
international trade – caused the final Farm Bill to be passed by
Congress, vetoed by the President, and that veto overridden twice. A
corrections bill must pass before the end of September in order for USDA
to get its CFP grants out.
Since 1996, the CFP has pumped more than $40 million into low-income
communities through 276 grants to non-profit groups in 47 states, the
District of Columbia, and one territory. Activists hope to prevent a
break in the funding. “CFSC and its partners have been working hard with
the House and Senate Agriculture Committees and USDA to ensure that a
technical fix passes, to allow that the full $5 million is allocated to
deserving community groups this fiscal year,” concluded Fisher.