After 578 Days, Where's the Constitution
Annotated?<http://sunlightfoundation.com/blog/2012/07/17/after-578-days-wheres-t...>
Daniel Schuman <http://sunlightfoundation.com/people/dschuman/>July 17,
2012, 3:38 p.m.

http://sunlightfoundation.com/blog/2012/07/17/after-578-days-wheres-t...

578 days ago, Congress
directed<http://sunlightfoundation.com/blog/2011/02/14/jcp-directs-enhanced-ac...>
that
the legal treatise *Constitution Annotated* be published online, but it's
still not available. The *Constitution Annotated*, aka CONAN, is a
100-year-old continuously updated congressional
report<http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/browse/collection.action?collectionCode=GPO&...>
that
explains the US Constitution as it has been interpreted by the Supreme
Court. With so many important rulings coming out of the High Court, it's
important to understand the effect of its decisions on the Constitution.

Here's what Congress, via the Joint Committee on Printing, required in a
November 17, 2010 letter:

Update the online edition [of the *Constitution Annotated*] as frequently
as possible, and to create new and improved functions on the CONAN site.
The Congress and the public should find this site accessible and
user-friendly.
The master file for CONAN is updated frequently and is available as a
website accessible only to Congress. (The public version is updated only
once a decade and is released in a barely usable format, which is why JCP
sent the letter in the first place.) Many organizations have
asked<http://sunlightfoundation.com/blog/2010/09/17/20-orgs-ask-for-better-...>
that
CONAN be published online in its original (XML) format. JCP has directed
that it be published online in a timely fashion, but in the less-useful PDF
format. (It would be fine to publish it in both.)

This shouldn't be a particularly hard project, so we can only help but
wonder why there's been such a long delay, and how much longer we'll have
to wait? As an interim measure, it may be simplest for Congress simply to
release to the public what it already publishes on the Congress' internal
website. That should require the technological equivalent of flipping a
switch.

This upcoming year, CONAN will be up for its once-a-decade print edition.
With at least 4,870 statutorily mandated copies, at an guesstimated cost of
$226<http://bookstore.gpo.gov/actions/GetPublication.do?stocknumber=052-07...>
per
copy, the House and Senate will pay over $1.1 million to prepare a document
that will go out of date almost immediately. (Even assuming that 60% of the
costs are for layout, which is necessary for an online edition as well,
that's still $440,000 to print a very heavy doorstop.)

Some of these costs may be avoided by asking Congressional offices whether
they prefer a paper version or electronic access, as is the practice with
other legislative documents. But the bigger question is: what's taking so
long? Is this a sign of bigger problems inside the Library of Congress and
GPO? When will this finally be finished?

It looks like we'll have to continue to wait and see.

Daniel

Daniel Schuman
Director | Advisory Committee on Transparency<http://transparencycaucus.org/>
Policy Counsel | The Sunlight Foundation <http://sunlightfoundation.com/>
o: 202-742-1520 x 273 | c: 202-713-5795 | @danielschuman