John makes an important point I've been thinking about with respect to these issues lately: these reforms
will change the
legislative process. (Of course, the legislative process needs
changing, or we wouldn't be looking for reform, right?) Pretending
they won't bring change will only slow down the opening process.
There are vast differences between
legislating and
programming. They are almost as different as language is from numbers. Yes, there is a
legislative process, but that process is entirely controlled by
written words--the rules of each chamber--not mathematical
code. These rules are written in English (no immigration reference
intended) which must be interpreted and understood. Some rules are
more well known than others and some are more used than others. And
then you hear about those rules that are
rarely invoked, especially in the Senate, but a little more in the House these days, too.
Enter structured data. A system that comprehensively can record everything that happens in a legislative chamber must have a
place or way to account for anything that can happen. That means a
thomas.loc.gov, GovTrack.us, OpenCongress.org or any open government kind of site should thoroughly know about
every rule that can followed/invoked at any time.
Anyone can read the rules of a chamber, but there are only a very
select few people
in the world that have a thorough understanding of how these chambers
work, and those folks most likely either are working in the
parliamentarian's office, or used to and are now making lots of money
working for lobbyists.
To see what I mean, take a look at any bill status page on Thomas and you'll see what I mean. As I've thought about
how a bill becomes text,
I've realized that the bill status page is just like a Twitter page for
each bill where the chamber clerks manually write a line about what
happened. A lot of it is consistent and therefore can be parsed, but
there are
no parsers out there that can anticipate every possible event that could be recorded there.
Now,
let's assume for a minute that we achieve our goal and get over that rather formidable hump
and we have a parser that truly knows everything that can happen in
each chamber. Whoever builds that will
know the chambers better than any staffer, and even staffers will know more of their
procedural options for their legislative jousting efforts.
Once you
know
what your additional options are, you will
use them!
That's when these reforms will change the legislative process.
Creating and getting Congress to
internally adopt
that kind of comprehensive electronic legislative recording environment
means changing things with easily more than a century of history. Yes,
this is indeed an uphill climb. These are not the efforts of one
Congress or one election. These may not even be efforts of a single
lifetime.
Tim
11,119 days
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Tim McGhee
703-798-322738.8205, -77.0445