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Comment by seaourfreed | Hacker News Reader

GREAT, BUT! We need an API on who wrote which parts of the bill. Find lobbyists who wrote parts. Find when there is an evil part (where lobbyists get congress to sell out), and we need to find out WHICH congress person put it in there.

We need to track the evil parts of bills to the congress person who is the sell out for lobbyists (and the corporations beind them)

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It's a common misconception that increasing transparency reduces the power of lobbyists, when it actually does the opposite. [0] In short, the average voter doesn't care enough to find out who added a specific line to a bill, but lobbyists care a lot and they use the additional access to monitor and influence legislators. Legislator accountability is increased with more transparency, but they become more accountable to lobbyists than to their constituents.

There needs to be a balance. A democracy that operates completely in the dark isn't much of a democracy, but Congress currently has the problem off too much rather than too little transparency.

[0] https://congressionalresearch.org/TransparencyProblem.html

You might also find this academic paper interesting: https://philpapers.org/go.pl?id=NGUTIS&aid=NGUTISv1

The title is a bit click-bait-y, but the argument is sound, I think. Forcing transparency changes how people do their work, especially what indicators of success they choose to focus on (which may be easy to relate, but bad indicators of success - like GPA).

Transparency does not automatically grant accountability.

I don't think we have a good handle on this problem, and we make the situation worse by assuming that transparency will solve the problems of corruption and government accountability.

I am skeptical, this sounds like 'trickle-down economics' where the theory is internally cohesive but the conclusions don't actually line up with reality.

Seems like the page you linked is an anti-trasparency advocacy org, what makes you trust them? Is there any data to back up this assertion?

If we went with its original name of 'chicken-shit economics' I doubt there would have been as much confusion about theory vs reality.

Just because the reckoning from citizens hasn't come yet, doesn't mean it isn't coming at all. The transparency is needed for citizens to find the bad actors in congress.

It is not coming because citizens do not have time.

Would also wager a lot of us don't care. Government can do incredibly fucked up things, but as long as quality of life of is high and the money train keeps flowing, I'm not going to do anything.

You'd really have to fuck some stuff up real bad for me to wake up and give a shit.

You're not addressing the problem proposed in the parent's argument - that lobbyists will be the ones who will use this, to ensure that the politicians they bought and paid for are doing what they want.

It seems like a pretty persuasive argument to me.

> You're not addressing the problem proposed in the parent's argument - that lobbyists will be the ones who will use this, to ensure that the politicians they bought and paid for are doing what they want.

That's not a problem, despite the characterization. That's a helpful side-effect. Now you have more definitive traceability.

> that lobbyists will be the ones who will use this, to ensure that the politicians they bought and paid for are doing what they want.

I don't know that lobbyist depends on an API for that!

Not all lobbyists are out to do evil, and not all politicians who do their job are doing evil. The alternative to listening to lobbyists and legislating is politicians who don't do legislation at all and instead spend their time fund-raising and running culture wars. That's not the better-world alternative I'm here for.

I think GP is talking about creating an incentive system that doesn't encourage or require a reckoning. There are plenty of systems which were designed by people in good faith who were unable to understand that the incentives they thought they were creating were not in fact that actual incentives. Creating line by line attribution sounds like one such case.

The existence of lobbying isn’t a foregone conclusion. We can have transparency without the problem you’ve adeptly described if we eliminate or at least significantly diminish lobbying.

Good thing that only requires eliminating the influence of money on politics.

Lobbying is explicitly protected by the 1st amendment to the constitution.

The validity of a contract where a company, person, or community action group pays someone to lobby on their behalf is not.

That reveals another problem: treating the Constitution (and its many edits) as a foregone conclusion.

Enshrining corruption in what’s practically holy law. What a coup.

How are you defining corruption here?

That's not my reading.

It sounds to me like transparency does always increase accountability full stop. It just turns out that accountability to lobbyists is a greater driver of legislator behavior than accountability to voters.

The problem is therefore neither accountability nor transparency, but the disproportionate influence of lobbyists.

At the root of that problem is this:

1. If you organize a team behind a goal and persist in focusing on it, you are more likely to succeed than someone who does not allocate their attention thusly.

2. If you do the above, you need a way to pay for rent and groceries.

Transparency is a logical necessity for accountability. If we don't know who wrote a law, then we can't hold somebody accountable for it. Even if we take for granted the truthfulness of the "transparency problem", the solution doesn't lie in finding the right "balance" of secrecy and transparency.

Law is backed by threat of violence; what separates legitimate Law from the law of the jungle is its _justification_. Everyone who the Law applies to (that is to say, everyone) has a legitimate interest in knowing the justification, so that they can determine whether such Law is justified or whether their government has morphed into a violent gang. Ergo transparency is fundamental to legitimate law and governance.

> lobbyists care a lot and they use the additional access to monitor and influence legislators

This is ad tracking for lobbyists. If a lobbyist could prove they got a line into legislation, they’re worth an order of magnitude more than they are today, when one is left guessing if they did anything at all.

I'd love to see a git history for our current US legislation

Yes. We need git-blame here.

You're in luck, someone recreated the constitution in git with the history of edits

https://github.com/jessekphillips/usa-constitution

Edit: just noticed the dates aren't accurate, but still interesting and the authors are accurate

Can git do pre-1970 dates?

The file/wire format can, but the official implementation doesn't handle it well. There is some work in progress to make it work, for this kind of historical work.

There is a project doing exactly this for German law.[1] I also once cobbled together a rather primitive Python script which commits Swiss federal law as MD-file into a repo through GitHub actions.[2]

[1] https://github.com/bundestag/gesetze

[2] https://github.com/quadratecode/ch-law-tracker

For pieces that were added as amendments, it is at least possible to determine who proposed the amendment. Instances where the as-written initial bill is written on K Street will probably always be impossible unless Congress pass absurdly strict sunlight laws with teeth (i.e. make it illegal for congresspeople to have substantive meetings without livestreaming them) that inconvenience themselves.

yah, for that, we'd need complete social graphs for public servants, which would quickly run afoul the congressional staffs' civil liberties, because they'd try to hide as much as possible behind other people. you'd need that to appropriately apportion attributions back to the public servant.

i'd be ok pushing for a legal carve-out for this social graph however, as i'd posit that greater governmental transparency overrides the potential encroachments of the ~tens/hundreds of thousands of partisans and lobbyists (<0.1% of population; though slippery slope could be invoked here). you'd start with staffers and move out to anyone paid directly by the office and their affiliated political organizations, then move to large donors and their PACs. obviously the current supreme court would try to block this as an antecedent to the citizen's united case.

Oh yeah it would definitely be in the interests of the ruled class. Unfortunately, since it is bad for the ruling class, we won't get it.

Not exactly what you are looking for, but Open Secrets gets you almost there: https://www.opensecrets.org/federal-lobbying

Their API leaves a lot to be desired, but the data is much easier to access and analyze than the raw data from the US House or Senate websites.

I've thought about this (as an outsider who doesn't know anything) and wondered if plain old git would do the job. I've heard Germany already does this, but when I looked at https://github.com/bundestag/gesetze it didn't look like this was representative of what I would assume to be the full extent of German legislation.

In theory, you probably wouldn't find lobbyists contributing directly, but you could find representatives and then link them to lobbyists they've associated with.

Until you define a method/definition of "Evil" you're out of luck. What you can do, is use this to track changes, and then match it to a corpus of other data to get a better fidelity on what may influence legislation; financial transactions, public statements and where they were made, state visits, litigation, etc. Much of it in the public eye, hence scrapable and able to be put into a data lake/warehouse/cabana/dilapidated shack, and analytics applied to it. From there you may find emergent phenomena.

Isn’t this what opensecrets.org does?

Find lobbyists who wrote parts Is this usually noted on the document?

unfortunately, no. but other records can and do illuminate such behavior.

Just need a github for legislation. Want to see who added what subsection? Check the commit history.

We do have this in the US! All laws should show who wrote them, when, who approved it, etc, we just don't have a great API for programs, and moreso we don't have the public appetite to consume it

No. The request is to show who wrote individual lines or sections. Currently the bill shows as being 'written' by legislators Smith & Johnson but lacks crediting/blaming who actually provided the wording for each section. The goal would be to see who slipped in which pieces of the bill.

Ah ok that makes a lot more sense. To be fair though that is the same as git, I might push up the code but that doesn't mean I "created" it - I'm just the one taking responsibility for it by introducing it into the system

True, but signing the commits with a key for a specific subsection would mean you attach responsibility for whatever was in that commit. Right now the system is, a bill is listed with who "sponsors it." That can mean they wrote it, it could mean a lobbyists gave it to them or that several people spread across the staff of different representatives wrote it. Sure, we could say who sponsors it bears full responsibility, but its not practical, especially when a bill grows to become a tome. Using a VCS system like git isn't full proof, a senator could just pass out their keys like candy, but I think it would mean a whole lot more if voters could go, "well here is your commit to this bill on X day at Y time, signed by your keys." It may also help correlate the wheeling and dealing that goes on and more importantly, how a bill changes as it goes through committees.

Edit: Actually it could have several other benefits. A senator could tag a "release" of the bill prior to the bill going to committee so the Senator could say, "look, this is the state of the bill now after going through committees, but here is a diff from when I tagged it before it going to committees. So no, my opponents are wrong when they say I put a provision in this bill to stock my favorite fishing hole, just check the difference."

I think even before that we need an API to tell us who voted for or against each bill, and their party affiliation.

Also an easy way to find all votes of each elected representative.

Then maybe an app that allows me to pick a few bills and a few representatives and produce a matrix of how they voted on those bills, also which proportion of each party voted yes or no on those bills.

And finally for each proposed bill who voted for or against to bring it onto the floor to be discussed and voted on, or not.

Everybody has lobbyists, there's no public cause that lacks lobbyists in the USA and if you think it's only corporations with effective lobbyists it's probably because you're discounting a slew of causes and groups.

"We need to track the evil parts of bills to the congress person who is the sell out for lobbyists (and the corporations beind them)"

This would require a lot of changes to how bills are literally shuffled around the building :)

git grep -n 'healthcare' | perl -F':' -anpe '$_=`git blame -L$F[1],+1 $F[0]`'

I use to work in Congress. 100% of it is written by lobbyists.

This is categorically false. If you want an understanding of what life in Congress is like, I highly recommend Mark Strand's "Surviving Inside Congress"

It's not categorically false, just false. Some phrases written by lobbyists survive in some bills.

But then wouldn't the phrase I was referring to, "100% of it is written by lobbyists" be categorically false because it specifically emphasizes the percentage and therefore the claim is false? If they had said that sometimes phrases or even whole bills from lobbyists get introduced I wouldn't have quibbled with it.

While the phrase has become used more loosely, I believe (could be wrong, of course) that it is best used to explain that the cause of being false is a category error. It's like the distinction between a type error and a value error. In this case, I'd say it's a value error. The value 100 is false, not the type, because we know that a nonzero amount of prose in legislation is indeed written by lobbyists.

Ah okay, this was really helpful, thanks! Not quite as bad of a language faux pas as when I was a kid and thought 'per se' was persay but I'm glad to know the difference

We need WHICH congress-person approved it getting into the bill. We have to VOTE OUT the congress-person linked to the evil riders to bills (Budget bills, Defence bills, etc.)

No, 100% is not written, but yes some bills are written by lobbyists.

A good story my professor told me is when he took a trip to Congress, met his Congressperson, suggested a law that would help entrepreneurs, then sat down with him and they both drafted it in about 2 hours, then he took it to Congress to table it for a vote. It didn't pass, but that's how laws get written.

But then again, is lobbying bad? I mean, it's not stacks of money passed under a table, it's literally arguing your case. I mean isn't that what Congresspeople are there for? To hear their constituents concerns and desires?

Would anyone on HN argue that EFF shouldn't be allowed to spend donations they receive to do work that helps them lobby congress for say, privacy laws?

That's a good thing to me.

We need the ability to understand exactly who profits from any act/law/bill and excruiciating detail of the finances of anyone in congress, coupled with max age limit for any seat, including the Supreme Court.

Who wants to be the first to teach congress to use git?

All of this is somewhere, all of this information.

lots of this data exists. campaign finance and lobbying reports help shine a light on this behavior.

i’d be happy with voting information for each bill that was voted on by either house or senate.

Git blame for bills, I love it! :D

Version track the bills.

That would be very cool.

you are arguing for Git for legislation. not an api.

I want a webhook for Nancy Pelosi’s trades

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