Congressional leaders fight against posting bills online | Hacker News Reader

Congressional leaders fight against posting bills online

washingtonexaminer.com

28 pointsmiked19 comments

The only shocking thing: Nearly every Republican has signed on, but the Democratic leadership is unwilling to cede control over when bills are brought to the floor for votes and are discouraging their rank and file from signing the petition.

The more I follow politics, the more I realize how similar the republicans and democrats are. Their behavior flips with power. If GWB was in office, it would be have been the democrats supporting the bill. I wonder really, why didn't the democrats support this? Would the republicans have supported such a measure for the Patriot Act? Why not require this for every bill? Why do the Republicans only want it on this bill?

While true that disclosure aids the minority party, and both sides pay some degree of lip service to the issue of transparency, it is still important for American democracy that our political leaders make bills available to the full Congress and to the public for at least 72 hours before a vote.

When Bush was in office, it was the Dems, including Obama, making similar complaints.

Looks like a misleading headline. This isn't about posting bills online; online bills is a canard being used to promote a 72-hour waiting period on bills.

There are arguments for or against the 72-hour waiting period (the GOP proposal, like similar arguments made during the Bush presidency by Dems, is crafted to increase the ability of the minority to delay action by the majority; it isn't simply a "good-governance" measure). But they have little directly to do with whether bills can be posted online.

72 hours even sounds like too little time.

I agree. How about six months? All the major issues have been festering for years, what's an extra six months of delay?

Remember, the government can't build a new road without three years of planning, community consultation, environmental impact statements, mandatory waiting periods, careful negotiation with all stakeholders, and whatever other bureaucracy might crop up along the way. But when the government wants to pass a bill to spend a trillion bucks or fundamentally change the nature of the economy, they seem to think that about twelve hours is the ideal length of time to spend debating it.

72 hours? Six months? How about a year?

What we need is a better process for informing people about the issues involved in legislation. But we don't run congress by referenda, and whether or not legislators "read" bills is irrelevant: they're voting based on political calculation and personal principles, and nothing is going to change that.

> ...and whether or not legislators "read" bills is irrelevant: they're voting based on political calculation and personal principles, and nothing is going to change that.

I think we should try change it. It's a horrible state of affairs.

The best thing about posting bills online for six months is that it doesn't matter that legislators don't read them. Instead you'd have an army of partisan bloggers etc trying to point out the flaws, ensuring that all the bill's flaws would get brought to the surface eventually, and at least some of those should get amended away.

The average SnR on bills on OpenCongress is terrible. Most bills require expertise to really analyze; the people with expertise and the will to apply it are already chiming in on bills. I don't want to sound apathetic, but I'm not convinced about the wonderful powers of public peer review on legislation.

Roger Ebert's blog is amazing, and one of the reasons is that he generates amazingly thoughtful comments. He even managed to do a debate on creationism, in the context of Ben Stein's movie! Here's what happens when he does something overtly political. Note the comments.

http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2009/10/the_anger_of_the_fes...

(Something to notice: 1200+ comments later, and he is still responding to comments. The guy is a machine.)

You change it by voting in better legislators.

Regardless, the idea that every voter on every piece of legislation is going to be conversant with every line in that legislation seems unrealistic.

It would absolutely be realistic if the legislation were of a sane length. If a bill can't be read and understood within an hour, it's probably too big for anyone to properly understand it at all, and it should be disallowed on principle.

This all seems to devolve to libertarianism --- "the bills are complicated because regulation is complicated", "no, regulation is only complicated because we over-regulate", and on and on until we hit the point where we say the free market will take care of PCBs in the watershed.

I'm fine with the fact that Dick Durbin isn't doing line-by-line review of the health care reform bill, and with the idea that one party is lining up behind one set of experts and interests, and the other is lining up behind another one. Dick Durbin would do a crappy job of making good judgements about health care. Replace him with someone who's awesome at health care, and now you have someone who does a crappy job with defense contracts.

Either bills don't matter, in which case voting on them without knowing what they say is fine (but why are we wasting our time on it?), or they do matter, in which case they should be read and understood.

Is there more to it than that? Maybe a continuum of importance, where some proportion of the voters has to know some proportion of what the bill means. Then the rest can use a combination of guesswork and party line to make their decision... ? Oh wait.

It's a robust system! really!

Libertarianism is devolving? I beg to differ.

The complexity is a shield against accountability.

I agree, except instead of one hour, one minute.

While I support a 72-hour public review period, I think there are ways to exploit public interest that would render it less effective. However, a 72-hour review period coupled with rules against omnibus laws would be very efficient (IMO). The laws that reach the floor would be very specific. Congressional records could not be obfuscated with "well I wanted this, so I compromised and voted for that as well".

Although...I think congress would still find a way around such rules.

"For the majority party, legislative timing plays a big role in whether a bill will pass because support can be fleeting."

Perhaps your bill doesn't deserve to pass if you can't even keep your supporters on your side for more than 12 hours or so...

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