I support this:
ReadtheBill.org is a new national organization dedicated to forcing Congress to post all proposed legislation online for 72 hours before it goes to the floor of Congress. We call this the “72 Hours of Sunshine Rule”. It is needed because Congress has degenerated into chaos. The House of Representatives still has a rule on the books requiring proposed legislation be available to members for three days. But the House waives this rule routinely and rubber stamps huge bills in the middle night, clueless of their content or cost. Senate rules are fuzzier but the result is the same. This chaos in Congress costs every American. Provisions and giveaways slipped through Congress are one reason that the U.S. has a national debt of $8 trillion. These sneaky provisions also invite plain-old corruption.
Posting all proposed bills online for 72 hours is the single most powerful reform to change the way Congress operates. It’s also simple. The short-order cook who reads the breakfast orders, the accounts payable clerk who scrutinizes invoices and most other working Americans understand that they must read certain papers to do their jobs. Amazingly, in the U.S. Congress, lawmakers do not believe they need to read proposed laws before they are considered on the floor of Congress.
I would increase it to two weeks if I had my way (I like a slow-moving government most of the time- even if it would be a colossal pain in the arse for Congress), but 72 hours is a nice start.
Steve
I believe the Democratic reform package that they are introducing today calls for bills to be posted in advance on the Internet, with a supermajority vote required for any waiver. Meanwhile, it’s the Republicans who have promoted this idea that the minority party is irrelevant and doesn’t even need to be shown bills in advance.
I can’t see how this would be a bad idea, although I sure hope we don’t follow the slippery slope all the way down to direct democracy!
Mr Furious
Abso-freaking-lutely.
Lines
Didn’t this come up in the comments about a month ago or am I having incorrect deja-vu again?
This is absolutely a great start towards re-democratizing our country. Bring people back into the process.
Now how do we force our lazy ass congress-critters to listen to us?
Jim Allen
John, I see you have this one filed under “Excellent links” and “Politics”. Maybe you can open up a new category of “Excellent politics” and make this one the first entry.
DougJ
72 hours is much too long to have to wait to get a warrant and it is much too long to have to post bills. What if the terrorists are reading the website too? Do we want these people to know about our laws and bills? Conceivably, they could read the bills carefully and figure out ways to attack us that are within the law. Or they could find loopholes and find ways to bilk the government out of billions in bogus benefits.
No way — it is far safer for all government business to be transacted in complete privacy.
Pb
I actually do think that in certain rare circumstances (which they haven’t found, apparently), 72 hours could be too long to wait for actual “emergency legislation”. Therefore, I think that this requirement should be waived given significant consensus and recognition of an emergency–if not unanimity, then three-quarters or four-fifths or something.
srv
Good things in government never happen. Y’all seem to think you live in a representative democracy or something…
How come nobody provides a front-end site to house and senate bills with internet polling?
yet another jeff
Damn, DougJ makes a good point…but I argue that when the govt. moves quickly and “efficiently”, the terrorists win.
Gridlock is more than a good idea, it’s Patriotic.
rilkefan
Umm, what’s supposed to happen in those 72 hours? Congressman X is going to read a 1k-page tax document requiring an MBA, a degree in accounting, and a sophisticated model of the US monetary and fiscal policy fabrics to understand? Joe Megafarmer is going to see that his subsidy for not growing soybeans in Utah got cut? Brad DeLong is going to wield his influence to get a comma removed?
yet another jeff
To be fair, much is already available for us to read: http://www.senate.gov/pagelayout/legislative/b_three_sections_with_teasers/active_leg_page.htm
Lines
Look at it this way, the 72 hour wait would have saved America from the Schiavo emotion-a-thon.
Mr Furious
Congressmen X has each of those experts on his staff. They all get to read it. And yeah, Brad DeLong can wiegh in and sound alarms as can John, me or anyone else.
It might have been here, as Lines mentioned, or elsewhere, but if this was standard procedure, media outlets (I know, try not to laugh/puke) might actually employ writers capable of boiling this stuff down for layman consumption, or exposing outrageous stuff.
There is certainly no harm.
In addition, there should be no anonymous earmarks or additions. No more “who added the vaccine-producer immunity to the PATRIOT Act?” Every piece has a name attached to it.
Steve
You also wouldn’t have secret legislation for Philip Morris getting slipped into the Homeland Security bill at the last minute, or mysterious provisions that let people snoop your tax returns. Stuff like that would get caught.
KC
I don’t know. Openness generally puts our nation at risk. I mean, posting legislation beforehand, eliminating the ability of conference committees from altering bills without majority support, or disallowing last minute cut-and-gut bills created in secret by the House rules committee to go forward could put our country at risk. Indeed, we need more secrecy and less oversight if we’re going to be absolutely safe.
Lines
Sorry, KC, DougJ did it better :) But nice try, its always good to see new humor attempted :)
Rob
Who could possibly be against this? Besides rilkefan, although I found his arguement weak at best.
Birkel
Emergency legislation would no doubt need to be excepted from any such rule.
And as a rule it could, of course, be rescinded in future Congresses. (And if it wasn’t rescind-able it likely wouldn’t pass Constitutional muster.)
But those might be nits to pick after giving the idea a go.
Katinula
Duly noted and posted. Lets get this word out and make it happen.
rilkefan
I don’t get why not. If they’re getting away with that now, what’s 72 hours going to do? Who’s going to vote against the Homeland Security bill?
Lines
If it was properly analyzed and broken down for laymen in easier to read ways? If the secrets are no longer secrets, they won’t survive the light. People would vote against their mother if they knew she was going to stab them in the back, or something like that.
Steve
First, you don’t have to vote against the Homeland Security bill to do something about it. You can have the amendment declared out of order in any number of ways.
Second, and more important, the publicity creates a political remedy. Politicians won’t pull stunts like that to benefit their girlfriend the Philip Morris lobbyist because people will find out and make a big stink. You can no longer slip a fast one by the unwitting public.
Your objections all seem to take the form of “this wouldn’t solve everything,” and I agree, it’s not going to make some kind of 1000-page muddle into the perfect bill. But it’s clear that it would help in at least some respects, and I don’t see any way at all in which it would hurt.
kenB
Rilk, a few years ago I would’ve agreed with you, but nowadays each side has a volunteer army of bloggers who would happily go through the legislation and find the undesirable portions. Can you imagine the resulting blogospheric triumphalism when one of them finds a $50 million giveaway buried on page 984 and the publicization of it gets it taken out of the bill?
Cyrus
Well, okay. But as Pb linked to above, examples of actual emergency legislation are extremely rare. If you can think of any bills – hypothetical or actual – that meet their criteria, please post them here as well as e-mailing them, because I know I’m curious. As they say, almost nothing a legislature does is truly urgent.
And,
No, one Congressman is not going to read a thousand pages. However, if one thousand MBAs and accountants read one page each – more realistically, each read the preliminary bits and then skim for their areas of interest – and they each blog about it or talk about it on cable or to a reporter, some very accurate and useful summaries will probably accumulate.
And this would help out with smaller bills no less than the really big ones. The Schiavo fiasco, for example, or the Medicare giveaway (well, small compared to some bills, at least.)
Anderson
Would everyone please step back a minute …
and think how fundamentally spooky it is that the Read The Bill proposal is even an issue?
Someone has to *argue* for the idea that Congress shouldn’t vote on bills before they’ve been made public a few days in advance?
Our “democracy” may have died a while back, & we’re just now starting to catch a whiff of the corpse.
stickler
There was this strange election in 2000; you may have heard about it. Decided, 5-4, by the Supreme Court of all things. Congress started behaving in odd ways after that. K-Street Project hit full throttle, DeLay got Texas gerrymandered to his specifications, and the Senate dropped the blue-slip privilege, among other things.
About that time, the opposition party no longer got to read bills before they had to vote on them.
Oh, and we got lied into a war in Iraq, too.
rilkefan
I’m not arguing about the blogarmy discovering tons of junk – I’m arguing about anybody taking action based on those discoveries. Is the claim that once the bill passes, the public ceases to care about pork? As best I understand it, the pork gets in there in the first place because it greases the process, makes constituents happy, comes in flocks (the usual prey defense against predators), and isn’t that big compared to the perfectly straightforward budget-busting that everybody can see coming in advance. I just don’t see Balloon Juice raising a fuss about a soybean giveaway and having CNN and Fox run it enough to get the bill changed.
MC
One of the best controls that could be put on Congress is a block on omnibus bills. The Maryland Constitution explicitly forbids the General Assembly from violating the idea of a single-purpose bill and the courts can overturn legislation that doesn’t fit that description.
I’m not saying there is no pork and no funny business, but it’s greatly reduced. Posting bills is swell, but if you can put anything and everything in a bill until it’s too complicated for most people to understand, it’s of little use.
Tony Dismukes
I’ve been arguing for years that the best way to achieve “small government” (for those old-style conservatives who actually believe in such a thing) is for all lawmakers to be required to actually read all the way through all legislation they vote on. Of course, I’m a liberal so I’m supposedly in favor of big government, but the liberal intellectual elitist side of me likes to see people doing all that reading, so that’s okay.
We could have pop quizzes. Flunk and you don’t get to vote on the bill in question.
Ed
It would all be much easier if Congress did not indulge in omnibus appropriations bills. One funded item = one bill. The current three card monte system (with a million cards) of hiding pork in a flood of words and numbers prevents anyone from knowing exactly what’s going on, except those moving the specific cards. Might not even have time to run up deficits in the trillions.
The Other Steve
The Minnesota Constitution has something that I would like to see added to the Federal Constitution.
It means if you are passing a law funding the purchase of Military Equipment, you can’t add a provision opening up the drilling of oil in ANWR.
rilkefan
Suspect that with one-item bills it would be hard to get important but unpopular measures enacted.
rilkefan
“unpopular” in the sense of nutritious and unsugary.
rilkefan
More good governance reform.
MC
If a piece of legislation is “important”, let it stand on its own merits. There is no more democratic method of determining the purely subjective importance of legislation than popular support.
waddayaknow
You betcha. It takes months or years for ‘reasonable’ legislation to reach the floor of either house and a matter of hours (minutes?) for the unread dreck that rapes our economy to come to a partisan vote (with earmarks) so every citizen should be able to view every bill that makes it’s way to a vote. That should cut down the temptation to blindside us with special interest payoffs.
Will it happen? No freakin’ way. IMHO.
rilkefan
“There is no more democratic method of determining the purely subjective importance of legislation than popular support.”
This isn’t a direct democracy, thank G*d. Allow the poor representatives some cover when making responsible but painful cuts or raising hated but necessary taxes.
radish
rilkefan, I have to disagree this would have no effect on bogus riders. In practice, sane congresscritters (I think there may be as many as ten or twelve of them still loose in the wild) might very well oppose a homeland security bill that had a Phillip Morris rider, but first they need two things:
1. they need to know that the rider is in there
2. they need political cover
In theory, staffers take care of both of those things, but in practice that isn’t working any more (why not is left as an exercise for the reader). Putting a frozen form of the bill online lets a bunch of motivated people poke at it to see what kind of bogosity got added when it was in committee and what the bill really says, as opposed to what its sponsors claim it says. It means that the
lobbyistsstaffers aren’t the only ones who have read the bill, which shifts at least a little bit of the political risk of producingeviltryannicalstoopidundesirable legislation into the period before the bill has actually passed. It means you can call up congresscritter B when congresscritter A is putting bad shit into bill X, instead of sitting at home praying that congresscritter B has alert staffers.Me personally I’d like to expose the whole sausage factory by requiring every bill to have a publicly accessible revision history with each revision personally authorized by a congresscritter as well. No more voice votes either. But nobody in DC is gonna go for that kind of thing in real life. Probably not even Feingold, though maybe I should ask his office, before I say that ;-).
I agree with yet another jeff: gridlock is patriotic. Gridlock (punctuated with an occasional preferably-bloodless revolution) is what the founders wanted, and the founders were some smart mofos, even if they were all dead white guys.
As to the problem of how to pass nutritious but unsugary legislation, when was the last time anything like that got out of committee anyway? I’d love for us to have that kind of problem, but I say let’s deal with the problems we’ve got now…
BTW it’s nice to see some big-C Conservatives starting to notice that the GOP is exactly the opposite of small-c conservative. Probably too little too late, but maybe y’all can regain a few shreds of self-respect before the economy collapses and they haul you off to the camps.
MC
rilkefan: You’re right, but I’m thinking more about public policy issues than fiscal issues. Torture bans and drilling in ANWR should not be afforded the opportunity to avoid debate by hiding in appropriation bills.
With regards to fiscal issues, Congress, especially the House, created this mess by tinkering with their rules. First off, every year they are supposed to pass a budget resolution and they haven’t done that at least three times since 1998. Now, we have nothing but “ad-hoc” budgeting with no planning or control. Secondly, they let the 1990 BEA lapse and all controls on tax expenditures went right out the window. Rule changes about committee chairmen in 1975 and 1995 also limited the ability of “safe” Congressmen to act as fiscal disciplinarians within the House.
If Congress is going to pass unpopular legislation, and all good fiscal legislation will be unpopular with someone, it has to be led by safe senior committee chairs using tools like rules to limit floor amendments, tactics to kill supplementals in committee, and binding budget resolutions to get the stuff through the House.
tbrosz
I don’t know about the “online” bit. You can get pretty good access to legislation on the Thomas site, although not always as rapidly as I’d like.
If you really want to see government improve, make every legislator pass a quiz on the content of a bill before he gets to vote on it.
rilkefan
Ok, all I have going for my side of the argument is cynicism. Somewhat like Mark Schmitt’s cynicism, only uninformed.
Kimmitt
This is cute and all, but the only way it gets passed is if a lot of House Republicans get to go on 72-hour golfing trips.
Lee
This is even a better idea. I would love to see how many could actually pass a test on a bill. My guess it that we would have a handful of Representatives getting to vote on every bill and the rest standing around twiddling their fingers.
Faux News
I think the Onion once again has hit the nail on the head:
http://www.theonion.com/content/node/44455
Alex Peak
Why just 72 hours? Some of these bills are thousands of pages long.
These bills should be available to the politicians and to the public at least seven days before a vote. This will give the politicians the time they need to read the legislation and to have meaningful debate. This would also allow political action groups, citizen lobbying groups, and the media time to learn about the bills.
Further, the politicians should have to sign an affidavit saying they’ve read the whole bill (or had it read to them) verbatim to be able to vote for said bill.
I support the Read the Bills Act, a bill written and promoted by DownsizeDC.org, Inc.
Mr. DougJ, your comments scare me. I say