Source Control For Bills In Congress? 300
grepya writes "An article in Slate talks about the sneaky way a major change in the Patriot Act reauthorization bill was made by (possibly) a Congressional staffer without even his boss knowing about it. (The change increased the power of the Executive at the expense of the other two branches of government.) Now, I write software for a large and complex system containing millions of lines of code and I know that nobody could slip a single line of code into my project without my knowledge. This is because everything that goes into the build goes into a source control system, and email notification is generated to interested parties. This is for a body of work that affects perhaps a few hundred thousand people at most (our company and the combined population of all our customer organizations). Shouldn't the same process be applied to bills being debated in national legislatures that affect potentially hundreds of millions of people?"
Read The Bills Act (Score:5, Informative)
A group called DownSizeDC.org is promoting a bill that would force every legislator who votes for a bill to sign a declaration that have either read the entire text of the bill, or had it read to them. The "Read the Bills Act" would also require that every piece of legislation be posted on the Net in its final form for a full 7 days before any vote could occur, giving the rest of us time to read and react...
There used to be requirements in US House and Senate for reading of the bills, but they both routinely waive that requirement. If it were required, the number and complexitiy of bills actually presented would go down dramatically.
Not needed. (Score:5, Informative)
Bills are already drafted using XML assigned numbers. Any amenment to a bill has its own number, bills which are "engrossed" or passed have a different number. They know exactly what they are voting for.
http://xml.house.gov/ [house.gov]
Let's look at the change log (Score:5, Informative)
First, we're talking about 109th Congress, H.R. 3199, section 502, "INTERIM APPOINTMENT OF UNITED STATES ATTORNEYS." Version control is in Thomas [loc.gov], run by the Library of Congress. (Unfortunately, you can't link to Thomas documents effectively; it's a front end to a non-Web system and the URLs are temporary.)
So where did that go in? The versions passed by the House and Senate are quite different, and this bill was rewritten in conference committee. This language isn't in either the House or the Senate version. We go to the Bill Summary and Status File, and look under "Amendments". This is the change log for the bill. Nothing about this is in there.
This change was added in the House-Senate conference committee, which is how stuff like this usually sneaks in.
The only reference to this change is in the conference committee's report, at House Congressional Record page H1130. The text is:
Section 502. Interim appointment of United States Attorneys
Section 502 is a new section and addresses an inconsistency in the appointment process of United States Attorneys.
That's where it went in. But there's no indication of who put it there. The members of the conference committee were appointed by the Speaker of the House, and they were:
One of those members of Congress is responsible.
Read the Bills (Score:1, Informative)
Get your congress critter to sponsor the Read The Bills Act: http://www.downsizedc.org/read_the_laws.shtml [downsizedc.org]
Re:I don't think you understand (Score:1, Informative)
First, you have to know about the federal agencies. Congress leaves the implementation of the technical details of a "clean up the air" bill to the EPA, since, presumably, Congress-critters know nothing about smoke stacks, NO2, etc. The EPA then figures out what Congress wanted to do and then the _EPA_ makes the specific laws regarding "thou shall emit no more than 1 lb mercury per year" and this goes in the Code of Federal Regulations. (All this rulemaking applies to DOT, EPA, FCC... the list goes on and on.)
The FR is, quite possibly, the best way to get involved with government. More specifically, it is the place where all the federal agencies that dictate policy (anything that goes in the CFR) basically "talk to themselves" and muse over how they're going to implement this new law that came down from Congress. Essentially, they try to determine intent and then suggest an idea over how it might be implemented in fines, reality, etc, in the CFR itself. They also, ALMOST ALWAYS, solicit comments from the public, and you have usually 60 days. (Even better, if you live in or around DC, there's usually a meeting somewhere where you can voice your opinion.)
What the sad part is, on really contentious nerd stuff, you'll see the post-comment notice in the FR from the FCC or something, saying "Okay, we've got these comments. All of 50 of them, from the 300 million people in the US. And now we'll consider them. And this is how we'll put the CFR together." And this is where the "easily subverted" legislation can be fought, if it deals with a Federal agency.
Really, the FR isn't all that bad. I was subscribed to the table of contents listserv for a while. You can ignore a lot of things (unless you're really interested in tarrifs on olives from China, or some such rot). But every once in a while, you'll hear about something you're really interested in.
Now, this system has nothing to do with THOMAS and the Congressional Record. THOMAS already does ALL of the pre-publishing for bills and proposed bills. This is what the parent is asking. And it's in a more accessible format than the FR, that's for sure. Congress bills that affect the US Code only don't really touch the FR or the agencies. But, between THOMAS and the FR, you can keep pretty good tabs on the govmnt. Sheer volume can be a significant problem, though..
Re:alternatively... (Score:2, Informative)
Open House Project (Score:2, Informative)