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?"
Re:alternatively... (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes, and a debuggable malloc too. (Score:5, Interesting)
I once had a conversation with a lawyer friend, who explained that there are portions of the law that refer to laws that have been repealed. I tried to explain to him that in computing this is directly analogous to de-referencing a pointer to memory that's been free()'d. We all know what this does in a program. In law, it perhaps there is a default judgement in cases like this. He was just a law student at the time, and IANAL, so maybe some real lawyers could explain how this situation is handled now.
Has happened before... (Score:4, Interesting)
http://archive.salon.com/tech/feature/2000/06/14/
Great suggestion but... (Score:2, Interesting)
For them, I'm guessing this idea ranks right up there with allowing more CSPAN cameras, databases on attendance (+other metrics), term limits, etc. If we get a bill addressing this topic, I'm sure it's title will match the concept far more than the content.
Another class idea that will be promptly ignored by the cretins more interested in personal power than public service.
Re:alternatively... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Yes, and a debuggable malloc too. (Score:3, Interesting)
Fragile base class (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:I don't think you understand (Score:5, Interesting)
First, I read about something called the Federal Register [wikipedia.org] the other day. As I understand, it is a daily publication of the GPO, responsible for creating a record of public government communication.
Where does this fit into the equation? Wikipedia says it has been operating since the 1930s. That to me suggests existing infrastructure. Could this program be adopted to handle pending Congressional legislation? Does something similar exist already? Are these even valid questions? I'm trying to get a sense of the public accounting context that exists today.
Now, once we set up a legislative mechanism to get the information in place, there are practical considerations. I happen to agree with the parent's cynicism. Open government is less corrupt government, and there will surely be resistance to a program like this. What is the likelihood that something like this would be ignored? The aforementioned Wikipedia states that the Register is for public notices not "classified." Do government agencies really bother? Would Congress bother? Would it matter, practically speaking?
Then there's the question of volume. I understand the current Register is thousands upon thousands of pages. What would be the best way to handle all this data? Pressure our Congressmen to form a committee to look into the possibility of proposing vaguely worded, easily subverted legislation that would create a billion dollar, privacy infringing, twenty-year behemoth of a program? Or dictate simply that the data should be available in a specified format (something akin to a patch) in a timely manner.
I think the latter would be better, because it would force We the People to take a little responsibility for the program. I mean really, who doesn't think that an enterprising group of dedicated people, working for free in their spare time would work more efficiently than a monstrous bureaucracy? Sound like a familiar Slashdot battle?
Either someone will rise to the challenge and write a utility to "visualize" the data in an interesting way, or not. If not, I think we have bigger problems than Congressmen not reading their bills.
Make the data (near) freely available, then leave it up to The People to figure out how to use it. That's my take.
Re:Fat chance (Score:2, Interesting)
Alternatively, require the bills to be written entirely on the floor, motion by motion starting from a blank piece of paper and only introducing changes in the exact form in they are read. Same effect.
Of course, this would actually protect the mechinisms of democracy from the corruption that is so rampant, so this would never happen...
The vote without even reading/knowing the bills (Score:3, Interesting)
They 'know' that cuts in any pet spending program cannot be made because we cannot 'afford to pay for the cuts'.
They hypocritically claim to know that we cannot afford to cut anything and yet admit that they vote for legislation that they do not know how much is being spent and what items it is spent on in bills.
The third Congressional sham is that they claim that reducing the rate of growth of spending on a particular program is a cut. A cut is an actual reduction in spending year over year. This is due to the 'baseline-budgeting' where spending on each program is automatically increased by 4% a year without congressional action.
These are reasons why you should not believe the parroted lines from each party.
Congress should be judged based on the actual bills they pass and not on the CNN Crossfire type of sound-bites.
Re:Fat chance (Score:3, Interesting)
First, you don't give commit privileges to interns. The only people with commit privs are actual senators/representatives/PMs. So some lackey can't change things without express authority from their privileged boss.
Of course, lackeys will still do all the typing and doc prep. Then somebody with access to commit privs will do the final commit without even proofreading it. So you say that everything is same old, same old. But the changelog will show who authorized the commit. You have to take responsibility for your commits. You didn't proofread before signing off on a commit? You take the blame. You gave your credentials to one of your staff lackeys to do commits for you? You take the blame.
And finally, if somebody tries to game the system by submitting 50 last minute changes everytime, you just vote no. Then you say, "I move to take a vote on changeset 1492, the last branch that has been stable for more than 90 minutes, and the only one that we have all been able to read." "Seconded." "A motion has been made and seconded... there will be a 30 minute pause while the build server compiles changeset 1492, after which the voting will commence."
Problems abound with this idea (Score:3, Interesting)
But, I think that there is another much more practical problem with this. Do we honestly think that people that think the internet is a series of tubes will be able to handle something like CVS?
Congressional Record, not Fed. Rgstr. (Score:3, Interesting)
http://www.gpoaccess.gov/fr/index.html [gpoaccess.gov]
There seems to be a way on that site, although I don't really want to try it myself, to sign up to receive the daily Table of Contents via email. That's about as close to `tail -f` as you can get to it, I think.
The other problem is that I'm not sure the Federal Register carries much that would help you track particular bills as they make their way through the Belly of the Beast -- for that, you'd need to be looking at the Congressional Record [wikipedia.org], which seems to be online here:
http://www.gpoaccess.gov/crecord/ [gpoaccess.gov]
It seems to also have daily updates. However -- there's a catch: the Record doesn't contain verbatim texts of everything that goes on in the Debates in Congress, even though it would be technically possible (bordering on trivial) for them to do this, if they wanted to. Instead, it's more of a heavily-edited Minutes, where various people can go in and edit what they said ex post facto (although WP claims they now print these edits in a different typeface). But even it doesn't, I don't think anyway, give you copies of draft legislation as it goes through Committee, or if it was voted on but never read on the floor; I think it would just contain the record of the vote itself.
But there's certainly the infrastructure there. All that you would need to do, would be to specify that the Congressional Record would need to contain more information -- like all the floor speeches, draft legislation, and text of bills regardless of whether they were read on the floor or not -- and then make sure that the output was in some type of standardized, machine-parsable format, with a lot of metadata. Plain text would be fine as long as you did the metadata consistently.
Then, the GPO could just expose the raw records, and let other people do the work of producing fancy frontends to manipulate the data and track particular pieces of legislation across the lifecycle.
Re:Really need both: change control & full rev (Score:3, Interesting)
Most bills are already written on as patches, with the authors indentified.
Re:The vote without even reading/knowing the bills (Score:3, Interesting)
As an admitted conservative with libertarian leanings:
The fun is, if the program is up for a 10% increase, and it gets knocked to an 7% increase, its called a C U T .
Now, to the rest of it:
The sneaky language and the ability to get provisions in, and the human, lazy, congress critters no controlling their own bills, or reading them prior to voting for them is exactly why sweeping security bills are very bad for the U.S.
Also, the fact that many laws are never sunsetted, or have their sunsets extended indefinately, and laws that have no further purpose that are never repealed or removed is another problem. (Witness the Spanish-American War Tax that we, in the U.S. are finally getting a $20 refund on this year.)
I propose a "Year of Reduction" in which there are no spending increases, and no new laws, and Congress goes through the books removing old and bad laws, old and bad taxes, and reviews Constitutional Amendments that are no longer needed because we no longer have slavery, prohibition, and etc.
Re:alternatively... (Score:3, Interesting)