House Appropriators May Limit Public Availability of Pending Bills 194
Attila Dimedici writes "The House Appropriations Committee is considering a draft report that would forbid the Library of Congress to allow bulk downloads of bills pending before Congress. The Library of Congress currently has an online database called THOMAS (for Thomas Jefferson) that allows people to look up bills pending before Congress. The problem is that THOMAS is somewhat clunky and it is difficult to extract data from it. This draft report would forbid the Library of Congress from modernizing THOMAS until a task force reports back. I am pretty sure that the majority of people on Slashdot agree that being able to better understand how the various bills being considered by Congress interact would be good for this country."
Obviously (Score:5, Funny)
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This is news? The current GOP pols are far to the right of that liberal Demagogue Nixon. The health care reform package that the current GOP is so outraged about would likely have been signed no further questions asked by Nixon as it's more conservative than what he was proposing at the time.
What's more back then the GOP recognized that we do indeed need the federal government to do somethings as leaving things up to the states didn't work out so well during our trial run as a confederation.
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This is news? The current GOP pols are far to the right of that liberal Demagogue Nixon. The health care reform package that the current GOP is so outraged about would likely have been signed no further questions asked by Nixon as it's more conservative than what he was proposing at the time.
You sure about that? [wikisource.org]
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If Democrats (or socialists) don't like it then they should amend the constitution
Anybody who refers to any member of Congress (except for Bernie Saunders) as a "socialist" is beyond the bounds of fact and reason.
Re:Obviously (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp1113618 [nejm.org]
The Irrelevance of the Broccoli Argument against the Insurance Mandate
Einer Elhauge, J.D.
N Engl J Med 2012; 366:e1January 5, 2012
Others argue that the Constitution's framers could not possibly have envisioned a congressional power to force purchases. However, in 1790, the first Congress, which was packed with framers, required all ship owners to provide medical insurance for seamen; in 1798, Congress also required seamen to buy hospital insurance for themselves. In 1792, Congress enacted a law mandating that all able-bodied citizens obtain a firearm. This history negates any claim that forcing the purchase of insurance or other products is unprecedented or contrary to any possible intention of the framers.
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http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp1113618 [nejm.org] The Irrelevance of the Broccoli Argument against the Insurance Mandate Einer Elhauge, J.D. N Engl J Med 2012; 366:e1January 5, 2012
Others argue that the Constitution's framers could not possibly have envisioned a congressional power to force purchases. However, in 1790, the first Congress, which was packed with framers, required all ship owners to provide medical insurance for seamen; in 1798, Congress also required seamen to buy hospital insurance for themselves. In 1792, Congress enacted a law mandating that all able-bodied citizens obtain a firearm. This history negates any claim that forcing the purchase of insurance or other products is unprecedented or contrary to any possible intention of the framers.
Interesting. Did this include seamen who only sailed the ocean within their own state, or did it apply only to seamen who sailed the ocean between states and/or between the US and other countries?
Was requirement for the purchase of firearms a mandate to promote the firearms business or was it perhaps related to the national defense?
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Did this include seamen who only sailed the ocean within their own state, or did it apply only to seamen who sailed the ocean between states and/or between the US and other countries?
Outside the United States.
http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/ampage?collId=llsl&fileName=001/llsl001.db&recNum=257 [loc.gov]
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Re:Obviously (Score:4, Insightful)
"NOT the Congress."
wrong.
Section 8:
The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States;
How is it not general welfare?
And lets no forget that some of our founding fathers went on to create a government health care program for some workers.
I don't see how anyone can look at that and the say they didn't want the government to be able to do that.
I wish there was a way to make the people who use the word socialism actually learn what that word means.
Do you mean market socialist? economic socialists? do you actual mean Marxisms? independent socialist? Utopian socialists?
Do you mean state joint ownership of companies? Or do you just hear that work on Fox when the are spoon feeding you what to think and assume it = 'bad'
The pubs do thing that can be considered economic and market socialism. SO maybe you should start to think for yourself and read outside your echo chamber of stupid?
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Yes, Congress can levy taxes to pay for health care, and the US government can (and does) run health care programs if it wants to. No problem with either. But that's not what Obama's health care law does.
Re:Obviously (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Obviously (Score:4, Interesting)
It's purely a matter of saying it bluntly instead of trying to say it cleverly.
You can't say, "You MUST pay $640 to buy health insurance"-- unconstitutional.
But...
You can say, "You MUST give the federal government $640 per year in taxes. The Federal government will provide you health care. There will be tax exemptions for people whose income is low". -- constitutional
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But the two statements don't mean the same thing. A mandate to buy something is legally not the same as a tax increase, and the differences have consequences.
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No, they are exactly the same. Saying you pay a $640 fine if you don't have health insurance is exactly the same as saying everyone pays $640 in extra taxes, except people with health insurance who get the $640 exempted. Except using different words, that have the same meaning in causing precisely the same effect.
Taxes are mandatory purchase of government services, that the government can waive when the same services are purchased from a private provider. Except when purchasing the government services with
Re:Obviously (Score:4, Informative)
Let's ask the author of the constitution (quoting from memory): "There is nothing more natural than to start with a general phrase, and qualify it with particulars. The phrase 'provide general welfare' is qualified by the list of specifically enumerated power below it. Congress may only exercise those powers.
"To suppose Congress might do anything that falls within the 'general welfare' would give the central government unlimited power to do whatever it pleases, and there is a whole host of proofs that was never intended by the original framers, nor by myself." - James Madison, author of the Constitution.
He also authored, with Jefferson, the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions which state the powers of the central government are few, while the bulk of the power is reserved to the People and their Legislatures (amendment 10). The Congress may not mandate you buy car insurance. But the States can. It is a power reserved to them, and the same is true of any other form of insurance.
And finally:
Congress has the power to regulate commerce AMONG the states. Not inside the states, and most-definitely not commerce between two individuals (me and my doctor). They can NOT force me to buy insurance if I would rather pay cash directly to my physician.
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Congress has the power to regulate commerce AMONG the states. Not inside the states, and most-definitely not commerce between two individuals (me and my doctor). They can NOT force me to buy insurance if I would rather pay cash directly to my physician.
Dead on accurate, sir.
In the interest of preserving Constitutional authority, I hope the SCOTUS decides in that manner regarding the individual mandate; however, given recent decisions by said court that blatantly flout the Constitutional rights of the People... I'm not holding my breath.
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No, it is NOT dead on accurate.
Or maybe you think the founding fathers didn't know what the constitution meant when they where in congress and passing bills the explicitly show that is an incorrect out of context interpretation?
Clearly your interpretation handed to you by your republican masters is correct and the founding fathers were wrong.
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No, it is NOT dead on accurate. Or maybe you think the founding fathers didn't know what the constitution meant when they where in congress and passing bills the explicitly show that is an incorrect out of context interpretation?
Well, sirrah, you are welcome to either prove me wrong, or STFU.
Clearly your interpretation handed to you by your republican masters is correct and the founding fathers were wrong.
Yes, my final statement in that post regarding my hopes that the SCOTUS will refuse to force-feed corporatism upon the populace is indeed an obvious indicator that I am ruled by "republican masters."
Or you're just being a partisan, sensationalist jackass who has chosen to reject the reality of my statement, and substitute your own. If I were a betting man, my money would go down upon the latter.
Go find someone else to troll, you are not adeq
Commerce among the several states (Score:3)
The phrase 'provide general welfare' is qualified by the list of specifically enumerated power below it.
"To regulate commerce [...] among the several states" is one such power. Otherwise, how is Medicare legal?
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Medicare is legal, as is SS.
The people paying for a fund that pays for old age pensions and healthcare is not a bribe. In fact most of the SS and Medicare money goes to people who are much less likely to vote. That's a terrible bribery scheme. It's clearly not bribery at all.
FDR passed all kinds of laws that Republicans like you tried to stop (and are trying again - you people never give up, because you always have budgets from your 1% masters). They have been challenged many times, and found Constitutional
Yes and no. (Score:3)
Statement: They can NOT force me to buy insurance if I would rather pay cash directly to my physician.
This is true. It is impermissible for Congress to make failure to buy health insurance a federal crime.
The law actually in question does not do so, contrary to the paranoia of the right-wing crazies. It is improper terminology and a bad political idea to call it a "mandate" instead of what it actually is. It imposes a fine---more correctly a tax---on those who do not. And this is 100% legal.
It has been e
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Uh, Congress isn't forcing you to buy anything. No one, at any point, is required to buy any insurance.
Does no one here actually understand how the law works?
Congress is taxing people who don't have health insurance. Or, as I believe it is phrased, Congress is taxing everyone, and then providing a rebate for people with health insurance.
Gee, I wonder if Congress has the power to tax people. If only the power to tax was somehow enshrined in the Constitution.
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Trouble is that Obama is flip-flopping: to get the health care bill passed, he insisted that it is not a tax. Now to get it through SCOTUS, he is claiming that it is a tax.
But it isn't a tax. A tax would mean that everybody pays a health care tax and then gets a credit for getting private health care. You may think it amounts to the same thing, but it doesn't.
The health care law needs to be scrapped and replaced with one that defines the mandate in terms of a tax because that is all Congress has a right
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Obama can 'insist' the PPACA is a manned moon mission for all I care.
'Penalty' doesn't actually seem to have any meaning in the law. Let's try to figure out what a 'penalty' could be.
It doesn't appear to be a fine, which is when a criminal offense is committed that has a monetary punishment. And, in fact, that would be a very oddly structured crime...a crime of not doing something?
It doesn't appear to be a tort, either. Simply because there's no trial possible.
There are 'fees' the government charges...
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They went out of their way in the wording to make it NOT be a tax. So, that part you quoted in the constitution isn't relevant.
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I cannot buy Healthcare Insurance from California if I live in the New York unless my employer is based in California and it's provided to me by my employer. The Health Insurance companies are(were?) "protected" from national insurance operations beyond state boundaries... Interestingly, automotive insurance can be sold across state lines yet that is regulated by the States.
Insurance firms in each state are protected from interstate competition by the federal McCarran-Ferguson Act (1945), which grants states the right to regulate health plans within their borders. Large employers who self-insure are exempt from these state regulations. Thus there is a patchwork of 50 different sets of state regulations, and the cost for an insurer licensed in one state to enter another state market is often high.
(Source [ncsl.org])
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But the insurance company has office in several states.
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This is where the problem lies.
If it is a tax then it can skirt the 10th amendment. Though we would all agree that it would be "skirting" it as the constitution was clear.
The issue is that it was not passed as a tax. They have legal issues if it is a tax. They have legal issues if it is not a tax.
What I am seeing is that they are trying to tell us it "is/is not" a tax. They can only get it to be legal if they can convince the Supreme Court that it is both a tax and not a tax at the same time.
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Re:Obviously (Score:5, Insightful)
This is reasonable per Pelosi. As she said "we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KoE1R-xH5To [youtube.com]
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Except, the Republicans run the House of Representatives now, and they run the Appropriations Committee who actually made this pronouncement, so wouldn't it be more appropriate to say that it is "reasonable per Boehner"? Or maybe, "reasonable per Koch" since that's who runs the Republican Party?
I mean, if you wanted to be accurate...
Re:Obviously (Score:5, Insightful)
He IS being accurate. He is pointing out that hiding the content of legislation isn't a GOP problem, it's a Democrat problem, as evidenced by the video he linked.
When Pelosi had control of the house, she intentionally and purposefully hid the contents of the "Obamacare" bill and used parliamentary tricks to avoid debate. There was even talk that the Democrats would use a trick called "Deem and Pass" to simply "Deem" the bill passed WITHOUT taking a vote on it. Yep, that's right; The Democrats, not the Republicans wanted to suspend the democratic process and simply force through a bill they wanted because people opposed it. This was a historical first for any Congress, and it was the Democrats that tried it. In the end they dropped it due to massive public pressure, and the bill passed on purely partisan lines. (Note that the Democrats had total control of both houses of Congress at the time.)
Also, as another poster pointed out below, wanting a full accounting and report of any major project so that all interested parties can review it before signing off on the expenditure is a responsible thing to do, something we want our representatives doing. Why is this bad just because the GOP is doing it? Doesn't that strike you as a hypocritical position to take?
As that other posted noted, this article is itself a troll and nothing but FUD. THOMAS isn't going down, even during the upgrade, so no access will be lost. The GOP just wants to do the upgrade properly and with full oversight. They should be applauded for being responsible with our money.
Re:Obviously (Score:4, Interesting)
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Yes, that is how Deem and Pass works. It's usually when one bill, let's call it Bill #1, relies on Bill #2, which has not been passed. (Although it actually can be used for almost anything.)
So they simply pass #1 using a specific process that says 'We agree that by passing Bill #1 we already passed Bill #2, even though we did not actually do that'. They 'deem' Bill #2 to have passed.
So Deem and Pass sounds normally completely pointless. The way to actually do things like that would just be to pass an amen
Re:Obviously (Score:4, Insightful)
You mean the "Deem and Pass" trick the Boehner House actually tried to use at least once for the godawful GOP budget bills to try to bypass the Senate? Doesn't that strike you as a hypocritical position to take? Quick, post some more out of context Fox News clips of out of context quotes to show what a partisan shill you are.
It isn't the Democrats or the Republicans or even the (bad) 2-party system that's the problem. The problem is the Red vs. Blue adversarial partisan bullshit pushed by people like you that makes every issue divisive for its own sake to the point that nonsense like hiding the content of legislation and "Deem and Pass" are more attractive options than intelligent discussion. Daniel Webster, John C. Calhoun and Henry Clay must be spinning in their graves.
That being said, I agree with you about TFA being complete nonsense.
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Actually, no, it's not the same thing.
What the Republicans House did with the budget was simply decide to pretend that the Senate had passed the Ryan budget for the purposes of House Committee stuff. The House obviously has no power to decide what the Senate has and has not passed, but it can pretend whatever the hell it wants for its own internal rule purposes, no matter how delusional such a thing is.
So what the House did wasn't 'Deem and Pass', it's 'Let's Pretend the Senate Passed This'. Which is com
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"[H]iding the content of legislation" is bipartisan, and (from their perspective) it isn't a problem, it's the goal.
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He IS being accurate. He is pointing out that hiding the content of legislation isn't a GOP problem, it's a Democrat problem, as evidenced by the video he linked.
No, it's an idiot problem, exacerbated by the insistence of other idiots on perpetuating bullshit partisan rhetoric, despite the obvious fact both parties are just two sides of the same coin.
I recommend you stop getting your political information from goddamn Youtube videos, and check out the voting records of the politicians for yourself.
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This is reasonable per Pelosi. As she said "we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KoE1R-xH5To [youtube.com]
Spoken like a true representative of the elite living above the laws they make for everyone else to abide by.
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It's been in there for years.
I read every version of it as it was being debated, and the final version was in there at the end.
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I also read it, and have a copy of almost every revision.
We can also just read the revised bits and not the whole thing over and over again.
Re:Obviously (Score:5, Informative)
I would be very surprised if ObamaCare even made it into THOMAS.
Be surprised then. [loc.gov] Both The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act and the earlier House version called The Affordable Health Care for America Act [loc.gov] (subsequently amended into an entirely different bill) are in there. (And apropos of TFA, trying to find those bills then extract a stable URL is a pan because the UI appends session specific data to query result URLs).
But it turns out there's a good reason why you might have the impression that Obama was secretive about the health insurance reform bill.
Keep in mind that when it came to health insurance reform the political game had three sides. The Democrats in Congress wanted to pass the most ambitious reform bill they could manage. The White House wanted a bill big enough allow them to say they delivered on reform promises but not so big Obama face the kind of shit storm Clinton faced when he tried to do insurance reform. The Republicans wanted to force Obama and the House Democrats through the same political meat grinder they put Clinton through in the 1990s.
Obama was inexperienced in national politics at this point. His strategy was to make a high profile call for reform, then leave it up to the House to come up with a package of specific proposals that it could pass. The intent was to get a reform bill passed without staking too much White House credibility on the specifics, and not to give opponents a political punching bag before the details of the actual bill had been worked out. This was a miscalculation. The Republicans were able to attack straw men proposals like death panels, bolstered by the lack of political leadership from the White House. And by leaving the specifics up to the House, Obama got a bill that was a lot more ambitious and politically risky than he wanted (source:http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/21/health/policy/21reconstruct.html). It was also some 70 billion dollars more expensive than he wanted (source: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0310/34753.html [politico.com]).
The House Democrats, for their part, based their proposals on Romney's Massachusetts plan, which in turn was based on Bob Dole's Republican alternative to Clinton's reform plans. While this would seem to be a politically safe move, the lack of leadership from the White House meant they ended up taking the political damage for a much more radical government takeover of health insurance, while at the same time alienating their base for *not* doing that.
In the end Republicans were able to gain a significant political victory in Congress and and advantageous position against Obama at the price of enacting their own health care plan from the mid 1990s.
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Troll Headline and Summary (Score:5, Informative)
Let's try a more reasonable one...
"The House Appropriations Committee is considering holding off on modernizing THOMAS until the system "owners" finalize the specifications."
It is entirely reasonable to put a hold on a project until everyone knows what it's going to be and buys off on the changes.
I am pretty sure that the majority of people on Slashdot agree that to dive into a project that will undoubtedly be large and expensive and is highly visible without nailing down the details first is irresponsible and a recipe for failure.
Re:Troll Headline and Summary (Score:5, Informative)
I forgot to mention that there is no discussion of taking THOMAS offline pending the upgrade.
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Thank you for your both Insightful and Informative post. If I had mod points I would vote you up. Far too many people on /. have this "Republicans are EEEVIILL! *HISSSSS*" reaction to anything that the GOP (or a body the GOP currently controls) does without even considering the source.
Personally I agree that it is valid to want a full accounting and report before all interested parties sign off on a major system upgrade. Glad to see SOMEONE in Washington is actually concerned with doing things right and
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I do think that the a
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I always say, if banging your head against the wall achieves nothing else, it will at least leave a mark on the wall.
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We can only hope. However they're going way to the left of Gingrich with this proposal - at least in terms of it becoming easier for elites to make laws "for the good of the people" without having to worry about what the people actually think. However it is not quite as far to the left as the typical left-wing tactic of using the courts to enact policies it can't get the public to support.
Opacity in government (Score:3)
Re:Opacity in government (Score:5, Insightful)
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You both are delusional because there is no mention of taking THOMAS offline while they decide on how to upgrade it.
Seems like a problem that could be fixed... (Score:5, Insightful)
The government SHOULD do this, but if they refuse, simply go around them. This is how governments should always be treated: Encouraged when useful, bypassed when not.
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I am pretty sure I could write a script to do that in one day, and many Slashdotters could do it quicker.
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THOMAS may only allow 1 bill at a time, but there are only so many bills before Congress. Download them one at a time and make an external database. Host that site yourself.
They will figure a way to claim copyright and send DMCA notices to get the site taken down. That assumes they don't just sieze the entire domain and the servers.
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Bills don't have to be public domain (Score:2)
If they're drafted by private parties and then copyright transferred to the US Gov't, Uncle Sam can hold the copyright.
Since the majority of bills are drafted by lobbyists, there's nothing in principle stopping Congress from blocking distribution on the grounds of protecting the copyright on the original special-interest draft and any derivative works.
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But then they would have to admit that the bills were in fact drafted by lobbyists.
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I agree with the sentiment, but I don't think that would be a problem. These bills are part of the public domain. Now Congress could pass a law changing that status...but I don't want to give them any ideas!
That would surely require a constitutional amendment. Otherwise it could hardly be expected to withstand challenge on the basis that it 1) exceeds the powers granted in the Copyright Clause of the US Constitution (since such a law clearly does not promote the progress of Science and the useful arts), and 2) that it violates the first amendment right to discuss public affairs. I would expect the government to be enjoined from enforcing such a law within days if not hours.
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Re:Seems like a problem that could be fixed... (Score:5, Insightful)
Hardly. It would just require our silent acquiescence.
Like how Obama has normalized Bush's radical policies of due process free detention, and has gone a step further with his policy of due process free execution. I mean, if your willing to let the executive branch on its own and in secret be the "due process" in the phrase "no person shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law," then there is absolutely nothing the president can't do because executing American citizens without trial is as big as it gets.
Obama has been the worst thing to happen to freedom and liberty ever -- at least when GWB was doing the things Obama does, Democrats pretended to care and push back. Now they just silently acquiesce, or worse, actively support the constitutional destruction they once opposed (for instance Marty Lederman [salon.com].
As a liberal, I hate to say it, but we'd be better off with a freak like Santorum as president, who basically promised war with Iran, because then perhaps the Democrats would go back to pretending to care about peace and freedom, and fight back against all this crap. With Obama in the office for another four years though, the damage to civil liberties and freedom will be immense because Democrats will just sit on their hands and let it continue to happen.
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Hardly. It would just require our silent acquiescence.
Like how Obama has normalized Bush's radical policies of due process free detention...
Even the War on Terror trump card goes only so far. Extending copyright so that access to bills could be restricted is so pointless and would antagonize so may powerful organizations that silent acquiescence is most unlikely. The line to sue would be out the door. People would see this as affecting their rights. In contrast, almost nobody thinks that rules about enemy combatants could ever have any relevance to him.
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Actually, I think war with Iran is MORE likely under Obama than it would be under Santorum exactly because the Democrats won't do squat if he pulls another Libya. Obama has set a huge precedent there by conducting war without even getting permission under the War Powers Act.
This cartoon basically sums up Democrats' relationship to Obama, War, and Iran:
http://americanextremists.thecomicseries.com/comics/192/ [thecomicseries.com]
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But strangely, as many of us know, the regulations are not part of the public domain.
In fact, a very large portion of U.S. law is proprietary, and if you were to publish or display it in any way you would get sued.
That is the downside of having corporations write those laws.
Re:Seems like a problem that could be fixed... (Score:5, Interesting)
THOMAS may only allow 1 bill at a time, but there are only so many bills before Congress. Download them one at a time and make an external database. Host that site yourself.
It would be nice to see a git-tree of legislations (revision history, diffs, who wrote what line when). I'm not expecting governments to do that, but it might be insightful and interesting.
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What would be even nicer is if they required all Bills to be written in some form of structural language.
Imagine being able to query a bill to find the salient points...who it applies to, each specific provision, etc. That would go a long way towards simplification and clarity. Conceivably, you could also do some form of syntax check and "compile" in the sense that you could find provisions that are vague. References to a population that do not have a previously declared definition.
For instance..."All docto
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We have this discussion every now and then on slashdot, but if you think about it for a while, it is pretty obvious why it wouldn't work.
Justice is not a set of instructions. That law is interpreted by humans and can change in practice over time is a good thing.
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I would suggest that Justice is implemented via a set of instructions. And that the fact the interpretation of a law changing over time due to different interpretations is a bad thing.
Primary example is the Constitution. It has a very well defined mechanism to make changes that insure those changes are the result of a very broad agreement, which in itself requires a great amount of deliberation. Instead of the interpretation changing, the should change the document.
Laws are more easily changed of course but
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"... Rev 1.1 ALEC@master"
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It would be nice to see a git-tree of legislations (revision history, diffs, who wrote what line when). I'm not expecting governments to do that, but it might be insightful and interesting.
https://github.com/divegeek/uscode [github.com]
Re:Seems like a problem that could be fixed... (Score:5, Informative)
http://appropriations.house.gov/UploadedFiles/LEGBRANCH-FY13-FULLCOMMITTEEREPORT.pdf
Obviously, the biggest issue is that detractors for each party will modify downloaded bills to meet their own political agendas and mudslinging goals. I would prefer to see this done correctly, too.
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Hear Hear!
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These "concerns" are all bunk. Just supply an html directory tree of all the pending laws, with each law signed with GPG. You're done. I bet it would cost them less to implement this than to keep Thomas running.
You don't even really need the GPG signatures. If someone edits a law for propaganda purposes, the original version should always be there for reference.
There are no legitimate concerns here. Only stonewalling.
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You don't even really need the GPG signatures. If someone edits a law for propaganda purposes, the original version should always be there for reference.
+1.
If there were a concern about partisans being able to break in and alter the version being distributed, that would be legitimate -- but GPG signatures would address it. Outside of that... it has always been possible for people to create fake versions of documents and try to pass them off as the real thing, and yet this doesn't appear to have been an issue for pending legislation in the past.
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Not to mention a wonderful and legal role for bittorrent.
Conversely, in Canada (Score:3)
The busy little beavers who track bills now include committee hearings. For example, here's some of the debate on the Copyright Act, C-11 [openparliament.ca]
--dave
House Committee on Appropriations (Score:4, Informative)
Git (Score:4, Insightful)
I know there are all sorts of craziness for bills, but wouldn't something like a Git repository be ideal? that way, you can have the hash of the exact version of the bill your voting on, so the people know stuff wasn't 'slipped in' before it becomes law. Oh, wait, that is probably a 'feature'
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I know there are all sorts of craziness for bills, but wouldn't something like a Git repository be ideal? that way, you can have the hash of the exact version of the bill your voting on, so the people know stuff wasn't 'slipped in' before it becomes law. Oh, wait, that is probably a 'feature'
I really need to get some time to work on it some more, but that was exactly the idea I had a few years ago when I set up github repositories to track the US Code [github.com] and Utah Code [github.com].
Of course, the only data I had easy access to was the codified law, some time after it was passed and went into effect, so my repos only track changes at that point. But, yes, what would be perfect is a distributed version control system that tracks the changes. Each legislator, each committee, each house would have its own fork,
Say no more (Score:3)
I am pretty sure that the majority of people on slashdot agree that being able to better understand how the various bills being considered by Congress interact would be good for this country.
And that explains why it must be prevented.
Huh? How to get from Point A to Point B? (Score:3)
Ok, the appropriations committee wants to delay money for a new system to replace THOMAS. But THOMAS doesn't limit access now, it just sucks. Congress could want to withhold money for a number of reasons, some legitimate (they don't like the bidding process for the new system), some less so (they have a favored systems integrator in mind.)
But if the current system is just lousy, but works, how is withholding a replacement in any way "limiting public availability of pending bills?"
PopVox? (Score:2)
How, if at all, would this affect a website like PopVox?
What's really going on... (Score:5, Insightful)
I personally want to have the ability to read any bill that has been introduced. THOMAS is a good system, but horribly outdated. It could be made so much better. But we make do with what we have.
Improvements to the system should be that the database is updated in real-time, or at least as close to real-time as possible. There is no reason why this shouldn't be possible.
My guess, however, is that reps want not to be able to be accountable for their votes. Not many representatives have easy access to their voting record on their official web site. I know my old rep did (Frank Wolf) but my current (Jim Moran) does not. While the information can be found on THOMAS, it adds an additional step.
I know a few months ago, DC Counsel put an unpopular bill available online for comment. It was passed and when it finally it the news, there was outcry. The counsel said, "But you had a chance to comment." The problem was that they hid the bill on their website in a rarely browsed section, obfuscated, and ultimately in a place where no one would think to look. Stepping aside the fact that the news should have picked this up before it was voted on, the fact is that the DC Counsel followed the letter of the law, but not the spirit.
Every politician must be not be trusted, even if they are from "your party" or even if you voted for the guy. The framers had this in mind when writing the Constitution.
The thing that saddens me is that the original intentions of the Founding Fathers has long since gone: a government of the People, by the People, and for the People. I don't see this changing anytime soon.
Re: (Score:2)
OpenCongress.org provides RSS feeds for anything you like:
http://www.opencongress.org/about/rss [opencongress.org]
Took about 10 seconds to Google.
Idea (Score:2)
I'm a pretty skilled web developer, anyone want to help?
Re: (Score:2)
Also, whose idea was it to make HTML ordered lists in comments have list-style: none? WTF, Slashdot?
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So what if we set up a system to sync from THOMAS every X hours, and enabled transparent, publicly viewable voting on bills? Once they're actually voted upon in the houses of Congress, we can compare the popular internet vote to our legislators votes, and give each proposed bill a score based on how well the legislators actually represented the people. Thoughts?
Not so good (Score:2)
I am pretty sure that the majority of people on Slashdot agree that being able to better understand how the various bills being considered by Congress interact would be good for this country.
And thus not so good for politicians who don't really want people to see in advance what the congress is doing. I can see how this could be a conflict of interest (theirs and ours).
Ulterior Motive (Score:2)
Information is power. (Score:2)
I am pretty sure that the majority of people on Slashdot agree that being able to better understand how the various bills being considered by Congress interact would be good for this country.
Good for us and the country, bad for Congress critters.
Learning from mistakes i see.. (Score:2)
This is in direct response to the outcry against SOPA. keep the public in the dark, they cant complain until its too late.
Bastards, run them ALL out of town on the next train.
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Well, a government couldn't adequately govern it's people if it understood less of the bills than the people, right?
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...While trying to figure out the best way to proceed before pouring money down a rat hole.
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Operation LAC [wikipedia.org]
Operation Dew [wikipedia.org]
Army tes [google.com]