Open Congress : Blog

Anti-Web Censorship Bill Protest from Our Perspective at OC

2012-02-08T13:45:00Z

Last month’s flurry of Stop-PIPA & Stop-SOPA online protests were an apex of activity for OpenCongress. Not only was January 18th, 2012 the single-highest day of traffic on OC since our launch in February 2007, but also the stop-PIPA action was in many ways the height of user engagement with active legislation in the U.S. Congress.

The huge “Internet blackout” event on January 18th was OC’s single largest day of traffic, with over 250,000 visits and more than half a million pageviews (and likely would have been much higher if we could afford more servers and cloud-scaling ability to handle the traffic rush).

Referrals to OC pages on PIPA from Craiglist, Reddit, Mozilla, and many others dwarfed the usual primary source of site traffic – viz., search engine queries for bill numbers & campaign donation data.
This tops our previous record of most-visits per day by 67% – that was in late March 2010, 150k visits around the signing of the major health care reform bill.
Together, the bills were the least-popular legislation with our user community in the past year, with less than 1% approval rating.
SOPA: over 500 user comments; PIPA: over 150.
In total, visitors racked up more than 260,000 pageviews of SOPA/PIPA content during the January 18th SOPA-strike event alone. This includes all the data aggregated by OpenCongress: official government information, actions & votes, bill text, news & blog coverage, campaign contributions, issue group analysis, videos, public comment forums, and free & open-source tools for users to email their members of Congress.
Since Nov. 26, 2011 – American Censorship Day – pages with SOPA info on OC have received over 700,000 views and PIPA over 250,000 — totaling over a million pageviews combined.
Since its introduction on 10/25/11, SOPA info has received over 850,000 pageviews; PIPA info, since 5/11/11, approx. 350,000 pageviews; totaling 1.2m pageviews on OC.

Users sent more than 8,000 emails, overwhelmingly in opposition to PIPA & SOPA, to their members of Congress during the Jan. 18th strike via OC’s unique Contact-Congress feature.

In the past week, users sent over 15,000 emails on both bills; since American Censorship Day on Nov. 26, 2011, users have sent over 40,000 emails on the two bills. (link to letters index page)
In total, over 50,000 emails have been sent via OC on SOPA & PIPA alone.

The wiki community project to Whip Count on PIPA exceeded our wildest expectations: it was viewed 40,000 times, with about 4,000 people clicking through to our Contact Congress tool to write their members of Congress and nearly 5,000 clicking through to a sheet of tips on how to effectively call Washington.

An impressive 12% went to the tips on calling page, which were optimized to provide the most effective communication & more-positive user experience in calling a Congressional office with opposition to a bill & request for more info.
Built on open-source semantic MediaWiki, we seek to bring over a similar whip-count form & accompanying materials to every pending item of legislation on the site for Groups to organize around.
The drop-down form on the wiki whip-count included eight nuanced position options, e.g. “leaning no – verbal”, to express different strengths of statement.
Documented position statements included links to THOMAS.gov (offiical list of bill co-sponsors), state newspapers, press releases on official government websites, verified social media accounts, and occasionally on Contact-Congress permalink letters on OC.

The mobilization of a vast number of citizens contacting their members of Congress is only half of the story of how the Great SOPA Showdown of 2012 shows that the Internet is changing politics. To be sure, the calls deluging congressional offices were the decisive factor in the bills’ defeat, but the use of free & open-source Web tools for online activism marked this as the first substantial case of the conversation between citizens and elected officials to happen in full public view. At OpenCongress, we built two tools that helped make this possible.

Grassroots campaigns to influence Congress have typically picked an upcoming vote or bill and asked citizens nationwide to call or email both their senators and/or their representative. The more sophisticated versions might only target citizens who live in the district of the members of the particular committee hearing a bill or pre-fill a letter in a webform that people can amend (or not) and send with a click. Constituents may receive a call or email back, but that usually concludes the conversation.

What made SOPA different was that the exchange between constituents and officials was being posted online, thus merging many private one-to-one conversations into a massive one-to-many conversation. And the back-and-forths between different citizens and the same senator thus changed from iterations of the same query-and-response into a continuing discussion between that senator and the public at large.

It might have ended there, but citizens started using social media to track the conversations and coordinate responses. Some top-voted threads on Reddit posted the defections from the bill and senators took to their Facebook pages to announce their opposition to the bill, which were promptly commented on, liked and shared on the personal pages of constituents at volumes many times the average post.

What transformed these public conversations from an effective way for people in any state to influence their senators into a way for the people to influence the senate as a body was the adoption of a common lobbyists’ tool: the whip sheet.

Whip sheets are simple lists of every member of the House or Senate with their current position on a bill. Well-funded lobby shops will chop up the list and send delegates to buttonhole each member and then target and re-target the members opposite their position until the get the necessary number of votes to win. They are even used by congressional leaders to make sure they have the votes to forward their party’s agenda.

SOPA Opera was the first effort to put a people’s whip sheet online. It used congressmen’s sponsorship of SOPA/PIPA or votes on previous, similar bills to make a rough prediction of where the current vote stood, which staff then augmented as more of them made public positions on the bills. Then OpenCongress posted the Protect IP Act Senate Whip Count, a user-editable form with every senator’s phone numbers, email contact forms, last known position on PIPA and a call log for users to record the date, time and content of their communications with Congress.

Using the Whip Count, citizens were able to pin down the position of each and every Senator (though for 23 of them, that position was “undeclared”). The call log shows that users contacted those senators more who were undeclared or supported PIPA, exactly as a lobbyist would pressure those senators on her whip sheet who had noncommittal or undesired positions. The Whip Count exceeded our wildest expectations: it was viewed 40,000 times, with about 4,000 people clicking through to our Contact Congress tool to write their members of Congress and nearly 5,000 clicking through to a sheet of tips on how to effectively call Washington.

Open Congress visitors used a number of other tools, including our money-in-politics analysis, supporter and opposition list, bill version tracking and user-marked-up text of the bills. In total, visitors racked up more than 260,000 pageviews of SOPA/PIPA content during the January 18th strike event.

Our Contact Congress tool was also a special point of pride for us. Visitors used it to send more than 8,000 emails to Congress. Contact Congress bypasses the clunky webforms on individual congressional webpages, letting users send emails to their representative and senators from one place and to include information like campaign contributions they received from industries involved in the legislation.

Part of what makes Contact Congress particularly useful from a social perspective are its fidelity and sharing features. Users have the ability to make a letter as publicly viewable, which enables them to share not only their letter but also the response from their senator or representative. Because the letter is routed through OpenCongress’ system, others can trust that the response has not been altered and it now becomes a public, verifiable source for a congressperson’s position on a bill. Because this was largely a one-day campaign, our users didn’t have time to receive many responses to post, but here’s a great example from one senator.

SOPA and PIPA showed that citizens can overwhelm Washington with public sentiment, at least when prompted to by the highest-traffic websites in the world. Short of such likely rare events, however, it is the adaptation and adoption of traditional lobbyist tools like vote counting – through whip sheets – and coordination of communications – through social media and tools like Contact Congress – that will help level the playing field between the body politic and the lobby.

Looking forward, we at OpenCongress are seeking to improve features like Contact Congress and to adapt the whip count tool so it is available to any group of citizens concerned with any bill. However, we don’t take any corporate or government funding, so we depend on public contributions to make that happen.

This post was co-written with OC Executive Director David Moore and OC Wiki Editor Conor Kenny.

Senate Passes FAA Bill With Anti-Union Language

2012-02-07T14:25:00Z

By a vote of 75-20, the Senate has given final passage to a Federal Aviation Administration reauthorization bill that would make it tougher for transportation workers to unionize. Under the bill, the National Mediation Board — the agency that manages labor issues for the railroad and airline industries — would not be allowed to call for an union election unless at least 50 percent of the employees of a company sign authorization cards requesting an election.

The new rules would make it more difficult for workers in the transportation industry to hold a union election than in just about any other industry. Under the current, National Mediation Board rules, once more than 35 percent of employees sign authorization cards the agency can deem that to be an adequate showing of interest and call for an up-or-down secret ballot vote on forming a union. And under the rules of the agency that deals with union issues for just about all non-transportation industries, the National Labor Relations Board, only 30 percent of employees are needed for an adequate showing of interest.

The new union-formation language was added to the bill during the conference committee process and has not been given complete legislative delibration. In a letter to Congress, union officials called out the process:

A rewrite of long standing labor law deserves proper and due consideration through the normal deliberative process. Acting otherwise directly conflicts with the non-partisan recommendations of the 1994 Report of the Dunlop Commission on the Future of Worker-Management Relations. This is particularly true of this law which was uniquely created through labor and management negotiations. Unilaterally changing that law without labor’s input and without due deliberation threatens to unravel its carefully balanced goals of labor stability and uninterrupted commerce. Rewarding the House Republican Leadership’s desire to rewrite decades of long standing labor law in a flash by inserting an unrelated and controversial labor provision in a much needed aviation safety and security bill, without notice, hearing, or debate, sets an extremely dangerous precedent.

The bill has already been passed by the Republican-led House. It now goes to President Obama to be signed into law.

House Getting Creative With the Earmark Moratorium

2012-02-06T11:04:00Z

House Republicans are starting to find ways around the earmark moratorium they voted for last year. The latest example, according to the New York Times, comes in the form of the 2012 Army Corps of Engineers budget. Instead of the $533 million worth of earmarks they included in 2010, the 2012 budget sets aside $507 in 26 slush funds, along withe a set of guidelines for making sure the money goes to Congress’ favorite pet projects.

The funds were financed by reducing money for projects included in the president’s budget request and adding $375 million to the corps budget, documents show.

Congress also gave the corps criteria to use in selecting projects and instructed it to report within 45 days about how it intends to spend the money from the funds, according to the budget documents. On Monday, the corps will release the list of projects it plans to finance. […]

Critics say the special funds in the corps budget are the latest example of members of Congress trying to circumvent the earmark ban to funnel money to their districts, in the form of corps engineering projects. In the absence of earmarks, lawmakers have tried pressing agencies for money or in some cases threatened to tie up Congress if projects are not financed.

The end result of the earmark moratorium is not less wasteful spending on projects; it’s less accountability in the budgeting process. Under the normal earmarking process, each project requested for funding by Congress would be publicly disclosed with detailed information on dollar totals and the names of members of Congress who requested the funding. Under the House’s moratorium, the slush funds will be converted into specific project funding through an opaque process, known as “lettermarking,” involving private communications between members of Congress and executive branch bureaucrats. Short of a gigantic investigation involving a drawn-out FOIA process, the public will never know for sure which members of Congress pushed for specific projects to be funded. That secrecy makes the process much more corruptable.

Liberate OpenGovData Now

2012-02-01T22:54:00Z

Update: 5pm ET – as the #LDTC conference grinds to a close, I’m sorry to report that my (unfortunately) cynical prediction turned out to be the case – officials from the LoC & GPO (more details to come) refused to embrace serious movement on the bulk data task force that was mandated back in 2009. In other words, typical D.C. bureaucratic inertia & gridlock, complete blinders to the huge public demand on OpenCongress & across the open Web for raw legislative data & government info.

As reported brilliantly by John Wonderlich at our partners Sunlight Policy (quite emphatic recommendations to read the whole thing & share it w/ a sense of contextual outrage):

Part of Congress’s job should be to empower third party developers who are are permanent part of the infrastructure that brings legislative data to a huge slice of the public. By ignoring the public’s and Congress’s calls for bulk legislative data, administrators are ignoring part of what it means to be a responsible steward of public data. [Full post – please share.]

As a professional Congressional watchdog since ’07, one who is extremely cyncial about systemic corruption & gridlock in Congress already, it is a lightly bizarre experience to find myself flush with visceral populist (i.e., public-benefit Web booster) anger about the unaccountable bureaucrats on the panel who refused to recognize the urgency of liberating #opengovdata for OC users & the public. I arrived with every expectation that the conference would not make significant strides towards the Principles of OpenGovData, and unfortunately that turned out to be the case.

Daniel Schuman of Sunlight pressed the gov’t officials to drag their feet to accept a (long-overdue) meeting (!!) with some of the most knowledgeable #opengov developers, e.g. Josh Tauberer & Eric Mill of Sunlight Labs, so that’s the next immediate step – although in their excruciating slow-walk bureaucrat turf-defending jargon, they agreed only to be “in dialogue” and to “seek input” – literally refusing to acknowledge that they were in violation of a clear Congressional directive, one that is also extremely popular around the Web and has wide-ranging social & economic benefits (well-documented – I mean, this is ridiculous). Take a look at Reddit Politics or TPM or HuffPo or RedState or Congress Matters – there’s a massive audience & demand for Congressional information. It is shocking that the officials today (names forthcoming) refuse to move with real determination towards bulk data access for the public. More grassroots efforts to come from PPF on demanding liberation of legislative data as a bare minimum first step towards #opengov & #deliberativedemocracy. For more info & context, follow Alex Howard, Jim Harper, Harlan Yu, and the #ldtc hashtag. Despite some good incremental steps, ultimately another disappointing D.C. event for the open data cause & OpenCongress mission – I know we know, as one would expect. Onwards from this letdown.

It’s 2012 – we don’t have hover skateboards, and we don’t have #opengov. We could have the latter, at least, in the here & now, benefiting every American, if the systemically corrupt U.S. Congress was capable of reforming itself (which it is currently, unfortunately, not).

I’m writing this on the train from NYC to D.C., en route to the Conference on Legislative Data & Transparency to be held Thursday, Feb. 2nd – agenda here, webcast live here reportedly. As usual with these types of events, I’m here to rep for radical transparency & deliberative democracy.

House staffers (currently under GOP majority) will seek to gather warm plaudits from the #opengov community, but it’s less clear whether the LoC & Committee on Rules will move determinedly towards liberating raw legislative data that projects like OpenCongress could use. Of course, the primary reason that the legislative process remains closed-off – whether under Democratic or Republican House leadership – is that the arcane, inscrutable process benefits the majority party currently in power, which in turn accrues leverage & benefits in campaign contributions. (Right, “Escape From New York” art, w/ evocations of forceful liberation, you know… it’s past time, come on everyone. We have the technology.)

We’ll keep hammering this until we achieve real-world electoral reforms & Rules Committee staffers & others openly acknowledge why Congress is fundamentally broken: the systemic corruption of campaign donations and lack of full public financing of elections. We’re facing major empirical social ills in the form of a lack of consumer demand, as-yet-unpunished fraud in the banking & housing industries, catastrophic climate degradation, and more – and the U.S. Congress is incapable of bipartisan action towards enacting ameliorating bills. More recent evidence of Congressional helplessness includes the farcical rush-to-vote, refusal-of-expert tech testimony of the SOPA/PIPA push (thankfully slowed – for now – by the American Censorship coalition, of which PPF is a founding member) and recently the bipartisan rush on the STOCK Act (a just-fine common-sense bill on individual investments that purposely does nothing to address the systemic corruption of how bills move through Congress or serious campaign finance reform).

Towards some balance in the judgement here, pro’s and con’s, carrots & sticks, you know how it shakes out: my compliments to the Congressional staff & government employees & civil servants & leading members of Congress who convened this meeting for their interest in this issue. It appears to be in good faith and as such represents a step forward. There’s also been some slight but notable progress in legislative XML under 112th Congress’ House GOP leadership, as summarized below, as well as ongoing positive consultation with the Open House Project (coordinated by our partners the Sunligh t Foundation), the more-or-less-unsuccessful-and-now-defunct Bulk Data Task Force, plus shout-out to Jim Harper of the Cato Institute, who has been doing admirable toiling with the heavy-lifting of tech specs - get at him for more info on that effort. Unlike those who live & work in the Beltway, however, I don’t feel obliged to see real progress on legislative transparency in the usual D.C. context. I can demand, on behalf of the OpenCongress user community, immediate bulk-data access to primary source data on legislation, and then aggressive steps towards constructing a robust open API for THOMAS (and as a potential nearer-term step, full legislation in XML data formats). Anything short of that (and realistically, there’s not a punching chance of sufficient progress) means this conference, like others before it, would fail to reach the Principles of Open Government Data. Full compliance w/ these community-generated principles is a necessary (but not even sufficient) condition of #opengov, in my view.

Under the U.S. Constitution, the work of the federal legislative branch has (as designed, in theory, if not nec. in practice) the most significant outcome on the laws & public policy that shape our daily lives (cit. E-Klein). And yet, the U.S. Congress refuses to release legislative data to the public on the open Web in ways that are compliant with the ever-evolving Principles of Open Government Data. To be reductive (more detail available upon request and – to be fair – to be discussed at this conference, certainly, see agenda), official bill info lives on closed-off gov’t servers to which #opengov developers & the public do not have (read-only file permissions, to be sure) access until it’s posted on various head-scratchingly-poorly-designed websites, e.g. the GPO & THOMAS & CRS & LIMS & LIS & LLOC et al. This has been and continues to be indefensible stonewalling, and anyone who claims to have an understanding of open-source technology and also claims to support open-gov for transparency & accountability must support the immediate liberation of open data.

PPF’s fundamental premise (in OpenCongress, OpenGovernment and other software for civic engagement) is that public data should be fully public. Full stop. Transparency is a basic virtue of any sane, modern system of representative democracy in our constitutional republic. It increases public accountability, mitigates systemic corruption, reveals government waste, and encourages public trust & civic engagement with the political process. All these factors contribute to improved public policy outcomes and a greater national happiness – for evidence supporting these claims, see Prof. Beth Noveck’s Wiki Government, Open Government & Alex Howard‘s #opengov coverage & blogging by O’Reilly, research by @participatory, David Eaves, Robert Richards, and many others (see aliied orgs. in footer of our homepage). Open data is widely accepted now as #opengov best practice, but it’s sorely lacking in robust practice.

If government at the federal, state, county, municipal level around the country were even a tad forward-thinking, they’d be rushing to embrace the suites of new open technology:

bulk data access & an API for #opengovdata;
Open311 integration, for constituents to report non-emergency community issues;
legislative tracking & constituent feedback through web apps like PPF’s OpenGovernment.org;
documents published in DocumentCloud;
more tools, as published in the Civic Commons Marketplace,
even, dare we dream, an API for constituent communication, resulting in a more deliberative democratic process that’s now possible with tech tools we’re developing together in the commons. (This is promising, Code For America + Chitown.)

As it is, we’re seeing a landscape of governments starved of resources for improving their own lot or investing in vital tech infrastructure, and too much slavishness towards legacy consultants & solution providers at the expense of prioritizing open data on the open Web. As we’ve seen over the past decade, with a lack of eager embracing of the Internet, governments will likely move too slowly – then pretend to be “with it” by embracing some lousy commercial social media service as an #opengov fig-leaf – then slow-walk some decent one-quarter-measures for a while (like MADISON) until the next election cycle. Come on everyone, it’s 2012, let’s get an API for Congress and then go from there to some serious cleaning-house systemic campaign-finance reform to fight back against corporate control of the political process.

Brief history of the #opengov community’s failure to compel the Library of Congress & offices like House Rules Committee to give us our data: our non-profit PPF conceived of OpenCongress as a valuable public resource during the 2004 federal elections. Simply put, it was too difficult to browse, search, track, and understand bills in Congress on THOMAS. We began building a web app that aggregated official government data (from our valued & cornerstone-important data partner GovTrack.us, which is and was obliged largely to scrape THOMAS for data updates) with news & blog coverage (from Google News & Blog Search), campaign contributions (from the very-ncessary OpenSecrets), a daily Blog covering Congress in plain language, and public comment forums (in the style of Slashdot & other p2p communities). (Left: political caricature by Thomas Nast against systemic corruption.)

In 2006, PPF obtained funding from the Sunlight Foundation to begin building OpenCongress, and launched publicly in February 2007. In November 2007, a working group of #opengov advocates gathered in Sebastopol, CA w/ O’Reilly Media to draft the Principles of OpenGovData - participants at bottom of page here, including Donny & me from PPF, as well as Prof. Lessig & Carl Malamud & Josh Tauberer & many others – four and a half years later, we’re still waiting & working

As PPF developed OC as a free, libre, and open-source not-for-profit web app, we added engagement features, as well as new data sources: more campaign finance analysis from MAPLight, video from Metavid, a semantic MediaWiki previously called Congresspedia, issue group ratings from VoteSmart, social media mentions, Wikipedia bios, Bing News results, streaming online video from official Congressional YouTube hubs, Contact-Congress features, and more. But data access remains stuck in the past.

Writing today in 2012, the process for obtaining bill data on OC is, sadly, status quo. Bills appear on government sites, they’re obtained by GovTrack and others, and then sent via automatic processes to OpenCongress and others – sometimes many hours after they’re first available online at some far-flung primary source. Before that, they’re often published in useless (actually, intentionally-closed-off) .PDF formats, which our small non-profit team has struggled over the years to liberate into open standards. We’ve had tools & demand for years to move without delay towards liberation.

PPF gave up some mild praise of the MADISON project around Rep. Issa‘s (R-CA) OPEN Bill – though guys, to be honest, just give us the data and let us design the site & its user interface, as this thing isn’t about to win any design compliments. Think of it like a “market solution” type of approach – let the market decide the best interface, but put it out there on the level playing field of the open Web. Last month’s long-awaited unveiling of Docs.House.Gov is a remarkable & praiseworthy step forward – big-ups to XML of upcoming legislation – but it’s not comprehensive enough for us to change the basic processes by which OpenCongress obtains data. Our demands for true legislative transparency are as follows:

I. Bulk data access – with this, OpenCongress could mash-up previous versions of bills and facilitate research of roll calls & sponsorship & other factors – and most importantly, we’d be sure we were coordinated via RSYNC network protocol (or even HTTP, golly) with the primary government publishing source. This can be arranged without delay and the Library of Congress should move aggressively towards offering this level of exhaustive read-only access.

II. Legislative XML feeds – this would be a fine middle step for bringing up-to-the-minute bill info into OC and enabling timely tracking of legislative actions. The just-launched XML feeds don’t apply, to my understanding, to any pre-2012 bills (OC has data going back to the 109th U.S. Congress via GovTrack), so significantly re-engineering OC just for this feed isn’t quite priority. We’ll certainly incorporate it into our pages though, it’s pretty cool (but, again, painfully rudimentary & insufficient given available & well-documented & elsewhere-ubiquitous technology).

III. Open API – this has been done at the state level! It can be done in D.C., if we’re capable of pulling ourselves out of the swamp. See the pioneering work by the New York State Senate’s Open Initiative – while, clearly, THOMAS would of course have different data fields and likely would need to be slightly more complex, the NY Senate’s Open Legislation API offers a starting point for development of one for the U.S. Congress. It’s actually pretty easy for a non-programmer to parse the different offerings there and get a meaningful sense of how an outside developer (civic or commercial) would pick different data fields to display on his or her website. It’s a typically American tragicomedy that we have the ability to implement this widely- and directly-useful technology, but lack the political will to do so. This development roadmap by Andrew Hoppin, former CTO, is one of the most important #opengov blog posts of the last couple years. NY Senate was able to push through these amazing reforms only b/c of a confluence of circumstances – generally speaking, NY Senate is one of the only 99 U.S. state legislative chambers (NE is unicameral yo) that practices true openness, and even that political momentum has been under attack by local changes in the political winds.

The above addresses broad data access & formats – but for a greater (yet basic) degree of #opengov transparency, how about requiring version control of legislation? That is to say, reducitvely, requiring legislative assistants & staffers & even lobbyists & members of Congress themselves have unique logins for openly writing, editing, and commenting on draft legislation. To be sure, staffers could still have off-the-record private conversations of the expected political-calculus and/or horse-trading sort – but for the public record, language or policy ideas cribbed from lobbyists could be programatically & easily identified as such. Which wouldn’t necessarily be a pejorative thing at all – but would be a basic accountability measure. To be reductive, if a member’s staffer adds funding for a bridge for her district, observers of the bill would find the individuals responsible and bring it to other parties for input. Constituents could be continually polled with ranked-choice voting about specific, significant sections of legislation. The details matter, as we know – facing down a federal election year in which the major health-care reform bill is likely to be an issue both in the Supreme Court and the Presidential campaign, wouldn’t it be helpful to know which individual staffers took responsibility for which sections of the bill, and which lobbyists & interest groups can be identified as crafting specific language? This isn’t even to address the benefits of metadata linking campaign donations to specific bill provisions, budget & spending transparency, real-time financial disclosure of senators’ campaign contributions (imagine that), and other realistic-yet-lofty ideas. (At right: OC’s custom Message Builder for Contact-Congress features, free of charge & in open-source code to contribute libre-licensed social wisdom back to the public commons.)

Congressional staff may say “we’re working with you”, but unless they’re moving determinedly towards a modern open API for THOMAS this year, we don’t share the same vision. They’ll cite expert practitioners & issues with data publishing from their end, and we can cite same from open-source community on opening up – e.g., CivicCommons, Sunlight Policy Dep’t (shouts Daniel & John), our own team & others.

The art-deco atmosphere of the conference tomorrow – and assurances that more data is coming, it’s coming, maybe after the election – will be nice enough today, but I call on the #opengov community to become more vociferous and use the word “demand” – as in “demand for our users, demand for the public interest” – in calling for full & immediate #opengovdata. But with the House GOP leadership is pursuing an explicit strategy of gridlock & hyper-partisan symbolic bills until after the Nov. 2012 elections, real data liberation is unlikely. Here’s to looking forward to comprehensive electoral reforms such as the following: score voting, non-partisan re-districting, right-to-vote laws, real-time financial disclosure of campaign contributions & lobbyist meetings, strong ethics reforms to prevent D.C.‘s endemic revolving door problem, and full public financing of elections to elect a Congress that will finally give the public access to its data. Maybe even a discussion about the undemocratic nature of the U.S. Senate and the increasingly abused filibuster process. This may seem ambitious or impatient, but this isn’t a negotiation with our public servants & elected officials – this is about liberating public legislative data via an open API and proceeding to enhancements for constituent communication (coupled with fair elections & ethics rules with teeth) for a living, breathing deliberative democracy. The public interest needs more persuasive, creative, aggressive defenders.

Questions, thoughts, comments welcome: david at opencongress.org. PPF is a 501c3 non-profit organization – we incorporated as a public charity because we believe it is the best possible foundation for reforming our contemporary representative democracy – organizations with the highest level of public-mission written into their charters just behave differently & more positively, we’ve found – public donations (tax-exempt, by the way) go directly towards paying our (considerable) server costs and keeping OpenCongress on the Web: donate, or become a recurring donor of $10 month to support our work on OC. We’re building user-friendly Web interfaces for civic engagement and we foresee a heartening surge of demand in a saner future – help us grow.

Update 12pm ET: support true #opengov legislation, like the Public = Online Act (HR 1348) from the Sunlight Foundation & allies. Email your members of Congress on OC to support it. More info on the rich public resource Transparency Hub on the OC Wiki. In the previous 111th Congress, per John Wonderlich of Sunlight Policy, there was a great bulk data access bill, H.R. 6289 (111th) – it needs a new sponsor in the 112th, though as per the above, not much is going to happen (unfort.) until after the elections, with the House in gridlock mode. Surf along w/ my updates on the popular micro-publishing service.

Senate debates STOCK Act, dodges real issue of money in politics

2012-02-01T00:41:00Z

The undue influence of corporate money in public policy is at the root of nearly all the major problems facing the U.S. right now, and in the wake of the Citizens United decision it’s only going to get worse. That’s why it was good to hear President Obama call out the “corrosive influence of money in politics” during his State of the Union speech. Unfortunately, his primary call to action doesn’t even address the real issue.

“Send me a bill that bans insider trading by members of Congress,” Obama said. “I will sign it tomorrow.”

The Senate has already responded to the request by voting 93-2 to begin debate of the STOCK Act, which would ban Congress from trading for personal benefit based on nonpublic information derived from their official positions.

As a recent 60 Minutes episode made clear, insider trading by Congress is a real problem that should be corrected. Members of Congress should never be given special exemptions from the laws they enact on everyone else. But it has almost nothing to do with how money distorts the political process and prevents Congress from doing its job and serving the public interest.

The corrosive influence of money in politics is rooted in the disproportionate level of political campaign contributions and lobbying expenditures from private interests, the revolving door that lets D.C. elites build up their personal worth by blurring the line between public and private work, and the secretive corporate takeover of elections. These things have made the U.S. Congress a systemically corrupt institution, where bribery is the norm (and perfectly legal) and a pro-corporate bias is ubiquitous. We need systemic fixes to root out the corrosive influence of money in politics. Instead, Obama and Congress are looking at cosmetic fixes to symbolic cases of individual corruption that are both rare and relatively inconsequential.

A key characteristic of systemic corruption is that the system is unwilling to recognize the corruption and, therefore, is not capable of fixing itself. President Obama’s campaign may have calculated that it is politically advantageous for him to be critical of Congress, but the fact is that he has thrived from the revolving door and corporate contributions more than any other politician in U.S. history. Congress is not going to fix itself, and the White House is even further entrenched in the system. Reform has to come from outside of Washington.

Washington has a public relations problem, and Obama and Congress have narrowed in on the STOCK Act as their latest PR strategy. If it becomes law this year, no progress will have been made on the real reason Congress’ approval rating is at a record low — the corrosive influence of money in politics — which is exactly the reason why the STOCK Act is being pursued as the solution in the first place.

UPDATE: Here are a few bills that would be better options for dealing with money in politics:

S.750 — Fair Elections Now Act
S.219 — Senate Campaign Disclosure Parity Act
S.J.Res.33 — A joint resolution proposing an amendment to the Constitution of the United States to expressly exclude for-profit corporations from the rights given to natural persons by the Constitution of the United States, prohibit corporate spending in all elections, and affirm the authority of Congress and the States to regulate corporations and to regulate and set limits on all election contributions and expenditures.
S.J.Res.29 — A joint resolution proposing an amendment to the Constitution of the United States relating to contributions and expenditures intended to affect elections.

The Week Ahead in Congress

2012-01-30T10:48:00Z

It’s the week after the State of the Union, and while the Senate is moving forward with bipartisan legislation requested by the President during the speech, the House is continuing its highly-partisan, mostly-symbolic agenda.

The first bill up in the Senate this week is the STOCK Act, which would apply insider tading laws to members of Congress and its staff. Specifically, it would amend the Congressional Accountability Act of 1995 to state that “no Member of Congress and no employee of Congress shall use any nonpublic information derived from the individual’s position as a Member of Congress or employee of Congress, or gained from performance of the individual’s duties, for personal benefit.”

Here’s a quick overview of what the House will be voting on:

A bill to require all states that provide TANF assistance funds to enact policies that would prevent recipients from using the funds at liquor store, casinos, and adult entertainment businesses.
A bill to formally extend the federal employee pay freeze to members of Congress. Congress has voluntarily given up their pay increases for the past two years and would likely do so again this year even without this bill.
A bill to repeal the CLASS Act, a provsion of the health care bill that the Department of Health and Human Services has already decided not to implement.
Ban the Congressional Budget Office from considering inflation adjustments in annual budgeting estimates, thereby effectively loweing the budget baseline year after year.
Require Congressional Budget Office bill reports to include analysis on how bills would impact gross domestic product, business investment, the capital stock, employment, and labor supply.

The full official House clanedar is below, with links to the OpenCongress bill pages so you can learn more and easily send an email to your members of Congress.

THE WEEKLY WHIP: FRIDAY, JANUARY 27, 2012

First Vote Of The Week: Tuesday 6:30 p.m.
Last Vote Predicted: Friday 3:00 p.m.

MONDAY, JANUARY 30, 2012
On Monday, the House is not in session.

TUESDAY, JANUARY 31, 2012
On Tuesday, the House will meet at 12:00 p.m. for Morning Hour debate and 2:00 p.m. for legislative business with votes postponed until 6:30 p.m.

Motion to go to Conference on H.R. 658 – FAA Air Transportation Modernization and Safety Improvement Act

H.Res. 522 – Rule providing for consideration of the bill H.R. 1173 – The Fiscal Responsibility and Retirement Security Act of 2011 (Rep. Sessions – Rules) (One Hour of Debate)

WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 1, 2012
On Wednesday, the House will meet at 10:00 a.m. Morning Hour debate and 12:00 p.m. for legislative business.

Suspensions (3 Bills)

H.R. 3835 – To extend the pay limitation for Members of Congress and Federal Employees (Rep. Duffy – Oversight and Government Reform)

H.Res. 496 – Adjusting the amount provided for the expenses of certain committees of the House of Representatives in the One Hundred Twelfth Congress (Rep. Lungren – House Administration)

H.R. 3567 – Welfare Integrity Now for Children and Families Act of 2011, as amended (Rep. Boustany – Ways and Means)

H.R. 1173 – The Fiscal Responsibility and Retirement Security Act of 2011 (Rep. Boustany – Energy and Commerce/Ways and Means) (Subject to a Rule)

The Rule provides for one hour of general debate and makes in order only those amendments that have been preprinted in the Congressional Record no later than the legislative day of Tuesday, January 31, 2012. The Rule also provides that the bill shall be considered for amendment for a period not to exceed three hours.

THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 2, 2012 AND FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 3, 2012
On Thursday, the House will meet at 10:00 a.m. Morning Hour debate and 12:00 p.m. for legislative business. On Friday, the House will meet at 9:00 a.m. for Legislative business with last votes expected no later than 3:00 p.m.

H.R. 3582 – Pro-Growth Budgeting Act of 2011 (Rep. Price (GA) – Budget/Rules) (Subject to a Rule)

H.R. 3578 – Baseline Reform Act of 2011 (Rep. Woodall – Budget) (Subject to a Rule)

Members are advised that Conference Reports may be brought up at any time

And here’s what we know so far about the Senate’s plans for the week:

Senate Floor Schedule for Monday, January 30, 2012

Convenes: 2pm

Following any Leader remarks, the Senate will be in a period of morning business until 4:30pm with Senators permitted to speak therein for up to 10 minutes each.

At 4:30pm, the Senate will resume consideration of the motion to proceed to Calendar #301, S.2038, the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge (STOCK) Act with the time until 5:30pm equally divided and controlled between the two Leaders or their designees.

At 5:30pm, the Senate will conduct a roll call vote on the motion to invoke cloture on the motion to proceed to S.2038, the STOCK Act.

Congress Links - STOCK Act

2012-01-30T09:08:00Z

The Hill: "The Senate meets at 2 p.m. for speeches, and then at 4:30 p.m. starts work on the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge (STOCK) Act, which aims to prevent members of Congress from making trades based on non-public information." Official press release (Nov. 16, 2011) from Senate version sponsor, Sen. Gillibrand. Video on her official site from Jan. 26th.

Links to official schedules for House & Senate on the STOCK Act (H.R. 1148, with 99% user support on OC; and S. 1903). Follow the Money Trail of which interest groups support & oppose the Senate version. News & blog coverage aggregated by our OC web scrapers, for helpful context. Previous coverage on OC Blog & previous House sponsorship by Rep. Slaughter. Email your members of Congress via Contact-Congress on OC.

Wonkblog (WaPo):Budget cuts have harmed growth , reports David Leonhardt in the NYT.

Up with Chris (video): New York Attorney General and co-chair of President Obama’s new mortgage crisis unit Eric Schneiderman talks with Chris about his expectations for the new mortgage crisis investigations.

The Hill, House: Democrats’ strategy on Medicare: Let Ryan, Republicans step in it again

The Hill, Senate: GOP wants Sen. Baucus to go rogue on Keystone XL oil sands pipeline

To surf along with what we’re tracking, we recommend the lists feature on a popular micropublishing service:

Congress-Watchers on @opencongress
#OpenGov on @ppolitics
‘Pol-Sci’ on @ppolitics

What are you reading today? Let us know: David at opencongress d0t org will work.

We work every day to maintain OpenCongress as a not-for-profit public resource, free of charge and independent from any commercial sponsorship. Please make a tax-exempt donation to support our work to keep OpenCongress up and running. Charitable foundations: please read & circulate our non-profit funding prospectus.

(Photo credit of Sen. Gillibrand, above: Abdul Smith)

Congress Links: SOtU Reax

2012-01-25T14:57:00Z

It’s Congress Links for Jan. 25th, featuring responses to President Obama’s State of the Union address last night (at right, House Maj. Leader Boehner [R-OH], previous coverage on OC Blog):

The Hill: “President Obama used his election-year State of the Union address to issue a loud call for economic equality based on ‘responsibility from everybody,’ a theme prefacing his 2012 campaign message.”

Ezra Klein, Wonkblog: “But what viewers of the State of the Union learned was that Obama has an agenda. An ambitious one, even. Whether they approve of it, and whether they approve of congressional Republican obstructing it, remains to be seen.”

Matthew Yglesias, Moneybox: “Almost everything the president touched on briefly sounded about right to me… The energy section initially bugged me, but I thought they landed it in a smart way. Infrastructure: Check. Deficit reduction must be balanced and long-term: Check. Tax progressivity: Check.”

John Wonderlich, Sunlight Foundation: “It’s good to have a President willing to raise transparency and money in politics in the State of the Union. But when insider trading and an ill-fated lunge at bundlers are all the vision he has to offer, we have to wonder whether Obama sees his old transparency platform as a political liability, rather than a vision to be perfected and implemented.”

Reihan Salam, National Review: “My Economics 21 colleague James Capretta argues that President Obama failed to make a compelling case for the connection between steep increases in taxes on capital income, increased public spending, and wage growth for the middle class…”

Jamie Dupree, WSBRadio: in-person bullet-point round-up.

Congress Matters: “The House returns to work, but only briefly, to finish up the fifth suspension bill from yesterday, take up a Gabby Giffords-sponsored bill under suspension before she leaves the House, and consider a motion to go to conference on yet another FAA bill.”

United Republic: “Money in Politics Groups Mixed on Obama’s Speech”, feat. quotes from our non-profit partners Sunlight & CRP, and our allies in electoral reform Public Campaign & Common Cause.

Brian Lehrer Show, WNYC: open-phone call-in.

I’ll add – if you watched, the Congress you saw assembled before you was not the federal legislature that the contemporary U.S. public deserves, with our efficient technology for a more transparent & accountable government. The Congress there was riddled with systemic corruption, closed-off back-room deals for campaign contributions (e.g. PIPA / SOPA), and gridlocked hyper-partisanship. The first step towards comprehensive reform is full public financing of federal elections – fair elections now. Several subsequent steps are necessary for a more delibertive democratic process – later this year, PPF plans to expand on this reform agenda to include planks for independent media (e.g. policies touted by our allies Free Press), net neutrality (e.g. Save The Internet), radical transparency (e.g. our allies LittleSis), and other core attributes of any legitimately representative democracy.

To surf along with what we’re tracking, we recommend the lists feature on a popular micropublishing service:

Congress-Watchers on @opencongress
#OpenGov on @ppolitics
‘Pol-Sci’ on @ppolitics

… what was your takeaway from the SoTU? Email us: david at opencongress. Always glad to hear from OC visitors & our terrific user community.

… don’t miss John Wonderlich’s remarks on the micropublishing service last night about flipping the script on this arcane political monologue: “The State of the Union would be better described if every Member of Congress delivered their description to the President, instead.” Massive co-sign – as I put it on the same commercial service, “Free, libre & open-source technology (e.g, open API for constituent communication) can build a more representative & deliberative democracy.” Let’s build it together.

Congress Links - SOtU Edition

2012-01-24T08:49:00Z

The U.S. House returns to gridlocked action in D.C. this week. The top story, of course, is (yesterday’s) 9pm ET State of the Union address from President Obama, which the reliable Brian Beutler of TPM-DC argues will present a frame for Election 2012. He writes, “It would be a lot to ask of even a well-functioning Congress to pass the sorts of major economic reforms that would be required to end a decades-long systemic economic problem. And as House GOP Leader Eric Cantor acknowledged Monday, the sorts of issues that underlie that problem will not be resolved until after the election.” And as we know, this is not a well-functioning legislative body. A “populist cry for economic fairness” is how WNYC just described the expected message tonight from the President, though that leaves unclear the definition & rhetoric of populist, of course – viz. middle-class.

To surf along with what we’re tracking, we recommend the lists feature on a popular micropublishing service:

Congress-Watchers on @opencongress
#OpenGov on @ppolitics
‘Pol-Sci’ on @ppolitics

… keep in mind you can subscribe to those lists from your own account, though everyone has his or her own social media strategies. This commercial Twitter service (though not as good as an open standard micropublishing client could be) can still offer a brilliant balance, actually, w/ users flipping back-and-forth b/w longtime journalistic observers in select-lists and more-positively-chaotic commenters in the wider fray & discussion. You likely realized this user experience already if you’re on the service, not making a huge point.

The Hill has a comprehensive view of the landscape in the House & Senate, foregrounding the implications for reproductive freedom if the GOP takes the Senate and/or White House in November.

Chez WaPo, 2Chambers lists nine bipartisan members planning to sit together. Clearly the drama of seating plans don’t matter much when the House GOP leadership explicitly kills bipartisan jobs legislation coming its way.

Expert observer David Waldman blogs on Congress Matters that today is pretty much all about “Killing time until the State of the Union”. Ezra Klein’s must-read-e’ery-day Wonkblog on WaPo reminds, “Last year, for instance, Obama exhorted Americans to win the future by investing in scientific research, clean energy and infrastructure. But as Glenn Kessler ”http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fact-checker/post/obamas-2011-state-of-the-union-address-an-accounting/2012/01/22/gIQA8bu6IQ_blog.html">details, Obama’s proposals languished in the divided Congress. Instead, Congress spent much of its time almost letting the government shut down, almost defaulting on the national debt, and almost letting the payroll tax cut and unemployment insurance expire."

Sunday’s “Up With Chris” had a typically interesting – even “robust” if I may type so – discussion of the upcoming bank settlement re: mortgage fraud w/ former NY Gov. Spitzer.

More Congress Links to come later this morning. What blog posts are you following today? Let us know: david at opencongress.org. More to come also on the ongoing protests against #PIPA net censorship, which was mortally wounded - thanks to the American Censorship coalition (of which PPF is a founding member) and our sibling organization Fight For the Future, helping with the largest online protest in history - but still is insufficiently perished. As I was quoted saying in Salon last week, ““We’re fundamentally saying, kill PIPA, kill SOPA, nuke the bills, then we’ll talk.”

SOPA/PIPA Dead ...For Now.

2012-01-20T15:26:00Z

Following a day of unprecedented online protest, the web censorship bills in Congress, SOPA and PIPA, have officially been tabled. “In light of recent events, I have decided to postpone Tuesday’s vote on the PROTECT I.P. Act (PIPA)," Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid announced this morning.

SOPA in the House was put on hold as well. “It is clear that we need to revisit the approach on how best to address the problem of foreign thieves that steal and sell American inventions and products,” said Judiciary Committee Chairman and SOPA sponsor Rep. Lamar Smith. The SOPA mark-up was scheduled to resume on Feb. 18th, but it has now officially been postponed indefinitely.

Just weeks ago, these bills were considered virtually untouchable by everyone who follows Congress. The bipartisan support for the bills, both within members of Congress and among special-interest groups, was deeper than just about any other bill proposed this session. The best description of how the game shifted comes from MPAA Chairman (and former senator) Chris Dodd himself:

By Mr. Dodd’s account, no Washington player can safely assume that a well-wired, heavily financed legislative program is safe from a sudden burst of Web-driven populism.

“This is altogether a new effect,” Mr. Dodd said, comparing the online movement to the Arab Spring. He could not remember seeing “an effort that was moving with this degree of support change this dramatically” in the last four decades, he added.

In other words, the political establishment has been forced to recognize that even the best revolving-door connections and the most obscene financial investments in political campaigns do not necessarily top a united public armed with the means to communicate freely and directly on the internet. Until now, this really, truly was not clear as far as it applies to legislative battles in the U.S. Congress.

For sure, Congress and the entertainment industry will bring these bills back to the table again. The entertainment industry desperately wants special rules that allow them to legally censor online speech in order to defend their legacy business model. By all accounts they are more focused and more invested on getting Congress to change the rules than they are on updating their business and improving their content to compete in 2012 and beyond. Don’t expect the threat of SOPA/PIPA-style web censorship to go away any time soon.

The corporations pushing bills like SOPA and PIPA are dead set on limiting the rule of law as it applies to the internet. For the moment, we’ve succesfully defended the rule of law. But to ensure that we win in the future, we need to use this victory as a starting point for a pro-active movement in support of online freedom. The internet is an essential element of the public sphere; we need to consider our values and work to make sure the internet reflects them.

Pictured above is PIPA sponsor Sen. Patrick Leahy [D, VT].