Here’s another legislative process Q&A post. We tackle two questions in this post. Here’s the first:
Does one know who writes a bill? Is writing a bill considered different than being the Sponsor of the bill?
September 28, 2008
“Writing” versus “Sponsoring”, and who decides what gets a vote?
September 25, 2008
Utah Senator Crusades for Bureaucratic Gobbledygook
This post by Coby Logen (a pseudonym), who blogs on government website matters at and has worked to improve government websites for the past five years, is syndicated here with permission.Thanks Coby!
Senator Bennett from Utah is single-handedly quashing the most commonsense, bi-partisan bill this year–a requirement that the U.S. government write clear, concise, and intelligible English. And he is doing so based on a misreading of the bill.
September 18, 2008
What Does “Ordered to be reported with an amendment in the nature of a substitute favorably” mean?
Using the new Q&A tool, a visitor asked (
):
What does “Ordered to be reported with an amendment in the nature of a substitute favorably” mean?
GovTrack tries to answer. Read on… Read it all..
September 9, 2008
Welcome to GovTrack's Fourth Year
. (Thanks to for the data!)
I have written a page on Tips for Commnicating With Congress
Pages for representatives now show a little map
Bills pages now show related pages based on what GovTrack users have selected as trackers. You have to go to the Related Bills page for a bill. See . This will help you find legislation that has superseded the bill you are looking at, for instance.
The feed and bill status that you can embed on your webpage (which by the way we had first) can now be customized easier.
. Should you write your rep? What should you include? Take a look.
now include some cute pie charts
, and, also, the time of day when the vote happened, in case you’re doing some deep research.
for their congressional district and a listing of the counties and towns in the district. See .
And for developers:
- There is a new page.
- The congressional district look-up API now supports lat/long, addresses, ZIP codes, and ZIP+4 codes. You may not know about the three other APIs either: see the page.
But much more is in the works. We’ll be completely overhauling our bill text page for easier navigation and comparison of bill text and to let you link directly from your website to particular paragraphs within bills, and to embed paragraphs in widgets on your own website — to help you make your case in your own writings. We’ll also be expanding and improving on the statistics we generate for Members of Congress, providing a new set of “indicators” to get the big picture on what your rep is actually doing. Lastly we hope to integrate some campaign contribution data to get another perspective.