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The GovTrack Blog

Archive for September, 2008.

September 28, 2008

“Writing” versus “Sponsoring”, and who decides what gets a vote?

Author: Josh Tauberer - Categories: Questions
More posts by Josh Tauberer.

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?

Read it all..

September 25, 2008

Utah Senator Crusades for Bureaucratic Gobbledygook

Author: Josh Tauberer - Categories: Analysis
More posts by Josh Tauberer.

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.

Read it all..

September 18, 2008

What Does “Ordered to be reported with an amendment in the nature of a substitute favorably” mean?

Author: Josh Tauberer - Categories: Questions
More posts by Josh Tauberer.

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

Author: Josh Tauberer - Categories: Site News
More posts by Josh Tauberer.
. (Thanks to for the data!)
  • I have written a page on Tips for Commnicating With Congress

    . 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.

  • Pages for representatives now show a little map

    for their congressional district and a listing of the counties and towns in the district. See .

  • 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 This will help you find legislation that has superseded the bill you are looking at, for instance.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.
  • 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.