I’m a wonk, you’re a wonk. We like reading legislation and we’re proud of it. Strut your stuff with GovTrack’s new merchandise.

About a month ago I started a t-shirt design contest. With a $100 prize at stake, about a dozen people submitted ideas — three submitted shirt-ready images. Congrats to Matt Pentifallo The Last Resort on dvd who stole the prize for his satirical design:

I Know What You Did Last Session

(For the older readers, this is a reference to a horror movie.)

Ben Rellick submitted some new logo images, based on the site’s current logo. In appreciation, I decided post-hoc to add a runner-up prize of $60 for Ben. Ben’s submissions are on t-shirts and a mouse pad. Here’s the mouse pad:

GovTrack Logo Mouse Pad

Finally, Susie Holderfield submitted a cute red G with an eye inside, which I turned into a mug:

Red G Mug

Thanks to all of the submitters!

A Sister’s Secret hd

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I also added a design myself. It’s an image of a bill, the House’s health care bill, and on the back is the page with the supposed dead panels, which are clearly not mentioned on that page.

The merchandise is now available The Alphabet Killer movie download . It’s all created, managed, and shipped through a third-party website that does this sort of stuff — Zazzle.com. I just upload the designs.

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What Goes Up divx

Now, I didn’t do this to make money so all of the merchandise are available at the lowest rate that Zazzle.com will let me sell them for. But, people have asked me how to donate to GovTrack and I’ve always declined donations in the past (GovTrack is NOT an actual non-profit charitable organization), but if you want to support the site, you can also buy the same merchandise at a marked-up price. You choose.

Sara from Kentucky asks:

I don’t know if I am hearing accurate information. Some of us want bill numbers listed in newspapers so we can look them up. “America’s Healthy Future Act”  has no number and Baucus’s office says that it will not receive a number until it goes to the Senate Floor. It is not on GovTrack. Would it be on Thomas?

HR 676 has never gone to the House floor, yet it has a number.  Why is this?

• A Clockwork Orange release

The issue that Sara raises is an important one for government transparency: where does the legislative process begin? the first step in the parliamentary procedure for a bill to become law is for the sponsor of the bill in the House or Senate to submit the bill formally to the clerk of the chamber. At that point, the clerk assigns it a number. Then the bill gets assigned (”referred”) to committees which begin the deliberations for the bill, and eventually, if it is lucky, it may come to the full chamber for a vote.

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• Bottle Shock release

The tricky thing for us on the outside is that there’s no stopping congress from deliberating on an idea before it is submitted to the clerk and officially becomes a bill under consideration. And if it’s not an official bill, it’s not on the government website THOMAS or on GovTrack. This isn’t something you can prevent. There will always be deliberations outside of the official way things work. And I think that’s fine. It does make things difficult to follow, though.

That’s what happened with the stimulus bills a year ago. There were a number of drafts and revisions all before the bill actually became an actual bill. And that’s what’s happening in the Senate with drafting its health care bill. (The House drafted H.R. 3200.) Until the bill gets formally submitted, it’s not “in the system”. You can only get a draft — an essentially unofficial bill — from the congressman’s or committee’s website that is working on it, if they care to share.

The Senate Committee on Finance posted a PDF of the latest draft

. It’s called a Chairman’s Mark because it is the draft bill with the markups (i.e. revisions) that the chair of the committee (Max Baucus) wants to push forward. It’s what the committee voted on, and subsequently passed. I expect this to be submitted to the Senate clerk and get a bill number soon.

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I would like GovTrack to start collecting draft bills where we can find them, but I haven’t had the time yet to build the infrastructure on the site for it yet.

15 Minutes Taxi Driver move

Thanks for the question, Sara.